Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Science

Despite advances in health care, infectious microbes continue to be a formidable adversary to scientists and doctors. Vaccines and antibiotics, the mainstays of modern medicine, have not been able to conquer infectious microbes because of their amazing ability to adapt, evolve, and spread to new places. Terrorism aside, one of the greatest dangers from infectious disease we face today is from a massive outbreak of drug-resistant microbes.

Every part of your body affects every other part of your body, and if any one area is not functioning properly, other systems will feel it, too. There is a fundamental connection between the brain, the gut, the microbiome and the thyroid - which Dr Raphael Kellman calls 'the whole brain'.

Testosterone Rex is the powerful myth that squashes hopes of sex equality by telling us that men and women have evolved different natures. Fixed in an ancestral past that rewarded competitive men and caring women, these differences are supposedly recreated in each generation by sex hormones and male and female brains. Testosterone, so we're told, is the very essence of masculinity, and biological sex is a fundamental force in our development. Not so, says psychologist Cordelia Fine.

Own an unruly horse? Thinking about purchasing a horse but don't exactly know what to expect once you do? Ever wondered what and how a horse thinks? Mark Rashid tells stories that provide horse owners and potential buyers with the best training solutions - straight from the horse's mouth. By considering the horse's point of view, he explores a variety of solutions to common training problem like head tossing, trailer loading, mounting problems, and more.

Science starts to get interesting when things don'’t make sense. Even today, there are experimental results that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. In the past, similar anomalies have revolutionised our world: in the 16th century, a set of celestial irregularities led Copernicus to realise that the Earth goes around the sun and not the reverse. In 13 Things That Don'’t Make Sense, Michael Brooks meets thirteen modern-day anomalies that may become tomorrow'’s breakthroughs.

Jimena Canales introduces listeners to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics.

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, Wallace, a pioneer of modern consciousness research, offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physics and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism.

In Born in Africa, Martin Meredith follows the trail of discoveries about human origins made by scientists over the last hundred years, recounting their intense rivalry, personal feuds, and fierce controversies, as well as their feats of skill and endurance. The results have been momentous. Scientists have identified more than 20 species of extinct humans. They have firmly established Africa as the birthplace not only of humankind but also of modern humans.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete.

The science is overwhelming; the facts are in. The planet is heating up at an alarming rate and the results are everywhere to be seen. Yet, as time runs out, climate progress is blocked by the men who are profiting from the burning of the planet: energy moguls like the Koch brothers and Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. Powerful politicians like Senators Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe, who receive massive contributions from the oil and coal industries. Most of these men are too intelligent to truly believe that climate change is not a growing crisis.

The burgeoning new science of epigenetics offers a cornucopia of insights - some comforting, some frightening. For example, the male fetus may be especially vulnerable to certain common chemicals in our environment, in ways that damage not only his own sperm but also the sperm of his sons. And it’s epigenetics that causes identical twins to vary widely in their susceptibility to dementia and cancer. But here’s the good news: unlike mutations, epigenetic effects are reversible. Indeed, epigenetic engineering is the future of medicine.

In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale.

What is consciousness? Why are we here? Where did it all come from - the laws of nature, the stars, the universe? Humans have been asking these questions forever, but science hasn't succeeded in providing many answers - until now. In The Grand Biocentric Design, Robert Lanza, one of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People", is joined by theoretical physicist Matej Pavšic and astronomer Bob Berman to shed light on the big picture that has long eluded philosophers and scientists alike.

Mr. A. was admitted to Dr. Joel Gold’s inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital in 2002. He was, he said, being filmed constantly, and his life was being broadcast around the world "like The Truman Show" - the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the "Truman Show Delusion," launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon and the nature of madness itself.

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.

How Dogs Love Us answers the age-old question of dog lovers everywhere and offers profound new evidence that dogs should be treated as we would treat our best human friends: with love, respect, and appreciation for their social and emotional intelligence.

Nicknamed 'Mountain Man' by the Sunday Telegraph, James Forrest is the record-breaking adventurer who climbed every mountain in England and Wales in just six months - the fastest ever time. Solo and unsupported, he walked over 1,000 miles and ascended five times the height of Everest during his 446-peak challenge. And he did it all on his days off from work, proving it is possible to integrate an epic adventure into your everyday life.

In this classic work that continues to inspire its many fans, James Lovelock deftly explains his idea that life on Earth functions as a single organism. Written for the non-scientist, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the Earth's living matter - air, ocean, and land surfaces - forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life.

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.

The ocean teems with life that thrives under difficult situations in unusual environments. The Extreme Life of the Sea takes listeners to the absolute limits of the ocean world - the fastest and deepest, the hottest and oldest creatures of the oceans. It dives into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal vents - and exposes the eternal darkness of the deepest undersea trenches - to show how marine life thrives against the odds. This thrilling book brings to life the sea's most extreme species, and tells their stories as characters in the drama of the oceans.