Rare and violent events through geological time are the theme of this readable and thought-provoking view of the Earth's history. The evidence for episodes and rare "catastrophic" happenings have been gleaned from the geological record in the author's travels all over the world. Such events are shown to dominate over the gradual and continuous processes that we see in the record of the history of the Earth. From hurricanes to episodic evolution, from colliding continents to asteroid impacts--the importance of these events are presented with many illustrations, both pictorial and anecdotal. View More...
Is Man the product of a God...or is "God" the product of human evolution? From the dawn of our species, every human culture-no matter how isolated-has believed in some form of a spiritual realm. According to author Matthew Alper, this is no mere coincidence but rather due to the fact that humans, as a species, are genetically predisposed to believe in the universal concepts of a god, a soul and an afterlife. This instinct to believe is the result of an evolutionary adaptation-a coping mechanism-that emerged in our species to help us survive our unique and otherwise debilitating awareness of de... View More...
What caused the Black Death? What really happened to the Russian Royal Family? Did Anastasia survive the Russian revolution? Could the unnamed victims of the Titanic be returned to their families? In The DNA Detectives, Anna Meyer provides a fascinating glimpse into one of the newest and most intriguing areas of scientific research. Any DNA that still exists in the remains of living things after their death is called ancient DNA. But the death doesn't have to be recent -- the DNA could be from an organism that died a few days ago, or from an extinct species, such as the Australian thylacine or... View More...
This volume explores the relevance of genetics for the conservation of species, communities, and ecosystems, emphasizing actual case histories. It should be of interest to ecologists, evolutionary biologists, conservation biologists, zoologists, forestry and fisheries researchers, botanists working with rare or endangered plants, and some zoo personnel. View More...
Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Companies like Yahoo and Google are harvesting an average of 2,500 details about each of us every month. Who is looking at this data and what are they doing with it? Journalist Stephen Baker explores these questions and provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're entering--and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, voters, potentia... View More...
Every day we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Companies like Yahoo and Google are harvesting an average of 2,500 details about each of us every month. Who is looking at this data and what are they doing with it? Journalist Stephen Baker explores these questions and provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're entering--and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, voters, potentia... View More...
In a universe filled by chaos and disorder, one physicist makes the radical argument that the growth of order drives the passage of time -- and shapes the destiny of the universe. Time is among the universe's greatest mysteries. Why, when most laws of physics allow for it to flow forward and backward, does it only go forward? Physicists have long appealed to the second law of thermodynamics, held to predict the increase of disorder in the universe, to explain this. In The Janus Point, physicist Julian Barbour argues that the second law has been misapplied and that the growth of order determine... View More...
That Monday afternoon, in high-school gyms across America, kids were battling for the only glory American culture seems to want to dispense to the young these days: sports glory. But at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California, in a gear-cluttered classroom, a different type of "cool" was brewing. A physics teacher with a dream - the first public high-school teacher ever to win a MacArthur Genius Award -- had rounded up a band of high-I.Q. students who wanted to put their technical know-how to work. If you asked these brainiacs what the stakes were that first week of their project, they'd... View More...
Scheduled for its television premier in September and October of this year, the exciting series Race to Mars will be presented on the Discovery Channel in the United States and Canada. This beautiful book--the program's companion volume--describes the dramatic chain of events that will ultimately send human beings to Mars. The story begins in ancient times when the red planet was associated with war and violence, then leads us to the American astronomer Percival Lowell. He trained his telescope on our neighboring red planet and detected surface marks that he and other observers believed were ... View More...
A thought-provoking analysis of how the acquisition and utilization of information has determined the course of history over the past five centuries and shaped the world as we know it today Information is power. For more than five hundred years the success or failure of nations has been determined by a country's ability to acquire knowledge and technical skill and transform them into strength and prosperity. Leading historian Jeremy Black approaches global history from a distinctive perspective, focusing on the relationship between information and society and demonstrating how the understandi... View More...
In this compelling, cutting-edge book, two generations of science writers explore the exciting science of "body maps" in the brain-and how startling new discoveries about the mind-body connection can change and improve our lives. Why do you still feel fat after losing weight? What makes video games so addictive? How can "practicing" your favorite sport in your imagination improve your game? The answers can be found in body maps. Just as road maps represent interconnections across the landscape, your many body maps represent all aspects of your bodily self, inside and out. In concert, they crea... View More...
In Spectrums, David Blatner blends narrative and illustration to illuminate the variety of spectrums that affect our lives every day: numbers, size, light, sound, heat, and time. There is actually very little in this universe that we can feel, touch, see, hear, or possibly even comprehend. It's not an easy task to stretch the mind to encompass both billions of years and billionths of seconds; the distance to Jupiter and the size of a proton; the tiny waves of visible light and gargantuan but invisible gamma rays; or the freezing point of Helium and the heat generated by the blast of an atom bo... View More...
The Lucifer Principle is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that "evil" is a by-product of nature's strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric. In a sweeping narrative that moves lucidly among sophisticated scientific disciplines and covers the entire span of the earth's, as well as mankind's, history, Howard Bloom challenges some of our most popular scientific assumptions. Drawing on evidence from studies of the most primitive organisms to those on ants, apes... View More...
