Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Science

How did human minds become so different from those of other animals? What accounts for our capacity to understand the way the physical world works, to think ourselves into the minds of others, to gossip, read, tell stories about the past, and imagine the future? These questions are not new: they have been debated by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, evolutionists, and neurobiologists over the course of centuries. One explanation widely accepted today is that humans have special cognitive instincts.

Free-flowing rivers in the United States are an endangered species. With more than 500,000 dams in place, we've dammed and diverted almost every major river, straightening curves and blocking passage for fish and other aquatic animals, pushing many to the brink. Now a heartening new movement is helping to demolish harmful or obsolete structures and restore new life to rivers and the communities that depend on them. In doing so, it offers a pathway to undoing environmental harm to nature—and to ourselves.

In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its goal: to shine a light on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger's naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition’s achievements are the stuff of legend. It identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor. It measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry. And, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science.

Environmental justice recognizes that environmental benefits and burdens should be distributed fairly, and that the people making policy decisions should incorporate the views of those most often harmed: people of color, Indigenous populations, low-income communities, and those who are underserved and disenfranchised for other reasons such as age, gender, or disability. It encompasses not only traditional environmental issues like clean air and clean water, but also social issues such as employment, nutrition, and access to health care.

Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid as large as Mt. Everest hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula at a speed ten times faster than the fastest rifle bullet. Debris from the impact blew into space, re-entered the atmosphere as a swarm of shooting stars that burned the global forests and grasslands, leaving behind a thin global layer containing rock from the asteroid and from Mexico, and smoke from the fires. This layer marks one of the greatest extinctions in Earth history including not just dinosaurs, but also fish, plankton, ammonites, and plants making up about 75% of the known species.

It was not easy being a woman of ambition in early 20th-century England, much less one who wished to be a scientist. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin overcame prodigious obstacles to become a woman of many firsts: the first to receive a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first promoted to full professor at Harvard, the first to head a department there. And, in what has been called "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy", she was the first to describe what stars are made of.

What are we made up of? What holds material bodies together? Is there a difference between terrestrial matter and celestial matter? When Democritus stated that we are made up of atoms, few people believed him. Not until Galileo and Newton in the seventeenth century did people take the idea seriously, and it was another four hundred years before we could reconstruct the elementary components of matter.

The concept of canine consent is far more than simply a buzzword in modern dog training practices. In its current form, consent is a distinctly human concept, designed by humans and for humans. Looking beyond species boundaries can help us not only consider concepts of canine consent and...

Fight for the Final Frontier uses the concepts associated with irregular warfare to offer new insights for understanding the nature of strategic competition in space. Today's most pressing security concerns are best considered using an irregular warfare lens because incidents and points of potential conflict fall outside the definition of armed conflict. While some universal rules of combat apply across all domains, conflict in space up-ends those assumed standards of understanding.

Despite their cultural influence, the grand narrative of the dinosaur story is rarely told. Most of us have heard of Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus, but these two dinosaurs lived more than eighty million years apart—a greater span of time than the entire post-T. rex history of the planet. Furthermore, we often know even less about the environments these animals lived in. The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs tells the full story, a 230-million-year epic of small beginnings, spectacular golden periods, and eventual global domination.

So Great Was the Slaughter reveals the untold story of Arkansas conservation pioneers who saved the state's game and fish populations. As Arkansas entered the twentieth century, the national demand for meat combined with the ability to ship millions of animals to hungry cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago had driven many species, including bison and passenger pigeons, to extinction in Arkansas. Many others, including deer, bear, turkey, quail, and fish, were in danger of disappearing.

In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists—including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive—Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer, and their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, intertwining at the site of the golden toad's last emergence deep in Monteverde's Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.

This text outlines the relative merits of qualitative interviewing to new and emerging scholars in an accessible way. This is achieved not by providing an exhaustive 'how-to' guide but in introducing researchers to the interview technique and using examples of 'best practice' from across the...

What is matter? Matter is the stuff from which we and all the things in the world are made. Everything around us - from desks, to books, to our own bodies - are made of atoms, which are small enough that a million of them can fit across the breadth of a human hair. Inside every atom is a tiny nucleus and orbiting the nucleus is a cloud of electrons. The nucleus is made out of protons and neutrons, and by zooming in further, you would find that inside each there are even smaller particles: quarks.

For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story. In Beasts Before Us, paleontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago. They made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs.

In this wide-ranging and accessible new book, biologist-turned-perfumer Elise Vernon Pearlstine turns our human-centered perception of fragrance on its head and investigates plants' evolutionary reasons for creating aromatic molecules. Delving into themes of spirituality, wealth, power, addiction, royalty, fantasy, and more, Pearlstine uncovers the natural history of aromatic substances and their intersection with human culture and civilization.

Min W. Jung offers a new understanding of the neural basis of innovation in terms of humans' exceptional capacity for imagination and high-level abstraction. He provides an engaging account of recent advances in neuroscience that have shed light on the neural underpinnings of these profoundly important abilities. Jung examines key discoveries concerning the hippocampus and neural circuits that have demystified the processes underlying imagination and abstract thinking. He also considers how these capacities might have evolved as well as possible futures for intelligence.

Understanding Nature is a new kind of ecology textbook: a straightforward resource that teaches natural history and ecological content, and a way to instruct students that will nurture both Earth and self. While meeting the textbook guidelines set forth by the Ecological Society of America, Understanding Nature has a unique ecotherapy theme, using a historical framework to teach ecological theory to undergraduates.

All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands.

Symbiosis, the sustained and intimate associations between unrelated life forms, is now recognized as a ubiquitous phenomenon, one that has shaped evolution since the origin of life and that continues to affect all species. This overview of symbiosis starts with a quick history of relevant early discoveries and researchers, and considers why symbiosis was so long neglected as a respectable topic of biological research and why it was a controversial topic. Today, symbiosis is widely appreciated as being everywhere in nature and as a pervasive influence on ecological communities.