Our landscape has long been shaped by its native tree cover, whether pine, oak, beech or birch. These habitats are full of life, and you'll see many different bird species in all kinds of woodlands throughout the year. But do you know a Nuthatch from a Treecreeper? And can you tell the difference between a Goshawk and a Common Buzzard when it's soaring overhead? The UK's woodlands are home to a diverse collection of our most beautiful wild bird species. RSPB ID Spotlight Woodland Birds is a reliable fold-out chart that presents illustrations of 63 of our most widespread and familiar woodland birds by renowned artist Stephen Message. * Species are grouped by family and helpfully labelled to assist with identification * Artworks are shown side by side for quick comparison and easy reference at home or in the field * The reverse of the chart provides information on the habitats, behaviour, life cycles and diets of our woodland birds, as well as the conservation issues they are facing and how the RSPB is working to support them * Information on research and conservation projects aimed at improving habitats for vulnerable woodland birds is also included The ID Spotlight charts help wildlife enthusiasts identify and learn more about our most common species using accurate colour illustrations and informative, accessible text.

Winner of the Marsh Book of the Year Award (2015) Throughout British history rivers have been of profound economic, social and cultural importance - yet as we see with increasing frequency they have the potential to wreak great destruction. This book describes the natural and not-so-natural changes that have affected British rivers since the last ice age and looks at the many plants and animals that live along, above and within them. Detailed case studies of the Meon, Dee and Endrick illustrate the incredibly varied nature of our river ecosystems, and the natural and human factors that make each one different. Written by two widely respected river ecologists, the book looks not only at rivers as they were and are but also at how they can be managed and cared for. Full of interesting facts and stunning images, Rivers is essential reading for anyone professionally involved in rivers and for the naturalist, conservationist and layman alike. It is the one book you need to understand this singularly important and often contentious feature of the British landscape.

Grow delicious edible mushrooms indoors or outdoors, in your garden or on your balcony, and enjoy them fresh throughout the year. This practical book explains how to grow fungi, with easy-to-understand instructions: Methods and growing-media for indoors and out Getting your mushrooms started and caring for them How to harvest, store, and preserve your mushrooms all year round In-depth descriptions of the most popular varieties This beautifully designed book is the perfect introduction to mushrooms. In it, Folko Kullmann explains what fungi are, how they grow, their history and medicinal properties. It outlines every step of how to grow mushrooms at home, with lots of photographs throughout. Grow Your Own Mushrooms includes a 12-month plan and a list of the best mushrooms to grow at home. In the garden, mushrooms thrive in areas too shady for vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Whether you grow them on logs, straw bales, or ready-mixed growing media, with the right care you’re sure of a rich crop of delicious and unusual mushrooms. Mushrooms are completely at home on balconies, where you can grow them in the shade in pots or containers and many are in their element indoors – in the kitchen or bathroom, on a windowsill, in a dark corner, or in the basement. Best of all, indoors you can grow them all year round! Growing your own mushrooms is fun and can give you a great harvest. These mushrooms, described in detail in the book, are ideal for beginners, as they are low-maintenance, grow quickly and are suitable for cooking in a variety of ways: Shiitake has great taste and is packed with nutritional value. It grows on wood or special growing media, indoors or out. Oyster mushrooms come in such a wide variety, some fruiting in spring and autumn, some in summer, so you can have fresh, delicious mushrooms almost all year round. King oyster mushrooms taste very similar to porcini, and form their first fruiting bodies in just a few weeks, so perfect for an impatient beginner. Sheathed Woodtuft mushrooms grow quickly and almost anywhere and are so easy to dry, they are perfect for the storecupboard. Wine cap mushrooms are tasty mushrooms that fruit twice a year. And, while mushrooms are versatile in your kitchen, this book also shows how easy they are to preserve, so if you have too many, you don’t have to use them right away.

From Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan 'Beyond superb' Bill Bryson 'A wonderful book' Ian McEwan Everyone knows about DNA, the essence of our being, the molecule where our genes reside. But DNA by itself is useless without a machine to decode the genetic information it contains. The ribosome is that machine. Venki Ramakrishnan tells the story of the race to uncover its enormously complex structure, a fundamental breakthrough that resolves an ancient mystery of life itself.

An eagerly anticipated addition to the New Naturalist series. The shieldbug is an amazing and beautiful species, rich with diversity in shape, form, size, life history, ecology, physiology and behaviour. But they are not commonly known, outside of specialist circles. Richard Jones’ groundbreaking New Naturalist volume on shieldbugs encourages those enthusiasts who would otherwise be put off by the, to date, rather technical literature that has dominated the field, providing a comprehensive natural history of this fascinating and beautiful group of insects.

One of the fundamental principles of green chemistry is to design chemical products that minimize adverse consequences to human health and the environment. While chemists have been designing molecules for 200 years to have a limitless range of commercial applications, little or no attention has been given to developing commercial chemicals while avoiding hazards and toxicity. This book is the first to provide chemists with useful, practical guidance on how to minimize or avoid a wide range of hazards. Building on the insights gained from the pharmaceutical industry over the past 25 years on how to create desirable biological effects, the authors demonstrate how to avoid undesirable biological effects by design.

From the groundbreaking partnership of Macmillan Learning and Scientific American comes this one-of-a-kind introduction to the science of biology and its impact on the way we live. Available for the first time with Macmillan's new online learning tool, Achieve, Biology for a Changing World explores the core ideas of biology through chapters written and illustrated in the style of a Scientific American article. Chapters don't just feature compelling stories of real people-each chapter is a newsworthy story that serves as a context for covering the standard curriculum for the non-majors biology course. Achieve is Macmillan's new online learning platform that supports educators and students throughout the full range of instruction, including assets suitable for pre-class preparation, in-class active learning, and post-class study and assessment. The pairing of a powerful new platform with outstanding biology content provides an unrivaled learning experience.

Forensic taphonomy is the study of the postmortem changes to human remains, focusing largely on environmental effects-including decomposition in soil and water and interaction with plants, insects, and other animals. While other books have focused on subsets such as forensic botany and entomology, Manual of Forensic Taphonomy is the first update of the entire domain in more than ten years and the first book to consider distinguishing among multiple types of taphonomic changes. Edited by two of the most distinguished experts in the field, this volume examines taphonomic alterations to bone and related taphonomic processes common to cases of forensic interest. Specific chapters address a range of issues related to: Varying burial environments Animal scavenging and transport Fluvial and human transport Cultural modifications Marine environments Subaerial weathering Thermal alteration Recovery methods used in collecting the remains The book discusses inherent variations in survivability of different bones, degradation of DNA in different environments, and organisms involved in soft-tissue decomposition which result in skeletonization. It also describes microscopic alterations, color changes, macroscopic physical damage of multiple types, and bone loss through dispersal away from the location of initial body deposition. The authors present methods that can be employed to determine the timing of taphonomic damage (perimortem vs. postmortem) as well as checklists for the collection of microscopic and macroscopic taphonomic data. The ability to recognize taphonomic characteristics and discriminate between osseous alterations with similar appearances but dissimilar origins is essential to those engaged in the analysis of skeletal remains. This volume is an ideal guide for students and non-specialists as well as a reference manual for professionals.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

**A NEW YORK TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, ECONOMIST, MAIL ON SUNDAY and GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 'As big a topic as life itself; I'm not sure a writer could cover it better' The Times From the prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies, The Song of the Cell tells the vivid, thrilling and suspenseful story of the fundamental unit of life. In the late 1600s, a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, look down their hand-made microscopes. What they see introduces a radical concept that alters both biology and medicine forever. It is the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves, are built from these compartments. Hooke christens them 'cells'. The discovery of cells announced the birth of a new kind of medicine. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer's, AIDS, lung cancer - all could be re-conceived as the results of cells, or a cellular ecosystem, functioning abnormally. And all could be treated by therapeutic manipulations of cells. This revolution in cell biology is still in progress: it represents one of the most significant advances in science and medicine. Both panoramic and intimate, this is Siddhartha Mukherjee's most spectacular book yet. 'Brilliant ... medical magic' Daily Telegraph

Evolution and the Human-Animal Drive to Conflict examines how fundamental, universal animal drives, such as dominance/prevalence, survival, kinship, and "profit" (greed, advantage, whether of material or social nature), provide the basis for the evolutionary trap that promotes the unstable, conflictive, dominant-prone individual and group human behaviours. Examining this behavioural tension, this book argues that while these innate features set up behaviours that lean towards aggression influenced by social inequalities, the means implemented to defuse them resort to emotional and intellectual strategies that sponsor fanaticism and often reproduce the very same behaviours they intend to defuse. In addressing these concerns, the book argues that we should enhance our resources to promote solidarity, accept cultural differences, deter expansionist and uncontrolled profit drives, and achieve collective access towards knowledge and progress in living conditions. This entails promoting the redistribution of resources and creative labour access and avoiding policies that generate a fragmented world with collective and individual development disparities that invite and encourage dominance behaviours. This resource redistribution asserts that it is necessary to reformulate the global set of human priorities towards increased access to better living conditions, cognitive enhancement, a more amiable interaction with the ecosystem and non-aggressive cultural differences, promote universal access to knowledge, and enhance creativity and cultural convivence. These behavioural changes entail partial derangement of our ancestral animal drives camouflaged under different cultural profiles until the species succeeds in replacing the dominance of basic animal drives with prosocial, collective ones. Though it entails a formidable task of confronting financial, military, and religious powers and cultural inertias – human history is also a challenging, continuous experience in these domains – for the sake of our own self-identity and self-evaluation, we should reject any suggestion of not continuing embracing slowly constructing collective utopias channelled towards improving individual and collective freedom and creativeness. This book will interest academics and students in social, cognitive, and evolutionary psychology, the neurosciences, palaeoanthropology, philosophy, and anthropology.

Bioelectronics is emerging as a new area of research where electronics can selectively detect, record, and monitor physiological signals. This is a rapidly expanding area of medical research, that relies heavily on multidisciplinary technology development and cutting-edge research in chemical, biological, engineering, and physical science. This book provides extensive information on the (i) fundamental concepts of bioelectronics, (ii) materials for the developments of bioelectronics such as implantable electronics, self-powered devices, bioelectronic sensors, flexible bioelectronics, etc, and (iii) an overview of the trends and gathering of the latest bioelectronic progress. This book will broaden our knowledge about newer technologies and processes used in bioelectronics.

Gain a solid foundation in organic chemistry and the chemistry of the human body, as well as a better understanding of biochemical interactions with INTRODUCTION TO ORGANIC AND BIOCHEMISTRY, 8E, International Edition. Designed to make challenging information accessible to everyone and ideal for those entering health careers, this proven book shows chemistry applied to normal human biochemical pathways and discusses biochemical conditions present in disease.

Handbook of Arsenic Toxicology, Second Edition presents the latest findings on arsenic, including its chemistry, sources and effects on the environment and human health. The book discusses both acute and chronic effects, discussing many aspects of arsenic, from physical and chemical properties, exposure, epidemiology, organ toxicity, diagnosis, prevention and treatment. Fully updated and revised, this new edition includes new topics on risk assessment, molecular mechanisms of arsenic, advances in the integrated approach to testing, assessment and development, evaluation and application of high content predictive models, and new alternative methods (NAMS) in the context of Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) to assess toxicology. This comprehensive resource allows readers to effectively assess the risks related to arsenic, providing them with all they need to know on arsenic exposure, toxicity and toxicity prevention.

Donald D. Cox brings together a wide range of information about the forests of eastern North America, including the origins and types of soils and their relationships to vegetation, climate, and human culture; the members of the plant kingdom and the fungi that are found in forests; the methods by which forest plants reproduce and disperse their seeds; and toxic, medicinal, and edible plants that grow in forests. Cox provides complete and accurate details for those readers who are interested in collecting forest plants and preserving plant collections. For readers who wish to go a step beyond identifying and collecting plants, the final chapter describes non-technical investigations, activities, and projects. The author emphasizes forest conservation and habitat preservation throughout this invaluable book.

'What I like best about this fascinating book is the detail. Brian Butterworth doesn't just tell us stories of animals with numerical abilities: he tells us about the underlying science. Elegantly written and a joy to read' - Professor Ian Stewart, author of What's the Use? and Taming the Infinite 'Full of thought-provoking studies and animal observations' - Booklist 'Enlightening and entertaining' - Publishers Weekly The Hidden Genius of Animals: Every pet owner thinks their own dog, cat, fish or hamster is a genius. What makes CAN FISH COUNT? so exciting is the way it unveils just how widespread intelligence is in nature. Pioneering psychologist Brian Butterworth describes the extraordinary numerical feats of all manner of species ranging from primates and mammals to birds, reptiles, fish and insects. Whether it's lions deciding to fight or flee, frogs competing for mates, bees navigating their way to food sources, fish assessing which shoal to join, or jackdaws counting friends when joining a mob - every species shares an ability to count. Homo Sapiens may think maths is our exclusive domain, but this book shows that every creature shares a deep-seated Darwinian ability to understand the intrinsic language of our universe: mathematics CAN FISH COUNT? is that special sort of science book - a global authority in his field writing an anecdotally-rich and revelatory narrative which changes the way you perceive something we take for granted.

Prevention and treatment of cardiometabolic disorders by lifestyle management is the most understood and effective applications of this emerging field. The focus of this book on prediabetes, diabetes and cardiometabolic diseases is timely and will be a welcome addition to clinicians who wish to gain more knowledge and competence in the area. This book will focus on the metabolic syndrome, which is the largest non-communicable disease of our time, and lifestyle approaches that drastically reduce the risks and adverse effects of this condition. Presents a detailed review of clinical evidence and guide for implementation. Provides a toolkit to counter both the high cost of medications and the need to address metabolic disorders associated with insulin resistance early, before or simultaneous to when medications are indicated.

This photographic field guide to southern African birds comprises the biggest and most comprehensive collection of photographs of the region's birds in one volume.

It describes and illustrates all 958 bird species found in southern Africa, and an additional 17 species recorded from the Southern Ocean and associated islands, and Antarctica. Over 2 500 images show age and sex plumage variations, perched and in-flight birds, and colour morphs where relevant. authors.

Colour-coded distribution maps give resident and migratory status, and bird density. Annual seasonality bars show at a glance when species are present and when they breed. A-Z directory provides quick guide to locating groups. Group introductions provide additional clues to identification.

This comprehensive guide follows traditional species sequence. It brings a new dimension to bird identification in southern Africa and will prove indispensable in the field.

Ook in Afrikaans beskikbaar as Volledige Fotografiese Gids: Voëls Van Suider-Afrika.