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

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.

The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.

E=mc2: It may be Einstein’s most well-known contribution to modern science, but how many people understand the thought process or physics behind this famous equation? In this collection of his seven most important essays on physics, Einstein guides the listener step-by-step through the many layers of scientific theory that formed a starting point for his discoveries.

An adrenaline-fueled travel memoir of life in the wild among the planet’s most ferocious and fascinating predators. Over the last forty years, bestselling science-fiction writer Alan Dean Foster has journeyed around the globe to encounter nature’s most fearsome creatures. His travels have taken him into the heart of the Amazon rain forest on the trail of deadly tangarana ants, on an elephant ride across the sweeping green plains of central India in search of the elusive Bengal tiger, and into the waters of the Australian coast to come face-to-face with great white sharks. Packed with pulse-pounding adventure and spiked with rapier wit, Predators I Have Known is a thrilling look at life and death in the wild.

Militant atheism is on the rise. In recent years, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have produced a steady stream of best-selling books denigrating religious belief. These authors are merely the leading edge of a larger movement that includes much of the scientific community. In response, mathematician David Berlinski, himself a secular Jew, delivers a biting defense of religious thought.

In June 2011, Julian Assange received an unusual visitor: the chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, arrived from America at Ellingham Hall, the country residence in Norfolk, England where Assange was living under house arrest. For several hours the besieged leader of the world’s most famous insurgent publishing organization and the billionaire head of the world’s largest information empire locked horns.

With 30 years of backcountry patrol experience in Florida, Bob Lee has lived through incidents of legend, including one of the biggest environmental busts in Florida history. His fascinating memoir reveals the danger and the humor in the unsung exploits of game wardens.

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why - and how - it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma.

In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.

Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada - mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.

For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine’s greatest mysteries: why doesn’t our immune system fight cancer the way it does other diseases? The answer is a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses. But we are in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it. Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the game-changing and Nobel Prize-winning scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognise and defeat cancer.

Lost Enlightenment recounts how, between the years 800 and 1200, Central Asia led the world in trade and economic development, the size and sophistication of its cities, the refinement of its arts, and, above all, in the advancement of knowledge in many fields. Central Asians achieved signal breakthroughs in astronomy, mathematics, geology, medicine, chemistry, music, social science, philosophy, and theology, among other subjects.

For the past 30 years, scientists, psychologists, teachers and entrepreneurs have been coming up with ways to overcome our biases and end unconscious discrimination, whether it be on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, religion age or even body type. In this landmark book, Nordell sets out to meet the people who are finding solutions - from meditating police chiefs to innovative hiring policies - and explains how their discoveries are set to change the world.

Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book brings us closer than ever to these elusive creatures. The companion to the highly anticipated National Geographic television special, this book explores the alluring underwater world of the octopus—a creature that resembles an alien lifeform, but whose behavior has earned it a reputation as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet.

A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for 50 years against the worldwide slaughter of birds for extravagantly feathered hats. Her legacy is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (the RSPB), grown from an all-female pressure group of 1889 with the splendidly simple pledge: Wear No Feathers. Etta’s long battle against ‘murderous millinery’ triumphed with the Plumage Act of 1921 - but her legacy has been eclipsed by the more glamorous campaign for the vote, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst.

One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go." Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner.

Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to explain the true nature - and needs - of our feline friends. Tracing the cat’s evolution from solitary hunter to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of social contact.

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose is much more utilitarian than that. Still today we depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland, a ring of 19 towers built between 1811-1905, so called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves.