Showing titles in Nature & Ecology

In this dazzling piece of reportage, Anna Krien investigates the contemporary animal kingdom and our place in it. From pets to food, from wildness to science experiments, Krien also reveals how animals are faring in this new world order. Examples range from the joyful to the deeply unsettling. As Krien delves deeper, she finds that animals can trigger primal emotions in us, which we are often not willing to acknowledge. "Us and Them" is a clear-eyed look at how we do - and should - treat animals.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.

You've got questions and astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter has answers - every episode you will come closer to complete knowledge of time and space!

Terrible Lizards is a podcast about Dinosaurs with Dr David Hone and Iszi Lawrence.

Every great drink starts with a plant. Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley. Gin was born from a conifer shrub when medieval physicians boiled juniper berries with wine to treat stomach pain. The Drunken Botanist uncovers the surprising botanical history and fascinating science and chemistry of over 150 plants, flowers, trees, and fruits (and even a few fungi).

Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world’s temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply....

The stars and constellations are among the few remaining objects that appear to us just as they appeared to our distant ancestors. From anywhere on Earth, a person may view the celestial panorama simply by stepping outside at night and gazing upward. This nonfiction narrative presents the tales of the 48 classical constellations, compiled from literature spanning a thousand years from Homer to Claudius Ptolemy. These age-old tales have captured the human imagination from ancient times to the present.

""A rip-roaring tale, Fossil Men is one of those rare books that can be a prism through which to view the world, exposing the fabric of the Earth and illuminating the Tree of Life."" —New York Times bestselling author Peter Nichols A behind-the-scenes account of the shocking discovery of the...

When Bob Quinn was a kid, a stranger at a county fair gave him a few kernels of an unusual grain. Little did he know, that grain would change his life. Years later, after finishing a PhD in plant biochemistry and returning to his family's farm in Montana, Bob started experimenting with organic wheat. In the beginning, his concern wasn't health or the environment; he just wanted to make a decent living and some chance encounters led him to organics.

This ""valuable and entertaining"" (New York Times Book Review) book explores how scientists are adapting nature's best ideas to solve tough 21st century problems. Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years...

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....

In 2015, an American hunter named Walter Palmer shot and killed a lion named Cecil. The lion was one of dozens slain each year in Zimbabwe, which legally licenses the hunting of big cats. But Cecil’s death sparked unprecedented global outrage, igniting thousands of media reports about the peculiar circumstances surrounding this hunt. At the center of the controversy was Dr. Andrew Loveridge, the zoologist who had studied Cecil for eight years. In Lion Hearted, Loveridge pieces together, for the first time, the fascinating life and murky details of this beloved lion’s slaying.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship.

In 1985, The Observer magazine sent Douglas Adams to Madagascar to look for the exotic and potentially extinct aye-aye lemur. There he met zoologist Mark Carwardine, and together they made a radio pilot about their travels, In Search of the Aye-Aye. This led to a hugely popular radio series, Last Chance to See, later adapted as a best-selling book. Douglas Adams died in 2001, but his friend Stephen Fry took his place for a follow-up 20th anniversary television series, broadcast on BBC Two in 2009.

More than half a century ago, the naturalist Farley Mowat accepted an assignment to investigate why wolves were killing Arctic caribou. Mowat’s account of the summer he lived in the frozen tundra alone – studying the wolf population and developing a deep affection for these wild creatures (who were no threat to caribou or man) – is today celebrated as a classic of nature writing, at once a tale of remarkable adventure and an indelible record of the myths and magic of wolves.

Otters hold an almost unique place in the animal kingdom of the British Isles, being one of the very few creatures that give birth once every two years. They are the most secretive yet also the most popular mammals - they are found in every county but are so rarely seen that they have been raised to mythical status. When Simon Cooper bought an abandoned water mill that straddles a small chalkstream in Southern England, little did he know that he would come to share the mill with a family of wild otters.

Since the 1987 publication of Diet for a New America, beef consumption in the United States has fallen a remarkable 19 percent. While many forces are contributing to this dramatic shift in our habits, Diet for a New America is considered to be one of the most important. Diet for a New America is a startling examination of the food we currently buy and eat in the United States and the astounding moral, economic, and emotional price we pay for it.

The most joyful emanation produced by a colony of bees is known as the "song of increase" - declaring that the hive is flourishing and the bees are happy in its abundance. Song of Increase takes us inside the world of the honeybee to glean the wisdom of these fascinating creatures with whom humanity has shared a sacred bond for millennia. Within these minutes is a bee-centric approach to living with honeybees, rather than advice for simply maximizing the products they provide.

Two Shakes of a Lamb's Tail is the funny, illuminating diary of a year in the life of a New Zealand farm vet With a husband and two children, 1200 sheep and 400 cattle, farm dogs and pet lambs, pigs bent on excavation and a goat bent on escape, country life is never dull. From calving cows to...

Travel thirty miles north, south, or east of San Francisco city hall and you'll be engulfed in a landscape of thick traffic, fast enterprise, and six-dollar cappuccinos. Venture thirty miles due west, however, and you will find yourself on what is virtually another planet: a spooky cluster of...