Showing titles in Biological Sciences

When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains plants and then become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of toxic substances. Teaming with Microbes offers an alternative to this vicious circle and details how to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web. You’ll discover that healthy soil is teeming with life - not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms.

In 1994 Professor Bryan Sykes, a leading world authority on DNA and human evolution, was called in to examine the frozen remains of a man trapped in glacial ice in northern Italy. News of both the Ice Man's discovery and his age, which was put at over 5,000 years, fascinated scientists and newspapers throughout the world. But what made Sykes's story particularly revelatory was his successful identification of a genetic descendant of the Ice Man, a woman living in Great Britain today. How was Sykes able to locate a living relative?

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.

Being you is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons create our everyday conscious experience. But how does this happen? Anil Seth's unique and groundbreaking theory of what it means to 'be you' challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology. Being You is an accessible, inspiring and eye-opening exploration of consciousness by one of the most remarkable pioneers working in science today.

A much-loved classic of nature writing from environmentalist and the author of Waterlog, Roger Deakin, Wildwood is an exploration of the element wood in nature, our culture and our lives. From the walnut tree at his Suffolk home, he embarks upon a quest that takes him through Britain, across Europe, to Central Asia and Australia, in search of what lies behind man's profound and enduring connection with wood and trees.

Together with his own life-changing encounters with animals around the world, Martin has celebrated the intelligence, loyalty, and companionship of some truly extraordinary creatures whose lives have been entwined with our own. By turns heart-warming, inspiring and always fascinating, Meetings With Remarkable Animals gives us a chance to meet them too.

Through riveting personal stories and the latest research, Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven shows how testosterone drives the behaviour of the sexes apart and how understanding the science behind this hormone is empowering for all.

When antibiotics started to fail the race to save humanity from deadly antibiotic resistant infections began. Science journalist Lina Zeldovich reveals the remarkable history of bacteriophages or 'phages', through the colourful lives of the British, French, Soviet and American scientists who discovered, developed and are now reviving this unique living medicine for seemingly incurable diseases.

In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience, revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world-other people and our relation to them.

Humans are a puzzling species. On the one hand, we struggle to survive on our own in the wild, often failing to overcome even basic challenges, like obtaining food, building shelters, or avoiding predators. On the other hand, human groups have produced ingenious technologies, sophisticated languages, and complex institutions that have permitted us to successfully expand into a vast range of diverse environments. What has enabled us to dominate the globe, more than any other species, while remaining virtually helpless as lone individuals?

A book to be listened to for pleasure as well as a practical identification guide, The Edge of the Sea introduces a world of teeming life where the sea meets the land. A new generation of listeners is discovering why Rachel Carson's books have become cornerstones of the environmental and conservation movements.

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.

This is a story about you. It is the history of who you are and how you came to be. It is unique to you, as it is for every one of the 100 billion modern humans who has ever drawn breath. But it is also our collective story, because in each of our genomes we carry the history of the whole of our species.

A forester's fascinating stories backed by the latest scientific research illustrate how trees nurture and talk to each other. Are trees social beings? In this international best seller - which has sold more than 320,000 copies in Germany alone - forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families.

Best-selling author Mary Roach returns with a new adventure to the invisible realm we carry around inside. Roach takes us down the hatch on an unforgettable tour. The alimentary canal is classic Mary Roach terrain: The questions explored in Gulp are as taboo, in their way, as the cadavers in Stiff and every bit as surreal as the universe of zero gravity explored in Packing for Mars. Why is crunchy food so appealing? Why is it so hard to find words for flavors and smells? Why doesn’t the stomach digest itself? How much can you eat before your stomach bursts?

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....

When it comes to understanding the connection between our mental and physical health, we should be looking at the exceptions, not the rules. Dr Jeff Rediger, a world-leading Harvard psychiatrist, has spent the last fifteen years studying thousands of individuals from around the world, examining the stories behind extraordinary cases of recovery from terminal illness. In analysing the remarkable science of recovery, Dr Rediger reveals the power of our mind to heal our body and shows us the keys to good health.

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.

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?

A journey through life, the universe and everything. From what actually happened in the big bang to the accidental discovery of Post-it notes, science is packed with surprising discoveries. Did you know, for instance, that if you were to get too close to a black hole it would suck you up like a noodle (it's called spaghettification), why your keyboard is laid out in QWERTY (it's not to make it easier to type) or whether the invention of the wheel was less important to civilisation than the bag (think about it)? New Scientist does.