Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Genetics

The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from best-selling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856, where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of heredity'.

Fifty thousand years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements.

Nothing is more familiar and yet less understood than the human mind. It defines the experience of being human, and yet its workings contain some of the deepest mysteries ever encountered. Written by one of the world's greatest teachers of psychology, The Human Mind provides a masterful and riveting guide to all that we have learned since modern science began probing those mysteries.

In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines.

With so much variation that can be handed down genetically, for better or worse, the way we understand our biology holds huge importance for how we understand our world and one another, including the biggest questions of our day, such as social inequality. Eye-opening and profound, Adaptable is a revolutionary reappraisal of an overlooked science.

Humanity has often found itself on the precipice. We've survived and thrived because we've never stopped moving. In this eye-opening book, Johannes Krause, chair of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Humanity, offers a new way of understanding our past, present and future. Marshalling unique insights from archaeogenetics, an emerging new discipline that allows us to read our ancestors' DNA like journals chronicling personal stories of migration, Krause charts two millennia of adaption, movement and survival.

In this ground-breaking and entertaining exploration of athletic success, award-winning writer David Epstein gets to the heart of the great nature vs. nurture debate, and explodes myths about how and why humans excel. Along the way, Epstein exposes the flaws in the so-called 10,000-hour rule that states that rigorous practice from a young age is the only route to success.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Blueprint, written and read by Robert Plomin. The blueprint for our individuality lies in the 1 percent of DNA that differs between people. Our intellectual capacity, our introversion or extraversion, our vulnerability to mental illness, even whether we are a morning person - all of these aspects of our personality are profoundly shaped by our inherited DNA differences.

Perched on the exterior of our delicate and intricate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest growing organ. We see it, touch it and live in it every day. It's a habitat for a mesmerisingly complex world of micro-organisms, its physical functions are vital to our health and indeed our survival, and it's crucial to our sense of identity. Yet how much do we really know about it? Through the lenses of science, sociology and history, Dr Monty Lyman leads us on a journey through the comedy, tragedy and exquisite humanity of our most underrated and overlooked organ.

For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. After new discoveries, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different - and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs.

Since the dawn of humankind, mental illness has been one of our greatest causes of suffering as a species. But for the majority of our history, its causes have remained a mystery. Professor Karl Deisseroth shares his breakthrough discovery, optogenetics, a biological technique that allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light. With moving and revelatory stories from both personal and professional experience, he reveals what mental illnesses really are, why we suffer from them and the unexpected role they have played in our evolution.

In An Appetite for Wonder Richard Dawkins brought us his engaging memoir of the first 35 years of his life from early childhood in Africa to publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, when he shot to fame as one of the most exciting new scientists of his generation. In Brief Candle in the Dark he continues his autobiography, following the threads that have run through the second half of his life so far and homing in on the key individuals, institutions and ideas that inspired and motivated him.

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.

An award-winning physician and scientist makes the game-changing case that genetic females are stronger than males at every stage of life. Here are some facts: Women live longer than men. They have stronger immune systems. They're better at fighting cancer and surviving famine and even see the world in a wider variety of colours. They are simply stronger than men at every stage of life. Why is this? And why are we taught the opposite?

In Valley of Forgetting, Jennie Erin Smith brings listeners into the clinic, the laboratories, and the Medellín trial center where Lopera’s patients receive an experimental drug to see if Alzheimer’s can be averted. She chronicles the lives of people who care for sick parents, spouses, and siblings, all while struggling to keep their own dreams afloat.

Go back even a quarter of a century and few people would have heard of DNA, except perhaps in a forensic case. Now genetics plays a part of our everyday culture and our interest in genetics is booming, particularly in the form of direct-to-consumer genetic testing for health, family history and ancestry testing. So how did we get to the point where our understanding, and misunderstanding of genetics became so commonplace?

The Secret Body is a gripping drama of discovery and a landmark account of the dawning revolution in human health that reveals a hitherto invisible universe within each of us.

Caitlin Shetterly discovered the importance of GMOs the hard way. Shortly after she learned that her son had an alarming sensitivity to GMO corn, she was told that she had the same condition, and her family's daily existence changed forever. An expansion of Shetterly's viral Elle article "The Bad Seed", Modified delves deep into the heart of the matter - from the cornfields of Nebraska to the beekeeping conventions in Brussels - to shine a light on the people, the science, and the corporations behind the food we serve ourselves and our families every day.