Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Science & Engineering

How does a neural network become a brain? While neurobiologists investigate how nature accomplishes this feat, computer scientists interested in AI strive to achieve this through technology. The Self-Assembling Brain tells the stories of both fields, exploring the historical and modern approaches taken by the scientists pursuing answers to the quandary: What information is necessary to make an intelligent neural network? As Peter Robin Hiesinger argues, "the information problem" underlies both fields.

Healthy chickens are happy chickens. This one-of-a-kind reference book covers the health problems that plague chickens of all breeds and ages.

Microbiology for Dummies is your guide to understanding the fundamentals of this enormously-encompassing field. Whether your career plans include microbiology or another science or health specialty, you need to understand life at the cellular level before you can understand anything on the macro scale. Microbes are literally the foundation of all life, and they are everywhere. Microbiology for Dummies will help you understand them, appreciate them, and use them.

The Idea of the World offers a grounded alternative to the frenzy of unrestrained abstractions and unexamined assumptions in philosophy and science today. This book examines what can be learned about the nature of reality based on conceptual parsimony, straightforward logic, and empirical evidence from fields as diverse as physics and neuroscience. It compiles an overarching case for idealism - the notion that reality is essentially mental - from 10 original articles the author has previously published in leading academic journals.

This groundbreaking book explores the revolution in psychotherapy that brought an understanding of the social nature of people's brains into a therapeutic context. Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscience and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. Here, he argues that all forms of psychotherapy are successful to the extent to which they enhance change in relevant neural circuits.

Although eugenics is now widely discredited, some groups and individuals claim a new scientific basis for old racist assumptions. Pondering the continuing influence of racist research and thought, despite all evidence to the contrary, Robert Wald Sussman explains why - when it comes to race - too many people still mistake bigotry for science.

Bringing together the best and most interesting science stories appearing in Quanta Magazine over the past five years, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire reports on some of the greatest scientific minds as they test the limits of human knowledge. It communicates science by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts, and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves.

Block by Block offers an original perspective on thermodynamic science and history based on the three approaches of a practicing engineer, academician, and historian. The book synthesizes and gathers into one accessible volume a strategic range of foundational topics involving the atomic theory, energy, entropy, and the laws of thermodynamics.

This short, smart book tells you everything you need to know about "nothing". What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty space - "nothing" - exist? To answer these questions, eminent scientist Frank Close takes us on a lively and accessible journey that ranges from ancient ideas and cultural superstitions to the frontiers of current research, illuminating the story of how scientists have explored the void and the rich discoveries they have made there.

In Reconnecting to the Source he unpacks the science behind spiritual experience, investigating the ways in which we can access realms of experience beyond the everyday. It is in these moments, when our conscious minds are in contact or perhaps even overridden by our unconscious selves, that we can explore the depths of spiritual meaning. In addition to a foreword by Deepak Chopra, the book includes new, never before published contributions from a long list of well-known writers and public figures.

Samuel Leech provides a fascinating account of life as a sailor in the War of 1812 and through early 19th century. It is a remarkable account of a man who, until the conflict with the USS United States, had fought British Navy but after that battle changed allegiance to the United States and continued sailing with her navy for a further four years. A perfect addition to any sailor's library, A Voice from the Main Deck is a vivid account of life at sea in the early 19th century.

Lives of Weeds explores the tangled history of weeds and their relationship to humans. Through eight interwoven stories, John Cardina offers a fresh perspective on how these tenacious plants came about, why they are both inevitable and essential, and how their ecological success is ensured by determined efforts to eradicate them. Linking botany, history, ecology, and evolutionary biology to the social dimensions of humanity's ancient struggle with feral flora, Cardina shows how weeds have shaped - and are shaped by - the way we live in the natural world.

John Roebling was one of the 19th century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the 19th century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn.

Neurobiology is a notoriously difficult subject, but Neurobiology For Dummies explains the essentials in terms anyone can understand. This fun and accessible book covers the fundamentals, covering the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system. Students in fields like neuroscience and pharmacology will get a complete overview of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of the nervous system, making it easier to complete coursework and pass exams. In this updated edition, fresh examples highlight the latest research, so you'll be prepared with a current understanding of the science.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

The search to find medicines is as old as disease, which is to say as old as the human race. Through serendipity - by chewing, brewing, and snorting - some Neolithic souls discovered opium, alcohol, snakeroot, juniper, frankincense, and other helpful substances. Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old hunter frozen in the Italian Alps, was found to have whipworms in his intestines and Bronze Age medicine, a worm-killing birch fungus, knotted to his leggings.

Economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.

More than any other modern scientists, Stephen Jay Gould has opened up to millions the wonders of evolutionary biology. His genius as an essayist lies in his unmatched ability to use his knowledge of the world, including popular culture, to illuminate the realm of science.

Evolutionary theory in the theme that binds together these essays on such seemingly disparate topics as the feeding habits of flamingos, flowers and snails that change from male to female and sometimes back again, and the extinction from baseball of the .400 hitter.

It is not your imagination: water crises are more frequent. Our twentieth-century systems for providing the water that grows food, sustains cities, and supports healthy ecosystems are failing to meet the demands of growing population and the challenges brought on by climate change. But the grim news reports—of empty reservoirs, withering crops, failing ecosystems—need not be cause for despair, argues award-winning author David Sedlak.