'This is the story of how your life shapes your brain, and how your brain shapes your life.' Join renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman on a whistle-stop tour of the inner cosmos. It's a journey that will take you into the world of extreme sports, criminal justice, genocide, brain surgery, robotics and the search for immortality. On the way, amidst the infinitely dense tangle of brain cells and their trillions of connections, something emerges that you might not have expected to see: you.

In Deep Time, Henry Gee, assistant editor of Nature, shows us that everything we think we know about evolution is wrong. For a long time, popular scientists have told us that by looking at a fossilised bone we could tell whether it belonged to our ancestors or not. This is not true. In Deep Time, Henry Gee, introduces for the first time in the popular science market a new way of thinking that has revolutionised the way that scientists are approaching the past - Cladistics. Cladistics ignores story-telling and authority and proposes a method based on shared characteristics, rather than ancestry and descent. As a result of using this new method Henry Gee is able to show us the wealth of new ideas that is radically altering our notions of the past: Dinosaurs with feathers; why fish developed fingers; what it means to be human.

'Steve Brusatte, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, brings mammals out from the shadow of their more showy predecessors in a beautifully written book that . . . makes the case for them as creatures who are just as engaging as dinosaurs.' - The Sunday Times, 'Best Books For Summer' 'In this terrific new book, Steve Brusatte . . . brings well-known extinct species, the sabre-toothed tigers and the woolly mammoths, thrillingly back to life' - The Times The passing of the age of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to become ascendant. But mammals have a much deeper history. They - or, more precisely, we - originated around the same time as the dinosaurs, over 200 million years ago; mammal roots lie even further back, some 325 million years. Over these immense stretches of geological time, mammals developed their trademark features: hair, keen senses of smell and hearing, big brains and sharp intelligence, fast growth and warm-blooded metabolism, a distinctive line-up of teeth (canines, incisors, premolars, molars), mammary glands that mothers use to nourish their babies with milk, qualities that have underlain their success story. Out of this long and rich evolutionary history came the mammals of today, including our own species and our closest cousins. But today's 6,000 mammal species - the egg-laying monotremes including the platypus, marsupials such as kangaroos and koalas that raise their tiny babies in pouches, and placentals like us, who give birth to well-developed young - are simply the few survivors of a once verdant family tree, which has been pruned both by time and mass extinctions. In The Rise and Reign of the Mammals, palaeontologist Steve Brusatte weaves together the history and evolution of our mammal forebears with stories of the scientists whose fieldwork and discoveries underlie our knowledge, both of iconic mammals like the mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers of which we have all heard, and of fascinating species that few of us are aware of. For what we see today is but a very limited range of the mammals that have existed; in this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Steve Brusatte tells their - and our - story.

Acclaimed author Matt Ridley's thrilling follow-up to his bestseller `Genome'. Armed with the extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, Ridley turns his attention to the nature versus nurture debate to bring the first popular account of the roots of human behaviour. What makes us who we are? In February 2001 it was announced that the genome contains not 100,000 genes as originally expected but only 30,000. This startling revision led some scientists to conclude that there are simply not enough human genes to account for all the different ways people behave: we must be made by nurture, not nature. Yet again biology was to be stretched on the Procrustean bed of the nature-nurture debate. Acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley argues that the emerging truth is far more interesting than this myth. Nurture depends on genes, too, and genes need nurture. Genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain; they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will. Published fifty years after the discovery of the double helix of DNA, `Nature via Nurture' chronicles a new revolution in our understanding of genes. Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. `Nature via Nurture' is an enthralling, up-to-the-minute account of how genes build brains to absorb experience.

Executive functions develop during the first years of life and determine future learning and personal development. Executive dysfunction is related to various neurodevelopmental disorders, so its study is of great interest for intervention in children with neurotypical development and in those who have suffered a neurodevelopmental disorder. The Handbook of Research on Neurocognitive Development of Executive Functions and Implications for Intervention offers updated research on executive functions and their implication in psychoeducational intervention. It establishes a multidisciplinary context to discuss both intervention experience and research results in different areas of knowledge. Covering topics such as childhood inhibitory processing, mindfulness interventions, and language development, this major reference work is an excellent resource for psychologists, medical professionals, researchers, academicians, educators, and students.

Every year nine million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis, every day over 13,400 people are infected with AIDs, and every thirty seconds malaria kills a child. For most of the world, critical medications that treat these deadly diseases are scarce, costly, and growing obsolete, as access to first-line drugs remains out of reach and resistance rates rise. Rather than focusing research and development on creating affordable medicines for these deadly global diseases, pharmaceutical companies instead invest in commercially lucrative products for more affluent customers. Nicole Hassoun argues that everyone has a human right to health and to access to essential medicines, and she proposes the Global Health Impact (global-health-impact.org/new) system as a means to guarantee those rights. Her proposal directly addresses the pharmaceutical industry's role: it rates pharmaceutical companies based on their medicines' impact on improving global health, rewarding highly-rated medicines with a Global Health Impact label. Global Health Impact has three parts. The first makes the case for a human right to health and specifically access to essential medicines. Hassoun defends the argument against recent criticism of these proposed rights. The second section develops the Global Health Impact proposal in detail. The final section explores the proposal's potential applications and effects, considering the empirical evidence that supports it and comparing it to similar ethical labels. Through a thoughtful and interdisciplinary approach to creating new labeling, investment, and licensing strategies, Global Health Impact demands an unwavering commitment to global justice and corporate responsibility.

Bioinspiration is recognized by the World Health Organization as having great promise in transforming and democratizing health systems while improving the quality, safety, and efficiency of standard healthcare in order to offer patients the tremendous opportunity to take charge of their own health. This phenomenon can enable great medical breakthroughs by helping healthcare providers improve patient care, make accurate diagnoses, optimize treatment protocols, and more. Unfortunately, the consequences can be serious if those who finance, design, regulate, or use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for health do not prioritize ethical principles and obligations in terms of human rights and preservation of the private life. Advanced Bioinspiration Methods for Healthcare Standards, Policies, and Reform is the fruit of the fusion of AI and medicine, which brings together the latest empirical research findings in the areas of AI, bioinspiration, law, ethics, and medicine. It assists professionals in optimizing the potential benefits of AI models and bioinspired algorithms in health issues while mitigating potential dangers by examining the complex issues and innovative solutions that are linked to healthcare standards, policies, and reform. Covering topics such as genetic algorithms, health surveillance cameras, and hybrid classification algorithms, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for AI specialists, hospital administrators, health professionals, healthcare scientists, students and educators of higher education, government officials, researchers, and academicians.