Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Biological Sciences

In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s.

In the summer of 2004, veterinarian Melanie Butera received an unexpected patient: a three-day-old blind, dying fawn she called Dillie. Melanie doubted the deer would survive, but with the help of her husband, Steve, she miraculously nursed Dillie back to health. The tenacious deer quickly became a member of the family, running around the house with the dog, the cat, and the people and enjoying all of the perks, including her own bedroom, plates of her favorite linguini, and swims in the family's pool.

In the aftermath of the horrific trench warfare of the First World War, the poppy - sprouting across the killing fields of France and Belgium, then immortalized in John McCrae’s moving poem - became a worldwide icon. Yet the poppy has a longer history: as the telltale sign of human cultivation of the land, of the ravages of war, and of the desire to escape the earthly realm through Romantic opium dreams or the grim reality of morphine drips.

Our basic right to healthy food is at risk. What can we do? Written in an astute, engaging style, armed with examples from her own homesteading lifestyle, small farmer Nicole Faires' Food Confidential gives you the tools to fight the intangible battles as well as the practical ones.

In Cool, the neuroscientist and philosopher Steven Quartz and the political scientist Anette Asp bring together the latest findings in brain science, economics, and evolutionary biology to form a provocative theory of consumerism, revealing how the brain's "social calculator" and an instinct to rebel are the crucial missing links in understanding the motivations behind our spending habits.

Why a unicycle? Why a cross-country trip? Why leave a prominent New York magazine and return to the simple life in Kentucky? Reminiscent of classic literary travelogues, Mark Schimmoeller's Slowspoke: A Unicyclist's Guide to America takes listeners on an inward, emotional journey as he inches across landscapes and communities from North Carolina to Arizona. Schimmoeller became inspired by his unicycle as an adolescent.

By turns epic and intimate, Telling Our Way to the Sea is both a staggering revelation of unraveling ecosystems and a profound meditation on our changing relationships with nature - and with one another. When the biologists Aaron Hirsh and Veronica Volny, along with their friend Graham Burnett, a historian of science, lead twelve college students to a remote fishing village on the Sea of Cortez, they come upon a bay of dazzling beauty and richness.

Hundreds of thousands of people die every year from malaria. No one's quite sure of the exact number. It's just too difficult to keep track of the disease as it tears through more than 200 million cases each year, many of them in countries wracked by war and blighted by other problems. In The Deadly Air, Christian Jennings mixes together his own experiences of suffering from malaria with a history of mankind's struggle with the disease.

It's no secret that our planet is in crisis. Environmental threats such as climate change, pollution, habitat loss, and land degradation threaten the survival of thousands of plant and animal species. In 100 Heartbeats, Jeff Corwin provides an urgent portrait of the wildlife teetering on the brink. From the forests slipping away beneath the stealthy paws of the Florida panther, to the giant panda’s plight to climb ever higher in the mountains of China, Corwin takes you on a global tour to witness firsthand the critical state of our natural world.

An end to Roderick L. Haig-Brown’s seasons cycle, Fisherman’s Summer is a book that can be listened to again and again, for both knowledge and pleasure. In this installment, he focuses again on the rivers of his native British Columbia such as the Campbell, the Columbia, and the Nimpkish. Among his vast wealth of knowledge concerning fly fishing, listeners are also exposed to his wise reflections.

From roots to canopy, a lush, verdant history of the making of California. California now has more trees than at any time since the late Pleistocene. This green landscape, however, is not the work of nature. It’s the work of history. In the years after the Gold Rush, American settlers remade the California landscape, harnessing nature to their vision of the good life. Horticulturists, boosters, and civic reformers began to "improve" the bare, brown countryside, planting millions of trees to create groves, wooded suburbs, and landscaped cities.

The Western world has had an enduring love affair with dolphins since the early 1960s, with fanciful claims of their 'healing powers' and 'super intelligence'. Myths and pseudoscience abound on the subject. Justin Gregg weighs up the claims made about dolphin intelligence and separates scientific fact from fiction. He puts our knowledge about dolphin behavior and intelligence into perspective, with comparisons to scientific studies of other animals, especially the crow family and great apes.

We have long fantasized about finding life on planets other than our own. Yet even as we become aware of the vast expanses beyond our solar system, it remains clear that Earth is exceptional. The question is: Why? In Lucky Planet, astrobiologist David Waltham argues that Earth’s climate stability is what makes it uniquely able to support life, and it is nothing short of luck that made such conditions possible. The four-billion-year stretch of good weather that our planet has experienced is statistically so unlikely that chances are slim that we will ever encounter intelligent extraterrestrial others.

A Natural History of North American Trees gives us a picture of life in America from its earliest days to the middle of the last century. The information is always interesting, though often heartbreaking. While Peattie looks for the better side of man's nature, he reports sorrowfully on the greed and waste that have doomed so much of America's virgin forest.

Did you know that the CIA once made use of a “spy cat”, or that, although delicious, eating the flesh of an armadillo can give you leprosy? And what about Terry, the small black Cairn Terrier from Kansas who was paid today’s equivalent of $2,000 a week for her work in The Wizard of Oz? Even if you think you have a handle on all things trivia, you're guaranteed a big surprise with Now I Know: Animals.

Did you know that San Diego’s Frozen Zoo is home to preserved DNA samples from over 8,000 endangered or threatened species, or that the tell-tale smell of freshly mowed grass is actually the plant’s version of a distress call? And what about Henrietta Lacks, the “immortal woman” whose cancer cells have been divided and multiplied for research purposes for over 60 years? Even if you think you have a handle on all things trivia, you're guaranteed a big surprise with Now I Know: Science.

Ticked: The Battle Over Lyme Disease in the South is the second installment of Discover In-Depth, Discover magazine's new longform series. In this deep investigation of the science surrounding Lyme disease, writer Wendy Orent dissects how tick-borne illness is diagnosed in the Southern United States, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) do not recognize Lyme even though thousands of people in the South have reported Lyme-like symptoms and debilitating illness.

From eye-witness accounts of elephants apparently mourning the death of family members to an experiment that showed that hungry rhesus monkeys would not take food if doing so gave another monkey an electric shock, there is much evidence of animals displaying what seem to be moral feelings. But despite such suggestive evidence, philosophers steadfastly deny that animals can act morally, and for reasons that virtually everyone has found convincing.

When most Americans think of environmentalism, they think of the political left, of vegans dressed in organic-hemp fabric, lofting protest signs. In reality, writes Jacob Darwin Hamblin, the movement - and its dire predictions - owe more to the Pentagon than the counterculture.

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget - nearly $175 billion - is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about healthcare: we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health.