Those opposed to the teaching of evolution often make well-rehearsed claims about the science that sound, to the layperson, powerful and convincing. And many people who support the teaching of evolution-students, teachers, parents, administrators-do not have the background to respond. They know that scientists have pretty thoroughly dismantled these arguments, but they don't have a handy way of responding to these attacks. The Counter-Creationism Handbook is a one-stop resource for addressing over 400 of the most prevalent claims made by creationists. Each claim is followed by a succinct and scientifically valid rebuttal, and the book includes print and on-line resources for further reading and information.Whether you are a preservice, inservice or veteran teacher, through the inquiry and reflection of teacher research you can learn about your practice and your students and gain a deeper understanding of the potential that the inquiry process has to support powerful student learning. This useful resource covers claims made about the disciplines of philosophy, biology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, physics and mathematics, history, linguistics, and folklore The work addresses the claims of Biblical creationism, intelligent design creationism, and even some creationism based on other religions. An introduction covers how to address creationists in different venues, how to deal with novel claims, and why accurate science is important. The volume is organized thematically, with extensive cross-referencing, so that someone presented with an unfamiliar claim can quickly find the argument, understand its flaws, provide a rebuttal, and see where to go for more information.

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver - an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information? This accessible examination of principles and evidence shows that a network of dualities lies at the heart of biological puzzles that have engaged the human mind for millennia.

This book is about a famous Hungarian mathematics competition that was founded in 1894, and thus, the oldest mathematics competition for secondary school students organized on a national scale. This book is based on Volumes III and IV of the Hungarian work by Janos Suranyi, covering the years from 1964 to 1997.Hungary, along with Russia, has a well-deserved reputation for proposing important, instructive, and interesting problems. Here, the reader will find a treasure trove of over 100 of them. The solutions are written carefully, giving all the details, and keeping in mind at all times the overall logical structures of the arguments.An outstanding feature of this book is Part II: Discussion. Here, the problems are divided by topics into six groups. It contains a discussion of the topic in general, followed by the basic results, that precedes the discussions of the individual problems. When a student encounters some difficulty in a problem, this part of the book can be consulted without revealing the complete solution. As an alternative, a student can also start with this part to familiarize with the general topic before attempting any problems. Finally, almost 400 additional problems from the legendary KoeMaL (Secondary School Mathematics and Physics Journal) takes the student to mathematical topics beyond competitions.

In China, lots of excellent maths students take an active part in various maths contests and the best six senior high school students will be selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results - they won the first place almost every year.The authors of this book are coaches of the China national team. They are Xiong Bin, Yao Yijun, Qu Zhenhua et al. Those who took part in the translation work are Zhao Wei and Zhou Tianyou.The materials of this book come from a series of two books (in Chinese) on Forward to IMO: A Collection of Mathematical Olympiad Problems (2019-2020). It is a collection of problems and solutions of the major mathematical competitions in China. It provides a glimpse of how the China national team is selected and formed.

In China, lots of excellent maths students take an active part in various maths contests and the best six senior high school students will be selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results - they won the first place almost every year.The authors of this book are coaches of the China national team. They are Xiong Bin, Yao Yijun, Qu Zhenhua et al. Those who took part in the translation work are Zhao Wei and Zhou Tianyou.The materials of this book come from a series of two books (in Chinese) on Forward to IMO: A Collection of Mathematical Olympiad Problems (2019-2020). It is a collection of problems and solutions of the major mathematical competitions in China. It provides a glimpse of how the China national team is selected and formed.

We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny? This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes - can take us towards answering these questions. Can such theories lead us to ultimate truths, leaving nothing unexplained? Last, but not least, Heller addresses the thorny problem of why and whether we should expect to find theories with all-encompassing explicative power.

In China, lots of excellent maths students take an active part in various maths contests and the best six senior high school students will be selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results - they won the first place almost every year.The authors of this book are coaches of the China national team. They are Xiong Bin, Yao Yijun, Qu Zhenhua, et al. Those who took part in the translation work are Wang Shanping and Chen Haoran.The materials of this book come from a series of two books (in Chinese) on Forward to IMO: A Collection of Mathematical Olympiad Problems (2017-2018). It is a collection of problems and solutions of the major mathematical competitions in China. It provides a glimpse of how the China national team is selected and formed.

In China, lots of excellent maths students take an active part in various maths contests and the best six senior high school students will be selected to form the IMO National Team to compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad. In the past ten years China's IMO Team has achieved outstanding results - they won the first place almost every year.The authors of this book are coaches of the China national team. They are Xiong Bin, Yao Yijun, Qu Zhenhua, et al. Those who took part in the translation work are Wang Shanping and Chen Haoran.The materials of this book come from a series of two books (in Chinese) on Forward to IMO: A Collection of Mathematical Olympiad Problems (2017-2018). It is a collection of problems and solutions of the major mathematical competitions in China. It provides a glimpse of how the China national team is selected and formed.

The ancient Greeks called it Gaia; the Romans Terra. We know it simply as Earth, the planet we call home. And what a planet it is. Formed around 4.6 billion years ago from the debris of the big bang and long-dead stars, at first it was nothing special, but somehow it evolved to become the most amazing place in the known Universe. The only living planet we know of, it also has a very unusual moon, a remarkably dynamic surface, a complex atmosphere and a deeply mysterious interior. This is Planet Earth is dedicated to the wonders of Planet Earth. Its past is long and dramatic and its future shrouded in mystery. Yet despite centuries of research, only now are we starting to understand Earth's complexity. ABOUT THE SERIES New Scientist Instant Expert books are definitive and accessible entry points to the most important subjects in science; subjects that challenge, attract debate, invite controversy and engage the most enquiring minds. Designed for curious readers who want to know how things work and why, the Instant Expert series explores the topics that really matter and their impact on individuals, society, and the planet, translating the scientific complexities around us into language that's open to everyone, and putting new ideas and discoveries into perspective and context.

Imagine mathematics, imagine with the help of mathematics, imagine new worlds, new geometries, new forms. The new volume in the series "Imagine Math" is intended to contribute to grasping how much that is interesting and new is happening in the relationships between mathematics, imagination and culture. The present book begins with the connections between mathematics, numbers, poetry and music, with the latest opera by Italian composer Claudio Ambrosini. Literature and narrative also play an important role here. There is cinema too, with the "erotic" mathematics films by Edward Frenkel, and the new short "Arithmetique " by Munari and Rovazzani. The section on applications of mathematics features a study of ants, as well as the refined forms and surfaces generated by algorithms used in the performances by Adrien Mondot and Claire Bardainne. Last but not least, in honour of the hundredth anniversary of his birth, a mathematical, literary and theatrical homage to Alan Turing, one of the outstanding figures of the twentieth century.

This fascinating, colourful book offers in-depth insights and first-hand working experiences in the production of art works, using simple computational models with rich morphological behaviour, at the edge of mathematics, computer science, physics and biology. It organically combines ground breaking scientific discoveries in the theory of computation and complex systems with artistic representations of the research results. In this appealing book mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers brought together marvelous and esoteric patterns generated by cellular automata, which are arrays of simple machines with complex behavior. Configurations produced by cellular automata uncover mechanics of dynamic patterns formation, their propagation and interaction in natural systems: heart pacemaker, bacterial membrane proteins, chemical rectors, water permeation in soil, compressed gas, cell division, population dynamics, reaction-diffusion media and self-organisation. The book inspires artists to take on cellular automata as a tool of creativity and it persuades scientists to convert their research results into the works of art. The book is lavishly illustrated with visually attractive examples, presented in a lively and easily accessible manner.

This book is about a famous Hungarian mathematics competition that was founded in 1894, and thus, the oldest mathematics competition for secondary school students organized on a national scale. This book is based on Volumes III and IV of the Hungarian work by Janos Suranyi, covering the years from 1964 to 1997.Hungary, along with Russia, has a well-deserved reputation for proposing important, instructive, and interesting problems. Here, the reader will find a treasure trove of over 100 of them. The solutions are written carefully, giving all the details, and keeping in mind at all times the overall logical structures of the arguments.An outstanding feature of this book is Part II: Discussion. Here, the problems are divided by topics into six groups. It contains a discussion of the topic in general, followed by the basic results, that precedes the discussions of the individual problems. When a student encounters some difficulty in a problem, this part of the book can be consulted without revealing the complete solution. As an alternative, a student can also start with this part to familiarize with the general topic before attempting any problems. Finally, almost 400 additional problems from the legendary KoeMaL (Secondary School Mathematics and Physics Journal) takes the student to mathematical topics beyond competitions.

The Industrial Revolution provided the greatest increase in living standards the world has ever known while propelling Britain to dominance on the global stage. In Forging Modernity, Martin Hutchinson looks at how and why Britain gained this prize ahead of its European competitors. After comparing their endowments and political structures as far back as 1600, he then traces how Britain, through better policies primarily from the political Tory party, diverged from other European countries. Hutchinson's Harvard MBA allows a unique perspective on the early industrial enterprises - many successes resulted from marketing, control systems and logistics rather than from production technology alone, while on a national scale the scientific method and commercial competition were as important as physical infrastructure.  By 1830, through ever-improving policies, Britain had built a staggering industrial lead, half a century ahead of its rivals. Then the Tories lost power and policy changed forever. In his conclusion, Hutchinson shows how changes welcomed by conventional historians caused the decline of Industrial Britain. Nevertheless, the policies that drove growth, ingenuity and rising living standards are still available for those bold enough to adopt them.  

The spectacular culinary creations of modern cuisine are the stuff of countless articles and Instagram feeds. But to a scientist they are also perfect pedagogical explorations into the basic scientific principles of cooking. In Science and Cooking, Harvard professors Michael Brenner, Pia Soerensen and David Weitz bring the classroom to your kitchen to teach the physics and chemistry underlying every recipe. Science and Cooking answers questions such as why we knead bread, what determines the temperature at which we cook a steak or the how much time our chocolate chip cookies should spend in the oven, through fascinating lessons ranging from the role of pressure and boiling points in pecan praline to that of microbes in your coffee. With beautiful full-colour illustrations and recipes, hands-on experiments, and engaging introductions from world-renowned chefs Ferran Adria and Jose Andres, Science and Cooking will change the way readers approach both subjects-in their kitchens and beyond.

This book is a science text about light for the general reader; it is also an adventure story and a detective story revealing how the secrets of light were uncovered. Readers can share in the thrill of each discovery and learn about some of the myriad applications opened up by these fascinating discoveries, including the telescope, fiber optics, the laser, and even the recent optical detection of gravitational waves from space.With Professor Fortson, distinguished experimental physicist, as your tour guide, follow the journey from the 17th century - when Descartes first calculated the size of the rainbow - to the 20th century, when the quantum theory of light was born. Learn how Huygens, Newton, Planck, Einstein and many other great scientists solved one mystery after another, from the reason underlying the law of refraction to the puzzle of the photoelectric effect. The journey ends with the solution to the most challenging mystery of all: that light is both a wave and a particle - a fascinating finale.

Seduction is not just an end result, but a process - and in mathematics, both the end results and the process by which those end results are achieved are often charming and elegant.This helps to explain why so many people - not just those for whom math plays a key role in their day-to-day lives - have found mathematics so seductive. Math is unique among all subjects in that it contains end results of amazing insight and power, and lines of reasoning that are clever, charming, and elegant. This book is a collection of those results and lines of reasoning that make us say, 'OMG, that's just amazing,' - because that's what mathematics is to those who love it. In addition, some of the stories about mathematical discoveries and the people who discovered them are every bit as fascinating as the discoveries themselves.This book contains material capable of being appreciated by students in elementary school - as well as some material that will probably be new to even the more mathematically sophisticated. Most of the book can be easily understood by those whose only math courses are algebra and geometry, and who may have missed the magic, enchantment, and wonder that is the special province of mathematics.

From atomic structures to theories about magnetic forces, scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials. However, most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or sculpt stone into all kinds of shapes, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Handmade is the story of materials through making and doing. Author and material scientist Anna Ploszajski journeys into the domain of makers and craftspeople to comprehend how the most popular materials really work. Anna has the fresh perspective of someone at the forefront of the field. Each chapter features her accounts of learning from masters of their respective crafts. Along the way, Anna builds a fuller picture of materials and their place in society, as well as how they have intersected with her own life experiences - from land racing on American salt flats to swimming the English Channel. She visits a blacksmith, explores how working with the primal material, clay, has brought about some of the most advanced technologies, and delves down to the atomic scale of glass to find out what makes it 'glassy'. Handmade affords us a new understanding of the materials we encounter every day and an appreciation for the skills needed to fashion them into objects that are perfectly formed for the jobs they do.

'A book that would have had Darwin swooning - anyone seriously interested in who we are and how we function should read this.' Guardian At the beginning of this century enormous progress had been made in genetics. The Human Genome Project finished sequencing human DNA. It seemed it was only a matter of time until we had all the answers to the secrets of life on this planet. The cutting-edge of biology, however, is telling us that we still don't even know all of the questions. How is it that, despite each cell in your body carrying exactly the same DNA, you don't have teeth growing out of your eyeballs or toenails on your liver? How is it that identical twins share exactly the same DNA and yet can exhibit dramatic differences in the way that they live and grow? It turns out that cells read the genetic code in DNA more like a script to be interpreted than a mould that replicates the same result each time. This is epigenetics and it's the fastest-moving field in biology today. The Epigenetics Revolution traces the thrilling path this discipline has taken over the last twenty years. Biologist Nessa Carey deftly explains such diverse phenomena as how queen bees and ants control their colonies, why tortoiseshell cats are always female, why some plants need a period of cold before they can flower, why we age, develop disease and become addicted to drugs, and much more. Most excitingly, Carey reveals the amazing possibilities for humankind that epigenetics offers for us all - and in the surprisingly near future.

***A Waterstones Best Paperback of 2022 pick*** Perfect for fans of Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage and Professor Brian Cox. 'A delightful and scintillating hymn to science.' Professor Carlo Rovelli Comedian Robin Ince quickly abandoned science at school, bored by a fog of dull lessons and intimidated by the barrage of equations. But, twenty years later, he fell in love and he now presents one of the world's most popular science podcasts. Every year he meets hundreds of the world's greatest thinkers. In this erudite and witty book, Robin reveals why scientific wonder isn't just for the professionals. Filled with interviews featuring astronauts, comedians, teachers, quantum physicists, neuroscientists and more - as well as charting Robin's own journey with science - The Importance of Being Interested explores why many wrongly think of the discipline as distant and difficult. From the glorious appeal of the stars above to why scientific curiosity can encourage much needed intellectual humility, this optimistic and profound book will leave you filled with a thirst for intellectual adventure.

The brilliantly told and gripping story of the most familiar - yet, amazingly, still poorly understood - substance in the universe: Water. The extent to which water remains a scientific mystery is extraordinary, despite its prevalence and central importance on Earth. Whether one considers its role in biology, its place in the physical world (where it refuses to obey the usual rules of liquids) or its deceptively simple structure, there is still no complete answer to the question: what is water? Philip Ball's book explains what, exactly, we do and do not know about the strange character of this most essential and ubiquitous of substances. H20 begins by transporting its readers back to the Big Bang and the formation of galaxies to witness the birth of water's constituent elements: hydrogen and oxygen. It then explains how the primeval oceans were formed four billion years ago; where water is to be found on other planets; why ice floats when most solids sink; why, despite being highly corrosive, water is good for us; why there are at least fifteen kinds of ice and perhaps two kinds of liquid water; how scientists have consistently misunderstood water for centuries; and why wars have been waged over it. Philip Ball's gloriously offbeat and intelligent book conducts us on a journey through the history of science, folklore, the wilder scientific fringes, cutting-edge physics, biology and ecology, to give a fascinating new perspective on life and the substance that sustains it. After reading this book, drinking a glass of water will never be the same again.

A tenth anniversary edition of the iconic book about the wonderful world of maths Sunday Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize The world of maths can seem mind-boggling, irrelevant and, let's face it, boring. This groundbreaking book reclaims maths from the geeks. Mathematical ideas underpin just about everything in our lives: from the surprising geometry of the 50p piece to how probability can help you win in any casino. In search of weird and wonderful mathematical phenomena, Alex Bellos travels across the globe and meets the world's fastest mental calculators in Germany and a startlingly numerate chimpanzee in Japan. Packed with fascinating, eye-opening anecdotes, Alex's Adventures in Numberland is an exhilarating cocktail of history, reportage and mathematical proofs that will leave you awestruck. This anniversary edition is fully revised and updated.

This book introduces Industrial AI in multiple dimensions. Industrial AI is a systematic discipline which focuses on developing, validating and deploying various machine learning algorithms for industrial applications with sustainable performance. Combined with the state-of-the-art sensing, communication and big data analytics platforms, a systematic Industrial AI methodology will allow integration of physical systems with computational models. The concept of Industrial AI is in infancy stage and may encompass the collective use of technologies such as Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and Big Data Analytics under the Industry 4.0 initiative where embedded computing devices, smart objects and the physical environment interact with each other to reach intended goals. A broad range of Industries including automotive, aerospace, healthcare, semiconductors, energy, transportation, mining, construction, and industrial automation could harness the power of Industrial AI to gain insights into the invisible relationship of the operation conditions and further use that insight to optimize their uptime, productivity and efficiency of their operations. In terms of predictive maintenance, Industrial AI can detect incipient changes in the system and predict the remains useful life and further to optimize maintenance tasks to avoid disruption to operations.

Can we give Grandma a Viking funeral? Why don't animals dig up all the graves? Will my hair keep growing in my coffin after I'm buried? Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. Here she offers her factual, hilarious and candid answers to thirty-five of the most interesting, sharing the lore and science of what happens to, and inside, our bodies after we die. Why do corpses groan? What causes bodies to turn strange colours during decomposition? and why do hair and nails appear longer after death? The answers are all within . . .

The main task of the initial period of studying physics is inculcating the interest and enthusiasm of children in this subject. The root cause of all interest is surprise, and for children there is almost nothing more surprising than a new and unusual toy. There is a whole class of toys with unusual mechanisms, behaviour, or way of interacting with them. Having explained to the child the not quite ordinary, and often paradoxical, properties of such toys, we can gradually instil in him an interest in physics as one of the most important sciences about the nature of the surrounding world. The main purpose of the book is to arouse interest in the study of physics with the help of toys that everyone has loved since childhood.The book contains descriptions of the toys in which, with the help of explanations of the devices and principles of operation, the basic physical laws are revealed, together with perspectives of phenomena and patterns, practical significance, as well as historical information. The individual descriptions contain the minimum necessary mathematical calculations as well as information of environmental, statistical, and household orientations. All toys are systematized according to 4 chapters: Mechanics, Liquids and Gases, Electricity, and Optics.To a large extent, self-production of simple scientific toys can increase interest and enthusiasm in the process of teaching physics. To this end, the fifth chapter provides step-by-step instructions for making 14 such homemade toys from the most affordable materials using the simplest tools. The participation of teachers or parents in the process of making these toys by young children will undoubtedly provide positive emotions and establish trusting relationships.

Making Sense of the Senses provides an easily understandable and engaging overview of the senses. The book allows readers insights into how humans and other animals perceive the world, reflecting a level of knowledge similar to that acquired by studying neuroscience at an undergraduate level. In order to offer an accessible introduction to the science, it uses relatable examples to uncover the history, evolution, and biological principles of the way we see, smell, hear, taste, touch and more.Rather than only focusing on the five primary senses you can see on the cover, Making Sense of the Senses dives deep into the various methods through which life across the planet surveys the world, and guides the reader through the lesser-known methods through which we humans interpret our surroundings. In this way, we come across some amazing abilities that we often forget we possess.Humans are nevertheless rather average creatures compared to many sensory specialists. So when we compare our relatively modest capabilities to those of other species across the animal kingdom, we are forced to yield our anthropocentric sense of supremacy. This book will introduce how biological life developed the capacity to detect magnetic fields, radioactivity, and many more phenomena that until recently were inaccessible to humans.By contextualising and comparing how the senses operate, this book covers the sensory systems in a way no popular science book has previously done. If you are starting your career in neuroscience, or simply want to learn more about the ways our biology guides us through life, Making Sense of the Senses will change the way you think about our perception of the world.