Showing titles in Biological Sciences

Understanding the human mind remains one of the most alluring challenges we face. Pioneering investigations and technologies are enabling science to gain new insights into the complexity of the brain, its ability to change and adapt, and the connections between its biology and the mind and individual experience and behaviour. Drawing on this research, science journalist Lynne Malcolm takes us on a fascinating journey to discover how this new knowledge is not only changing the way we understand the brain but also changing lives.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

Ever since we first started discovering dinosaurs in the early 1800s, our obsession for uncovering everything about these creatures has been insatiable. Each generation has made huge strides in trying to better our understanding of these animals, and in the past 20 years, we have made more discoveries than in the previous 200. There have been extraordinary advances in palaeontological methods, and ever more dinosaur fossils promise a landslide of new data and huge leaps forward in our understanding of these incredible animals. 

The secretive Mysteries conducted at Eleusis in Greece for nearly two millennia have long puzzled scholars with strange accounts of initiates experiencing otherworldly journeys. In this groundbreaking work, three experts - a mycologist, a chemist, and a historian - argue persuasively that the sacred potion given to participants in the course of the ritual contained a psychoactive entheogen. The authors then expand the discussion to show that natural psychedelic agents have been used in spiritual rituals across history and cultures.

In many ways, insects are just like us. Elaborate mating rituals, a variety of parenting styles, and a plethora of careers — from architects and engineers, to farmers and ranchers. Like us, they’re able to share complex information essential for survival, significantly impact their environment, and recycle. But insects outdo us in so many respects. They are terrestrial, but some can live underwater.

For two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender reassignment surgery, cadavers have been there alongside surgeons, making history in their quiet way.

In 1954, in a remote South American village, a four-year-old girl was abducted and then abandoned deep in the Colombian rainforest. So begins the incredible true story of Marina Chapman, who went on to spend several years alone in the jungle, her only family a troop of capuchin monkeys. Using instinct to guide her, she copied everything they did and soon learned to fend for herself. At around 10 years old, a completely feral Marina was returned to civilisation by hunters, who sold her as a slave to a brothel. Beaten daily and groomed to be a prostitute, she escaped - to live the perilous existence of a Colombian city street kid.

In Above the Line, they argue that that the quality of your life flows from the attitudes of your heart. Wise, compassionate, and practical Above the Line explores the deep, fundamental drivers of human behavior that exist within your heart - the seat of your character. It reveals that all of these behaviors can be explained by four heart-based principles - humility, love, pride, and fear - which influence every facet of our life, for better or worse. 

Speaking to experts in fields as diverse as oil production and ecology, and visiting the places that have escaped recent human activity to discover how they have adapted to life without us, Alan Weisman paints an intriguing picture of the future of Earth. Exploring key concerns of our time, this absorbing thought experiment reveals a powerful - and surprising - picture of our planet's future.

With acuity, humor, and respect for human diversity, The Shortest History of Sex reveals where the many facets of our sexuality—chemical, anatomical, behavioral, social—come from. Chasing down our evolutionary family tree, from the first aquatic creatures to primate societies, David Baker sheds light on our baffling array of passions, impulses, and fetishes, and guides us toward a clear understanding of one of the deepest, most abiding forces of human nature.

At WHOOP, we are on a mission to unlock human performance. WHOOP Founder & CEO Will Ahmed sits down with top athletes, scientists, experts, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak – and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. Every week, we dig deeper into sleep, recovery, nutrition, training, lifestyle habits, and more to help you reach your potential.

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks listeners through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It's a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away.

On 7 February 2009, Roger Wood was the police officer in charge of Kinglake, at the epicentre of the worst ever bushfire disaster in Australia's history, Black Saturday. As the firestorm engulfed the community, he risked his life again and again to try to save people. When he phoned home to warn his wife what was coming, she screamed that the fire had already hit their property. Then the line went dead.

Two New York Times best-selling authors unveil new research showing what meditation can really do for the brain. In the last 20 years, meditation and mindfulness have gone from being kind of cool to becoming an omnipresent Band-Aid for fixing everything from your weight to your relationship to your achievement level. Unveiling here the kind of cutting-edge research that has made them giants in their fields, Daniel Goleman and Richard J Davidson show us the truth about what meditation can really do for us.

Think of a platypus: they lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), they produce milk without nipples and venom without fangs and they can detect electricity. Or a wombat: their teeth never stop growing, they poo cubes and they defend themselves with reinforced rears. Platypuses, possums, wombats, echidnas, devils, kangaroos, quolls, dibblers, dunnarts, kowaris: Australia has some truly astonishing mammals with incredible, unfamiliar features. But how does the world regard these creatures? And what does that mean for their conservation?

No one has done more to transform our understanding of trees than the world-renowned scientist Suzanne Simard. Raised in the forests of British Columbia, where her family has lived for generations, Professor Simard did not set out to be a scientist. She was working in the forest service when she first discovered how trees communicate underground through an immense web of fungi, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that nurture their kin and sustain the forest.

The Podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma gets stored in the body and what you can do to heal.

A stunningly lyrical firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou, A Thousand Trails Home encompasses the historical past and present day, revealing the fragile intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape of cultural and climatic change sweeping the Alaskan Arctic. Author Seth Kantner vividly illuminates this critical story about the interconnectedness of the Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska, the Western Arctic caribou herd, and the larger Arctic region.

From Parkinson’s disease to Tourette’s syndrome and depression to psychopathy, Broken Brains reveals the mysteries of brain function - and dysfunction. In this no-nonsense introduction, Ian Mitchell takes you on a tour through the sometimes devastating and sometimes bizarre effects of what happens when brains break down.

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.