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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues
The evolution of a classic The new 12th edition of Introduction to Genetic Analysis takes this cornerstone textbook to the next level. The hallmark focuses on genetic analysis, quantitative problem solving, and experimentation continue in this new edition while incorporating robust updates to the science. Introduction to Genetic Analysis is now supported in Achieve, Macmillan's new online learning platform. Achieve is the culmination of years of development work put toward creating the most powerful online learning tool for biology students. It houses all of our renowned assessments, multimedia assets, e-books, and instructor resources in a powerful new platform.
'A funny and beautifully written welcome to the enigmatic, weird and wonderful world of wasps' DAVE GOULSON, author of SILENT EARTH There may be no insect with a worse reputation than the wasp, and none guarding so many undiscovered wonders. Where bees and ants have long been the darlings of the insect world, wasps are much older, cleverer and more diverse. They are the bee's evolutionary ancestors - flying 100 million years earlier - and today they are just as essential for the survival of our environment. A bee, ecologist Professor Seirian Sumner argues, is just a wasp that has forgotten how to hunt. For readers of Entangled Life, Other Minds and The Gospel of Eels, this is a book to upturn your expectations about one overlooked animal and the wider architecture of our natural world. With endless surprises, this book might teach you about the wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, about stinging wasps, about parasitic wasps, about wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, about how wasps taught us to make paper. It offers up a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour; as both predator and pollinator, the wasp is an essential pest controller worldwide. Inside their sophisticated social worlds is the best model we have for the earth's major evolutionary transitions. In their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer. The closer you look at these spurned, winged insects - both custodians and bouncers of our planet - the more you see. Their secrets have so far gone mostly untapped, but the potential of the wasp is endless.
"Landscape Bionomics, or Bio-integrated Landscape Ecology, radically transforms the main principles of traditional Landscape Ecology by recognizing the landscape as a living entity rather than merely the spatial distribution of species and communities on the territory, often analysed in separate themes (water, species, pollution, etc.). To be more exact, the landscape is identified as the "life organization integrating a set of plants, animals and human communities and its system of natural, semi-natural, and human cultural ecosystems in a certain spatial configuration." This new perspective inevitably leads to significant changes in how to assess and manage the environment. This book represents the culmination of an endeavor begun by the author, with the support of Richard Forman and Zev Naveh, more than a dozen years ago. It builds on the author s previous successful publication, "Landscape Ecology, A Widening Foundation," by addressing a range of additional topics and discussing the new theoretical and methodological concepts that have emerged during the past decade of research. Particular attention is paid to the fact that interventions in the landscape can be made with the best intentions yet cause serious damage Against this background, the author explains the need to study "landscape units" by applying methods comparable to those used in clinical diagnosis hence ecologists can be viewed as the physicians of ecological systems."
The first volume of the graphic adaptation of Yuval Noah Harari's global phenomenon and smash Sunday Times #1 bestseller, with gorgeous full-colour illustrations and a beautiful package - the perfect gift for the curious beings in your life. One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one-homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us? In this first volume of the full-colour illustrated adaptation of his groundbreaking book, renowned historian Yuval Harari tells the story of humankind's creation and evolution, exploring the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human". From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens challenges us to reconsider accepted beliefs, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and view specific events within the context of larger ideas. Featuring 256 pages of full-colour illustrations and easy-to-understand text covering the first part of the full-length original edition, this adaptation of the mind-expanding book furthers the ongoing conversation as it introduces Harari's ideas to a wider new readership.
Handbook of Thermoset-Based Biocomposites is a three-volume set that provides a comprehensive review on the recent developments, characterization, and applications of natural fiber-reinforced biocomposites. An in-depth look at hybrid composites, nanofillers, and natural fiber reinforcement is divided into three books on polyester, vinyl ester, and epoxy composites. The volumes explore the widespread applications of natural fiber-reinforced polyester, vinyl ester, and epoxy composites ranging from the aerospace sector, automotive parts, construction and building materials, sports equipment, and household appliances. Investigating the physio-chemical, mechanical, and thermal properties of these composites, the volumes also consider the influence of hybridization, fibre architecture, and fibre-ply orientation. This three-volume set serves as a useful reference for researchers, graduate students, and engineers in the field of composites.
The Encyclopedia of Estuaries, part of Springer's Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series, provides a single, state-of-the-art, comprehensive reference volume on estuaries for research scientists, educators, students, and others. Consisting of almost 270 subject entries in an easy-to-use format, this volume covers the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of estuaries. In total more than 225 authors from around the world have contributed to the encyclopedia on such diverse subjects as biotic communities, essential habitats, food webs, fisheries, hydrology, pollution, conservation, and many more. The Encyclopedia of Estuaries will meet the needs of professionals worldwide by supplying detailed information from world-class estuarine and marine scientists as well as experts from other fields of study.
Species evolve over time to become perfectly adapted to their environments, right?Well, sometimes. Consider that an elephant will not grow a seventh set of teeth, even though wearing down the sixth will condemn it to starvation; that hosts of the European cuckoo seem unable to tell that the overgrown monster in their nest is not their own chick; and that whales are fully aquatic mammals who, millions of years after first abandoning the land, still cannot breathe underwater. This book is about evolution, but not its greatest hits. Instead, it explores everything in the animal kingdom that is self-defeating, ill-made, uneconomical, or downright weird – and explains how natural selection has favoured it. In the grand struggle for survival, some surprising patterns emerge: animals are always slightly out-of-date; inefficiency tends to increase over time; predators usually lose, and parasites usually win. With equal parts humour and scientific insight, Andy Dobson is here to explain the how and why of evolution’s limits and liabilities.
A completely up-to-date introduction to the most common group of bees in Britain. Bees, for most people, mean honey or bumble bees, but in fact these social species make up only a small proportion of the species that live in Britain. Open your eyes to the so-called ‘solitary’ bees, and discover a wonderfully diverse population – miners, leafcutters, carpenters and masons – many of which can be found in your own back garden. Solitary bees come in a variety of colours and sizes, with some as large as bumblebees and some only a few millimetres long, and many are key pollinators for our crops and wildflowers. This comprehensive book will tell the story of how these bees live, reproduce and thrive: discover the numerous strategies used by male bees to find females and persuade them to mate; follow the females as they build their nests – or in the case of ‘cuckoo’ species, sneak into the nests of their neighbours – and watch as the new generation appears. Explore the interactions between flowering plants and their bee visitors, asking what the plants get from the relationship, as well as how the bees select the plants they visit, and the ingenuity required to extract pollen, nectar and other rewards. Finally, learn places where bees flourish and what can be done to encourage them and ensure they continue to pollinate our flowers and crops. Drawing on all the latest research as well as the authors’ own observations in the field, this timely New Naturalist gives a wonderful insight into the complicated lives of solitary bees, and the complexity of the behaviour and ecology of this remarkable group of insects.
When the famous South African fish scientist Professor JLB Smith published Old Fourlegs - The Story of the Coelacanth in 1956 he created an international sensation. After all, this 400-million-year-old fish, known only from fossil remains, was thought to have become extinct around 66 million years ago! JLB Smith’s dramatic account of the discovery of the first and second coelacanths in 1938 and 1952 turned him into a cult figure and put South African science on the world map. His book was eventually published in six English editions and translated into nine foreign languages. Mike Bruton’s The Annotated Old Fourlegs includes a facsimile reprint of the original book, to which he has added notes and images in the margins that provide an interesting and revealing commentary on Smith’s text, as well as new introductory and explanatory chapters that bring the coelacanth story up to date.
A practical guide to meditation based on scientific research and ancient Buddhist practices. In this modern digital age, many of us feel overwhelmed, panicked and exhausted. The practice of meditation is an antidote to that frenzied feeling. Using scientific research to explain the benefits of ancient practices, this book gives readers an empirically sound and time-proven set of mental exercises that will allow the reader to overcome destructive emotions and patterns of behaviour, and bring inner peace and focus to their lives. Practical and accessible, faithful to enduring traditions yet innovatively modern, these easy-to-follow techniques will benefit both experienced mediators and novices alike, and explain the wonders of meditation in a way never seen before.
As 95 per cent of our brain activity carries on at a subconscious level, we're not always aware of why we think what we think and do the things we do. Sometimes these subconscious wirings can make us think or act in ways that are not optimal for our happiness - they can bring out the illogical in us all. How Your Brain Is Wireddraws on recent breakthroughs in our understanding of how the brain really works, empowering the reader to take control over their own behaviour. Full of insight and practical advice, it equips you with a toolkit of simple changes you can put into action to: reduce conflict and anxiety achieve a positive mindset make better decisions have more fun and reach new goals. This book is about rewiring your attitudes; re-seeing yourself and your choices. It reveals something rather magical: how tiny tweaks to your behaviour can be all you need to deliver a big, sometimes thrilling, reboot to your life.
Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior. 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. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that 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.
During the past decade there has been an explosion in computation and information technology. With it have come vast amounts of data in a variety of fields such as medicine, biology, finance, and marketing. The challenge of understanding these data has led to the development of new tools in the field of statistics, and spawned new areas such as data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Many of these tools have common underpinnings but are often expressed with different terminology. This book describes the important ideas in these areas in a common conceptual framework. While the approach is statistical, the emphasis is on concepts rather than mathematics. Many examples are given, with a liberal use of color graphics. It is a valuable resource for statisticians and anyone interested in data mining in science or industry. The book's coverage is broad, from supervised learning (prediction) to unsupervised learning. The many topics include neural networks, support vector machines, classification trees and boosting---the first comprehensive treatment of this topic in any book. This major new edition features many topics not covered in the original, including graphical models, random forests, ensemble methods, least angle regression & path algorithms for the lasso, non-negative matrix factorization, and spectral clustering. There is also a chapter on methods for wide'' data (p bigger than n), including multiple testing and false discovery rates. Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman are professors of statistics at Stanford University. They are prominent researchers in this area: Hastie and Tibshirani developed generalized additive models and wrote a popular book of that title. Hastie co-developed much of the statistical modeling software and environment in R/S-PLUS and invented principal curves and surfaces. Tibshirani proposed the lasso and is co-author of the very successful An Introduction to the Bootstrap. Friedman is the co-inventor of many data-mining tools including CART, MARS, projection pursuit and gradient boosting. |
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