Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Science & Engineering

On June 3, 1769, the planet Venus briefly passed across the face of the sun in a cosmic alignment that occurs twice per century. Anticipation of the rare celestial event sparked a worldwide competition among aspiring global superpowers, each sending their own scientific expeditions to far-flung destinations to time the planet’s trek.

In What's Eating You? Eugene Kaplan recounts the true and harrowing tales of his adventures with parasites, and in the process introduces readers to the intimately interwoven lives of host and parasite.

人体の構造は、非常によくできている。汚い例になってしまうが、私たちが「おなら」が　できるのは、肛門に降りてきた物質が固体か液体か気体かを瞬時に見分けて、「気体の場合のみ気体だけを排出する」という

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Il est arrivé le 15 mai 1779 à l'École royale militaire de Brienne. Il n'a pas encore dix ans et parle à peine le français... Il va rester cinq ans dans cette école, sans la quitter un seul jour, sans revoir sa famille. Vingt ans plus tard, cet enfant sera le général Napoléon, maître de cette France ou il n'a d'abord été qu'un étranger. Quel caractère, quelle volonté, quel courage, quelle énergie, quelle imagination, quelle démesure, quelle puissance de rêve, quel sens des situations, quel génie il a fallu à l'enfant arraché à son milieu pour devenir le héros d'une nation !

Imagine raising an orphaned bear cub, carefully reintroducing her to the wild, then being welcomed back, almost daily, to observe her wild world for more than 17 years. Imagine visiting her in her feeding spots, watching her with her mates and her young, peering into her den, and, over time, observing the lives of all the other wild bears in her territory and surrounding ones. That is what happened to Ben Kilham.

IQ scores have the power to determine the chances we have in life: the people we meet, the schools we attend, the jobs we get, the lives we live. Very few of us, however, understand what IQ tests and ratings really mean. In this fascinating, provocative book, Stephen Murdoch explains the turbulent history and controversial current uses of intelligence testing.

This marvelous collection features stories from some of America’s finest and most respected writers about every outdoorsman’s favorite and most loyal hunting partner: his dog. For the first time, the stories of acclaimed writers such as Richard Ford, Tom Brokaw, Howell Raines, Rick Bass, Sydney Lea, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Phil Caputo, and Chris Camuto come together in one collection. Hunters and non-hunters alike will recognize in these poignant tales the universal aspects of owning dogs.

The spark of life, fount of emotion, house of the soul - the heart lies at the centre of every facet of our existence. It’s so bound up in our deepest feelings that it can even suffer such distress from emotional trauma as to physically change shape. Practising cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar beautifully weaves his own experiences with the defining discoveries of the past to tell the story of our most vital organ. We see Daniel Hale Williams perform the first open heart surgery and Wilson Greatbatch invent the pacemaker - by accident.

In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our "naturalist president." By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor. This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I.

Un chimico e un astrofisico (no, non è l’inizio di una barzelletta) navigano sulla zattera del pensiero scientifico attraverso l’insidioso mare dei media e della comunicazione. Sommerso ogni giorno da una quantità tale di dati, numeri, immagini e opinioni il nostro cervello – già di suo pigro e lontano dall’essere perfetto – rischia costantemente di perdere la rotta. Ma come si fa a impedire questa deriva cerebrale? Come aiutare la nostra mente a trovare punti di riferimento sicuri per attraversare indenne la tempesta del sovraccarico di notizie?

In Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, neuroscientists and zombie enthusiasts Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek apply their neuro-know-how to dissect the puzzle of what has happened to the zombie brain to make the undead act differently than their human prey. Combining tongue-in-cheek analysis with modern neuroscientific principles, Verstynen and Voytek show how zombism can be understood in terms of current knowledge regarding how the brain works.

What causes a child to grow up gay or straight? In this book, neuroscientist Simon LeVay summarizes a wealth of scientific evidence that points to one inescapable conclusion: Sexual orientation results primarily from an interaction between genes, sex hormones, and the cells of the developing body and brain. LeVay helped create this field in 1991 with a much-publicized study in Science, where he reported on a difference in the brain structure between gay and straight men. Since then, an entire scientific discipline has sprung up around the quest for a biological explanation of sexual orientation. In this book, LeVay provides a clear explanation of where the science stands today, taking the reader on a whirlwind tour of laboratories that specialize in genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and family demographics. He describes, for instance, how researchers have manipulated the sex hormone levels of animals during development, causing them to mate preferentially with animals of their own gender. LeVay also reports on the prevalence of homosexual behavior among wild animals, ranging from Graylag geese to the Bonobo chimpanzee.

What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble announced the greatest discovery in the history of astronomy since Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens. The galaxies, previously believed to float serenely in the void, are in fact hurtling apart at an incredible speed: the universe is expanding. This stunning discovery was the culmination of a decades-long arc of scientific and technical advancement.

Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again.

Financial economist George G. Szpiro here tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

An entertaining and revealing look at the science behind the emotion of disgust. Disgust originated to prevent us from eating poisonous food, but this simple safety mechanism has since evolved into a uniquely human emotion that dictates how we treat others, shapes our cultural norms, and even has implications for our mental and physical health.

È vero che sono i più capaci ad avere successo nella vita? Questo audiolibro parla della fortuna. O meglio, del ruolo che gioca il caso nella nostra vita in generale, nei nostri affari in particolare. Ma parla anche di quella fortuna che, non essendo percepita come tale, viene scambiata per abilità: una confusione presente in molteplici campi, dalla scienza alla politica, dall'arte alla finanza. Quante volte abbiamo visto un idiota baciato dalla fortuna trovarsi nel posto giusto al momento giusto, dimostrazione vivente della "sopravvivenza del meno adatto"?

From cocoa farming in Ghana to the orchards of Kent and the desert badlands of Pakistan, taking a practical approach to sustaining the landscape can mean the difference between prosperity and ruin. Working with Nature is the story of a lifetime of work, often in extreme environments, to harvest nature and protect it - in effect, gardening on a global scale.