Showing results for "the king" in Biological Sciences

The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For over a century, a diverse array of researchers have been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions, and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

Researchers of human behavior have identified an "orgasm gap": Men usually orgasm during intercourse, whereas women often do not. This book addresses this mystery. The two leading explanations are either that women are "psychologically broken"—Freud's theory—or badly designed—the "by-product theory." However, there is a much more compelling third explanation. Evolutionary biology, anatomy, physiology, and direct sex research suggest women have evolved under their own selection pressures and orgasm is a fitness-increasing consequence of such selective factors.

In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and marked one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England’s coast with a plastic fish tag. Fourteen years later that fish – dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys – died in a Mediterranean fish trap, sparking Karen Pinchin’s riveting investigation into the marvels, struggles, and prehistoric legacy of this remarkable species.

When Elvis Presley decided he wanted to buy a horse in 1966, he didn't want just any horse. "He wanted a Golden Palomino," Priscilla Presley remembers. "He would get up at 3:00 in the morning, go to certain farms and ranches and say, 'Do you have a Golden Palomino for sale?' People would say, 'That was Elvis Presley!'" Elvis's legendary love of horses drove him to find the golden palomino that would become his beloved companion, Rising Sun.

A revelation for Moby-Dick devotees and neophytes alike, Ahab's Rolling Sea is a chronological journey through the natural history of Melville's novel. From white whales to whale intelligence, giant squids, barnacles, albatross, and sharks, Richard J. King examines what Melville knew from his own experiences and the sources available to a reader in the mid-1800s, exploring how and why Melville might have twisted what was known to serve his fiction.

If you could bring back one living being from the whole of the history of time, what would you choose? Comedian and former stem-cell biologist Helen Pilcher has thought about this problem - a lot. In Bring Back the King, Helen explains the cutting-edge science that makes the resurrection of extinct animals a very real possibility and highlights her choices from eras gone by, from the king of the dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex, to the King of Rock 'n' Roll, Elvis Presley.

Go back even a quarter of a century and few people would have heard of DNA, except perhaps in a forensic case. Now genetics plays a part of our everyday culture and our interest in genetics is booming, particularly in the form of direct-to-consumer genetic testing for health, family history and ancestry testing. So how did we get to the point where our understanding, and misunderstanding of genetics became so commonplace?

This podcast series will feature scientists from the UK Dementia Research Institute at King’s College London, who will each share their research towards a better understanding of conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, Frontotemporal dementia and motor neuron disease/ALS and the development of much-needed, effective treatments. For more information, visit: www.ukdri.ac.uk

The Chat King

When Judith Summers' husband and father both died within the space of two weeks, she found herself floundering. Life for her and her eight-year-old son, Joshua, seemed relentlessly bleak. Then George bounced into their lives. A loving Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with film-star looks, George reawoke their joie de vivre.

Even as a very young child, Simon King was passionate about the natural world. Being savaged by a rabid cheetah, charged at by rhinos and elephants and defecated upon by a long list of birds and other animals may sound like hell to some. But these, along with countless other experiences alongside all things furry, scaly, slimy and feathery have provided him with an enormously rich bank of tales to relive and retell.

Balance is a lively, 360-degree exploration of our body's supersense. Health and wellness writer Carol Svec examines every facet of balance in a way that is highly entertaining, broadly accessible, and rigorously researched. Listeners follow her through various facilities as she talks with scientists doing state-of-the-art research. She grilled an egg in a virtual kitchen, had her senses fooled in a tumbling room by a mannequin named Hans, survived "the Vominator" without losing her lunch, and experienced drunken dizziness inside a police muster room.