Showing titles in Nature & Ecology

When we see a bird flying from branch to branch happily chirping, it is easy to imagine they lead a simple life of freedom, flight, and feathers. What we don't see is the arduous, life-threatening challenges they face at every moment. Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs guides the listener through the myriad, and often almost miraculous, things that birds do every day to merely stay alive. Like the goldfinch, which manages extreme weather changes by doubling the density of its plumage in winter.

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast.I am Dr. Andrew Huberman. My plan in creating this podcast is to discuss neuroscience: how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body controls our perceptions, our behaviors, and our health. I will also discuss tools for measuring and changing how our nervous system works.Upcoming episodes will cover: sleep and how to get better at sleeping, learning, dreaming, as well as motivation and focus and how to access more focus. We will also cover neuroplasticity, fear, and stress.Along the way, I will discuss behavioral tools ("do's and don'ts"), ...

Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of individuals to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation.

In this indispensable follow up to his acclaimed The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World, Charles Clover chronicles how determined individuals are proving that the crisis in our oceans can be reversed, with benefits for both local communities and entire ecosystems. Rewilding the Sea celebrates what happens when we step aside and let nature repair the damage: whether it is the overfishing of bluefin tuna across the Atlantic, the destruction of coral gardens by dredgers in Lyme Bay or the restoration of oysters on the East Coast of America.

At 28,251 feet, K2 might be almost 800 feet shorter than Everest, but it’s a far harder climb. It will kill you on the way up and the way down. Mick Conefrey guides us through the early story of the legendary mountain and the extraordinary attempts that led up to its first ascent in 1954 - these are tales of riveting drama and unimaginable tragedy.

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered. It is the annual flood pulse—the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain—that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees.

Lobster has been a phenomenal success story, with a commercial fishery that has generated enormous wealth and fuelled appetites for one of the world’s most recognizable luxury foods. The great lobster boom that began in the 1990s has also led to violent fights over who has the right to catch this valuable seafood, including many Indigenous people in Canada, who until recently have been excluded from this industry. Now overfishing, trade wars, and climate change are threatening the future of this fishery in deeply troubling ways.

This gripping true story follows a biologist's human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic to rediscover her love of birds, nature, and adventure—perfect for fans of Cheryl Strayed.​

As ecologists Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe show, rewilding is a new and progressive approach to conservation, blending radical scientific insights with practical innovations to revive ecological processes, benefiting people as well as nature. With its sense of hope and purpose, rewilding is breathing new life into the conservation movement and enabling a growing number of people to enjoy thrilling wildlife experiences previously accessible only in remote wilderness reserves.

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows offers an absorbing look at what social psychologist Melanie Joy calls carnism, the belief system that conditions us to eat certain animals when we would never dream of eating others. Carnism causes extensive animal suffering and global injustice, and it drives us to act against our own interests and the interests of others without fully realizing what we are doing.

Part travelogue, part natural history, part science, and part psychology, this absorbing book shows us how we can reinvigorate our lives, reduce everyday stress, and bring out the best in ourselves when we heed the wisdom of trees.

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.

Elephants are the largest land animals in the world. They are also intensely social and have advanced long-term memories. In this episode, a parade of Asian elephants makes its way through the Sri Lankan forest to a lake for drinks and mud baths, stopping periodically for group naps. The female leading the parade uses infrasonic rumbles—inaudible to humans, but traveling as far as two miles along the surface of the Earth as seismic waves—to invite friends and family around the forest to join her at the reservoir.

Explore the world through its most unlikely creatures: Cryptozoology, the study of hidden, monstrous, and legendary animals, is truly the art of discovering the unknown. Richard Freeman, Zoological Director of Centre for Fortean Zoology, has explored the corners of the five continents on the search for creatures that many people believe are non-existent. In this book, he shares the exciting stories of his investigations of the Yeti, Mongolian Deathworm, Loch Ness Monster, Orang-Pendak, Ninki-Naka, and more.

Ants have been walking the Earth since the age of the dinosaurs. Today there are one million ants for every one of us. The closer you get to ants, the more human they look: they build megacities, grow crops, raise livestock, tend their young and infirm, and even make vaccines. They also have a darker side: they wage war, enslave rivals and rebel against their oppressors. From fearsome army ants, who stage 12-hour hunting raids where they devour thousands, to gentle leafcutters gardening in their peaceful underground kingdoms, every ant is engineered by nature to fulfil a role.

The Book of Eels, a combination of social comment, biography and natural history, is also a fascinating and witty account of Tom Fort’s obsession with the eel, his journeying to discover the eel in all its habitats and the people he meets in his pursuit....

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than $200. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."

Learn the science behind weather and weather prediction in this clear and straightforward new guide. Weather is everywhere, and while it's typically not thought about most of the time, it can get everyone's attention in an instant - whether it's the swirling destruction of a tornado, the wreckage from a hurricane, or the havoc of climate change on the environment.

When the struggle to save oil-soaked birds and restore blackened beaches left him feeling frustrated and helpless, John Francis decided to take a more fundamental and personal stand: He stopped using all forms of motorized transportation. Soon after embarking on this quest that would span two decades and two continents, the young man took a vow of silence that endured for 17 years.

Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to the Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Mitch and his wife, Janine operate. Chika's arrival made a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delighted the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika was suddenly diagnosed with a terminal disease that no doctor in Haiti could help with.