Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Science

For generations, we’ve accepted the story that weight loss never lasts — that as soon as you go off your diet or stop taking your medication you will revert to your old self and regain weight, and the dieting journey will start all over again. But what if the secret to long-term health isn’t just about what we eat — or even when we eat — but why we eat?

From the Sunday Times top ten best-selling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame. "It's about the terror, isn't it?" "The terror of what?" I said. "The terror of being found out." For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world, meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made jokes on social media that came out badly or made mistakes at work.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. He takes subjects that normally bore the pants off most of us, like geology, chemistry, and particle physics, and aims to render them comprehensible to people who have never thought they could be interested in science. In the company of some extraordinary scientists, Bill Bryson reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before.

In this groundbreaking book, award-winning neuroscientist Emily Falk reveals the systems in our brains that control our daily decision-making - and gives us the tools to take meaningful action. Blending cutting-edge science with stories and practical insight, she reveals how our values shape our sense of self, how status, community and culture can rewire our minds, and how we can employ these realities to build new opportunities.

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.

The enchanted island of Corfu was home to Gerald Durrell and his family for five years before the Second World War. For the passionate young zoologist, Corfu was a natural paradise, teeming with strange birds and beasts that he could collect watch and care for. But life was not without its problems - Gerald’s family often objected to his animal-collecting activities, especially when the beasts wound up in the family’s villa or even worse - the fridge.

In the best-selling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological makeup.

For fans of The Lost City of Z, Walking the Amazon, and Turn Right at Machu Picchu comes naturalist and explorer Paul Rosolie’s extraordinary adventure in the uncharted tributaries of the Western Amazon - a tale of discovery that vividly captures the awe, beauty, and isolation of this endangered land and presents an impassioned call to save it.

This memoir is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where Gerald Durrell lived as a boy, surrounded by his eccentric family - as well as puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies.

The Durrell family returns to the island of Corfu, continuing the story begun in My Family and Other Animals. Already an ardent naturalist at the age of 10, the young Gerald lives in an unconventional and disordered household with his mother, sister, and two brothers. Convivial and open, the family plays host to a constant stream of quirky guests. But for Gerald, the main attraction is the wildlife of Corfu.

The American public's introduction to nuclear technology was manifested in destruction and death. With Hiroshima and the Cold War still ringing in our ears, our perception of all things nuclear is seen through the lens of weapons development. Nuclear power is full of mind-bending theories, deep secrets, and the misdirection of public consciousness - some deliberate, some accidental. The result of this fixation on bombs and fallout is that the development of a non-polluting, renewable energy source stands frozen in time.

The Blind Watchmaker, knowledgably narrated by author Richard Dawkins, is as prescient and timely a book as ever. The watchmaker belongs to the 18th-century theologian William Paley, who argued that just as a watch is too complicated and functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Charles Darwin's brilliant discovery challenged the creationist arguments; but only Richard Dawkins could have written this elegant riposte.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.

I hate every wave of the ocean', the seasick Charles Darwin wrote to his family during his five-year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle. It was this world-wide journey, however, that launched the scientists career.

The Quantum Rules applies the laws of physics to explain everything from relationships and human nature to the effects of globalization. It achieves the impossible task of making quantum physics deeply relevant to all listeners - even those with no interest in science. With a lively and engaging tone, author Kunal Das ponders the underlying truths and patterns in our shared and common life experiences, using insights derived from the fundamental laws of physics.

In The Talent Code, award-winning journalist Daniel Coyle draws on cutting-edge research to reveal that, far from being some abstract mystical power fixed at birth, ability really can be created and nurtured. In the process, he considers talent at work in venues as diverse as a music school in Dallas and a tennis academy near Moscow to demonstrate how the wiring of our brains can be transformed by the way we approach particular tasks.

Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.

In A Good Horse Is Never a Bad Color, Mark Rashid continues to share his talent for training horses through communication rather than force. Rashid uses humorous, feel-good stories to relate his techniques of teaching horses by examining their view of the world. This book is a must-have for compassionate horse trainers and owners. Tales of Arabs, appaloosas, and paints - mistrusted and mistreated because of their breed - will give listeners a new perspective on these breeds and others.

Many horse trainers, even those who espouse the so-called natural horsemanship approach, take the position that horses who fail to obey a human's request are doing so as much out of perversity as ignorance. That's not Mark Rashid's view. In his words, "If we understand that horses can't separate the way they feel from the way they act, then we can start to see that unwanted behavior isn't bad behavior at all. More times than not, it's just the horse expressing the way he feels at that particular moment in time....

The popular and highly respected horse trainer Mark Rashid brings together Western and Eastern philosophies to demonstrate a seamless new incarnation of horse training. After years of helping "difficult" horses, Mark Rashid understands how to build the foundation of a horse's training and resolve any problems encountered along the way.