Showing results by publisher "Wildfire" in Science & Engineering

The discovery of quantum mechanics has paved the way to just about every important innovation in the last half century: it has led us to the technology that powers microwaves, iPhones, and self-driving cars and is about to trigger a computing revolution that will either spell the end of the human species or propel us to heights we've never imagined. But there's another reason that quantum mechanics is so important: it is really the only way we can understand ourselves and each other.

Every so often, a new idea comes along that changes everything. Vaccinations. Relativity. Fascism. Can we imagine a world before the invention of writing? hat would Christianity have looked like without with a concept of hell? This fascinating little audiobook tells the stories behind 150 revolutionary concepts and explains why they are important. Taken from the realms of science, politics, society, religion and technology, these are the big ideas that have changed the world - in a nutshell.

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Seven years in the making, Amity and Prosperity tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbours' mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company.

Despite decades of research, remarkable imagery, and insights from a range of scientific and medical disciplines, the human brain remains largely unexplored. Consciousness has eluded explanation. Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness offers a brilliant overview of the state of modern consciousness research in twenty revealing chapters. Neuroscientist and author Patrick House describes complex concepts in accessible terms, weaving brain science, technology, gaming, analogy, and philosophy into a tapestry that illuminates how the brain works and what enables consciousness.

Po Bronson and Arvind Gupta, venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, take everyday news headlines and decode them, leading us on a journey through their unique and highly entertaining view of the world. Each chapter is prefaced with a real-world headline from today's chaotic news cycle: dying bees. Rogue planets. Beyond Meat. Glaciers melting. Bronson and Gupta decipher what's really going on behind these headlines, and why. 

'This is Bill McKibben at his glorious best. Wise and warning, with everything on the line. Do not miss it' Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine Thirty years ago, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book that alerted us to the dangers of climate...

As the planet warms due to greenhouse gas emissions, winter as we know it is disappearing. In the last 50 years, the Northern Hemisphere lost a million square miles of spring snowpack, and in the US alone, snow cover has been reduced by 15-30 per cent. On average, winter has shrunk by a month in most northern latitudes.