In his acclaimed 2016 book Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus -- the closest thing to an intelligent alien on earth, as he put it. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective awareness with the assistance of the far flung species he has met undersea. Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our hi-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and our active bodies. The result is a story as rich and vibrant as life itself, one that explains the mystery of animal consciousness in accessible and riveting prose.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
|
9780374207946
|
Hardcover
Llamas
By Gottlieb, Beth
Llamas have become a popular animal in recent years because of their cute, if odd looking, face and body. But llamas are more than just a cool mammal. They are very useful to people as pack animals and wool producers. Their wool can be made into cloth, just like sheep or alpacas. This volume covers llama life, size, and look, as well as the features of their wool and how it is harvested and used. Complete with full-color photographs of llamas and llama wool goods, the main content is written with young readers in mind.
Gareth Stevens Publishing
|
9781538279496
|
Library Binding
Plight of the Living Dead
By Simon, Matt
A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature - and ourselves Zombieism isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose - and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom. Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again.
Penguin Books
|
9780143131410
|
Paperback
She Has Her Mother's Laugh
By Zimmer, Carl
Award-winning, celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a history of our understanding of heredity in this sweeping, resonating overview of a force that shaped human society--a force set to shape our future even more radically.She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities. . . .But, Zimmer writes, "Each of us carries an amalgam of fragments of DNA, stitched together from some of our many ancestors. Each piece has its own ancestry, traveling a different path back through human history. A particular fragment may sometimes be cause for worry, but most of our DNA influences who we are--our appearance, our height, our penchants--in inconceivably subtle ways." Heredity isn't just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors--using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates--but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it. Weaving historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world's best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.
Dutton
|
9781101984598
|
Hardcover
Survival of the Friendliest
By Hare, Brian
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our unique friendliness is the secret to our success as a species. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
Random House
|
9780399590665
|
Hardcover
The Mission
By Brown, David W
A masterful, genre-defying narrative of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA's deep-space mission to Europa - the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our solar system - powered by a motley team of obsessives and eccentrics.When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: "Is it habitable?" and "How do we get there?" To answer the first, they had to answer the second, and so began a vivacious team's twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter.Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn't cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or Mars - anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia, who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards Europa in a pulsing, rippling, radiation belt - a halo of death whose conditions are like those that follow a detonated thermonuclear bomb.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780062654427
|
Hardcover
Through Two Doors at Once
By Ananthaswamy, Anil
The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost 200 years later.Many of the greatest scientific minds have grappled with this experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton's view that light is made of particles. But then Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles. Quantum mechanics was born. This led to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality--subatomic bits of matter and its interaction with light--again as revealed by the double-slit experiment. Richard Feynman held that it embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe.How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality, as the textbook "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics seems to suggest? How can particles influence each other faster than the speed of light? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double-slit?Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.
Dutton
|
9781101986097
|
Hardcover
Environmental Geography
By Duram, Leslie A.
Explores the complex relationship humans have with the environment. It is one of both responsibility -- including the sustainable or unsustainable management of natural resources -- and emotion, like the elation gleaned from a beautiful landscape or the devastation experienced from a natural disaster.* Documents human modification of the Eearth on topics such asthrough deforestation, land use change, agricultural soil degradation, water pollution, waste generation, and the ultimate impact: climate change.* Describes policies at national and global scales that have exacerbated environmental degradation (such as subsidies to fossil fuels) or acted to reduce such harm (such as pollution control regulations) .* Explains how richer and poorer nations are affected by and able to mitigate environmental degradation.
ABC-CLIO
|
9781440856105
|
Hardcover
The End of Everything
By Mack, Katie
From one of the most dynamic rising stars in astrophysics, an accessible and eye-opening look - in the bestselling tradition of Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli - at the five different ways the universe could end, and the mind-blowing lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in physics.We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it went from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from dark matter to black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life. But what happens at the end of the story? In billions of years, humanity could still exist in some unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant space, finding new homes and building new civilizations.
Scribner
|
9781982103545
|
Hardcover
Fear of a Black Universe
By Alexander, Stephon
Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream -- to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics.
Metazoa
By Godfrey-smith, Peter
In his acclaimed 2016 book Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus -- the closest thing to an intelligent alien on earth, as he put it. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective awareness with the assistance of the far flung species he has met undersea. Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our hi-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and our active bodies. The result is a story as rich and vibrant as life itself, one that explains the mystery of animal consciousness in accessible and riveting prose.
Llamas
By Gottlieb, Beth
Llamas have become a popular animal in recent years because of their cute, if odd looking, face and body. But llamas are more than just a cool mammal. They are very useful to people as pack animals and wool producers. Their wool can be made into cloth, just like sheep or alpacas. This volume covers llama life, size, and look, as well as the features of their wool and how it is harvested and used. Complete with full-color photographs of llamas and llama wool goods, the main content is written with young readers in mind.
Plight of the Living Dead
By Simon, Matt
A brain-bending exploration of real-life zombies and mind controllers, and what they reveal to us about nature - and ourselves Zombieism isn't just the stuff of movies and TV shows like The Walking Dead. It's real, and it's happening in the world around us, from wasps and worms to dogs and moose - and even humans. In Plight of the Living Dead, science journalist Matt Simon documents his journey through the bizarre evolutionary history of mind control. Along the way, he visits a lab where scientists infect ants with zombifying fungi, joins the search for kamikaze crickets in the hills of New Mexico, and travels to Israel to meet the wasp that stings cockroaches in the brain before leading them to their doom. Nothing Hollywood dreams up can match the brilliant, horrific zombies that natural selection has produced time and time again.
She Has Her Mother's Laugh
By Zimmer, Carl
Award-winning, celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a history of our understanding of heredity in this sweeping, resonating overview of a force that shaped human society--a force set to shape our future even more radically.She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities. . . .But, Zimmer writes, "Each of us carries an amalgam of fragments of DNA, stitched together from some of our many ancestors. Each piece has its own ancestry, traveling a different path back through human history. A particular fragment may sometimes be cause for worry, but most of our DNA influences who we are--our appearance, our height, our penchants--in inconceivably subtle ways." Heredity isn't just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors--using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates--but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it. Weaving historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world's best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.
Survival of the Friendliest
By Hare, Brian
A powerful new theory of human nature suggests that our unique friendliness is the secret to our success as a species. For most of the approximately 300,000 years that Homo sapiens have existed, we have shared the planet with at least four other types of humans. All of these were smart, strong, and inventive. But around 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens made a cognitive leap that gave us an edge over other species. What happened? Since Charles Darwin wrote about "evolutionary fitness," the idea of fitness has been confused with physical strength, tactical brilliance, and aggression. In fact, what made us evolutionarily fit was a remarkable kind of friendliness, a virtuosic ability to coordinate and communicate with others that allowed us to achieve all the cultural and technical marvels in human history.
The Mission
By Brown, David W
A masterful, genre-defying narrative of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA's deep-space mission to Europa - the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our solar system - powered by a motley team of obsessives and eccentrics.When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: "Is it habitable?" and "How do we get there?" To answer the first, they had to answer the second, and so began a vivacious team's twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter.Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn't cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or Mars - anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia, who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards Europa in a pulsing, rippling, radiation belt - a halo of death whose conditions are like those that follow a detonated thermonuclear bomb.
Through Two Doors at Once
By Ananthaswamy, Anil
The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost 200 years later.Many of the greatest scientific minds have grappled with this experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton's view that light is made of particles. But then Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles. Quantum mechanics was born. This led to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality--subatomic bits of matter and its interaction with light--again as revealed by the double-slit experiment. Richard Feynman held that it embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe.How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle, or indeed reality, exist before we look at it, or does looking create reality, as the textbook "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics seems to suggest? How can particles influence each other faster than the speed of light? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double-slit?Through Two Doors at Once celebrates the elegant simplicity of an iconic experiment and its profound reach. With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world, through history and down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. It is the most fantastic voyage you can take.
Environmental Geography
By Duram, Leslie A.
Explores the complex relationship humans have with the environment. It is one of both responsibility -- including the sustainable or unsustainable management of natural resources -- and emotion, like the elation gleaned from a beautiful landscape or the devastation experienced from a natural disaster.* Documents human modification of the Eearth on topics such asthrough deforestation, land use change, agricultural soil degradation, water pollution, waste generation, and the ultimate impact: climate change.* Describes policies at national and global scales that have exacerbated environmental degradation (such as subsidies to fossil fuels) or acted to reduce such harm (such as pollution control regulations) .* Explains how richer and poorer nations are affected by and able to mitigate environmental degradation.
The End of Everything
By Mack, Katie
From one of the most dynamic rising stars in astrophysics, an accessible and eye-opening look - in the bestselling tradition of Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli - at the five different ways the universe could end, and the mind-blowing lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in physics.We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it went from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from dark matter to black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life. But what happens at the end of the story? In billions of years, humanity could still exist in some unrecognizable form, venturing out to distant space, finding new homes and building new civilizations.
Fear of a Black Universe
By Alexander, Stephon
Years ago, cosmologist Stephon Alexander received life-changing advice: to discover real physics, he needed to stop memorizing and start taking risks. In Fear of a Black Universe, Alexander shows that great physics requires us to think outside the mainstream -- to improvise and rely on intuition. His approach leads him to three principles that shape all theories of the universe: the principle of invariance, the quantum principle, and the principle of emergence. Alexander uses them to explore some of physics' greatest mysteries, from what happened before the big bang to how the universe makes consciousness possible. Drawing on his experience as a Black physicist, he makes a powerful case for diversifying our scientific communities. Compelling and empowering, Fear of a Black Universe offers remarkable insight into the art of physics.