Showing results for "life" in Biological Sciences

Fins of Wisdom: Life Lessons from the Ancient Sharks invites listeners to dive beneath the surface and discover the truth about these remarkable animals. Told through the voice of a passionate nature lover, this book blends personal encounters with scientific insight, cultural history, and timeless reflections. From swimming beside gentle whale sharks to witnessing the precision of great whites, each chapter reveals not only the beauty of sharks but also the wisdom they hold for us.

No running water, no car, no electricity or any of the things it powers: the internet, phone, washing machine, radio, or light bulb. Just a wooden cabin, on a smallholding, by the edge of a stand of spruce. The Way Home is a modern-day Walden - an honest and lyrical account of a remarkable life lived in nature without modern technology. Mark Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, explores the hard-won joys of building a home with his bare hands, learning to make fire, collecting water from the stream, foraging, and fishing.

One of the nation's most popular presenters, Sir David examines 40 marvels of the natural world from his extraordinary and pioneering experiences. What was Sir David's first pet? Which animal would he most like to be? How did he track down a giant earthworm? Why does he respect rats? And what did he do when confronted by a 10-foot-long reptile? His enthusiasm is as infectious as ever and conveys a unique fascination on topics as diverse as the sloth, monstrous flowers, the platypus, dragons, the fire salamander, the coelacanth, the dodo, bird's-nest soup and the large blue butterfly.

His career as a naturalist and broadcaster has spanned nearly five decades and there are very few places on the globe that he has not visited. In this volume of memoirs David tells stories of the people and animals he has met and the places that he has visited. Over the last 25 years he has established himself as the world's leading Natural History programme maker with several landmark BBC series.

In this fascinating and thought-provoking book, author Nick Lane brings together the latest research findings in the exciting field of mitochondria research to reveal how our growing understanding of mitochondria is shedding light on how complex life evolved, why sex arose (why don't we just bud?), and why we age and die. This understanding is of fundamental importance, both in understanding how we and all other complex life came to be, but also in order to be able to control our own illnesses, and delay our degeneration and death.

Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the 20th century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. It appears here together with "Mind and Matter", his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times.

Four billion years ago, the infant Earth was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors, and hot noxious gases, totally devoid of life. But a relatively short time later-only 100 million to 200 million years-the planet was teeming with primitive organisms.What happened? Now you can find out-in a series of 24 vibrant lectures from a leader of the NASA-supported team studying the origins of life in the universe and also one of the nation's foremost science educators.

Birds. Over 9,000 species, the most widespread of all animals: on icebergs, in the Sahara or under the sea, at home in our gardens or flying for over a year at a time. Earthbound, we can only look and listen, enjoying their lightness, freedom and richness of plumage and song. David Attenborough has been watching and learning all his life. His classic book, now fully updated with the latest discoveries in ornithology, is a brilliant introduction to bird behaviours around the world: what they do and why they do it.

Get up close and personal with an amazing creature that has invaded our lexicon as well as our restaurants. It breathes with tubes, it has no head or brain, it feeds through a filter, and it is the source of dozens of familiar proverbs ("happy as a clam!"). Clams, it turns out, have been worshipped (by the Moche people of ancient Peru), used as money (by the Algonquin Indians), and consumed by people for thousands of years.

There is no denying that the emotional bond between horses and the humans who love them can reach mystical proportions, and nowhere is that relationship more evident than in these 24 true-life accounts of horses rescuing people. Many of the stories recount incidents where death or physical injury was imminent, and only because a horse intervened are the narrators alive to tell the tale.

For the first time ever unabridged and read by the author, this audiobook is a testimony of true humanity-filled with adventure, life lessons and hope for our world. From the time she was a girl, Jane Goodall dreamed of a life spent working with animals. Finally she had her wish. When she was...

""Once in a while you find a book that stuns you. Its scope leaves you breathless. This is such a book."" — John White, San Francisco Chronicle Explore the inner world of plants and its fascinating relation to mankind, as uncovered by the latest discoveries of science. In this truly...

Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes.

Nowhere on our planet is devoid of life. Plants and animals thrive or survive within every extreme of climate and habitat that it offers. Single species, and often whole communities, adapt to make the most of ice cap and tundra, forest and plain, desert, ocean and volcano. These adaptations can be truly extraordinary. In Living Planet, David Attenborough’s searching eye, unfailing curiosity and infectious enthusiasm explain and illuminate the intricate lives of the these colonies.

In a book that is both groundbreaking and accessible, Daniel C. Dennett, whom Chet Raymo of The Boston Globe calls "one of the most provocative thinkers on the planet", focuses his unerringly logical mind on the theory of natural selection, showing how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of humanity's place in the universe. Dennett vividly describes the theory itself and then extends Darwin's vision with impeccable arguments to their often surprising conclusions, challenging the views of some of the most famous scientists of our day.

Humans have kept honey bees in hives for millennia, yet only in recent decades have biologists begun to investigate how these industrious insects live in the wild. The Lives of Bees is Thomas Seeley’s captivating story of what scientists are learning about the behavior, social life, and survival strategies of honey bees living outside the beekeeper’s hive - and how wild honey bees may hold the key to reversing the alarming die-off of the planet’s managed honey bee populations.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Horse and The Eighty-Dollar Champion presents a “heartwarming [and] engaging folk-hero biography” (Kirkus Reviews) of a woman who fulfilled her lifelong wish to see the Pacific Ocean by riding her horse across...

The author of the New York Times bestselling Genius Foods is back with a lifestyle program for resetting your brain and body to its ""factory settings,"" to help fight fatigue, anxiety, and depression and to optimize cognitive health for a longer and healthier life. The human body was honed...

This is the third and last of Sir David’s great natural history books based on his TV series and completes his survey of the animal world that began with Life on Earth and continues with Living Planet. In Life on Earth, Sir David showed how each group of animals evolved. In Living Planet he looked at the way they have adapted to the whole range of habitats in which they live. Now, in Trials of Life, he completes the story by revealing how animals behave – and why.

Understanding our humanity - the essence of who we are - is one of the deepest mysteries and biggest challenges in modern science. Why do we have bad moods? Why are we capable of having such strange dreams? How can metaphors in our language hold such sway on our actions? As we learn more about the mechanisms of human behavior through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and other related fields, we're discovering just how intriguing the human species is.