'Read this book, then look and wonder' Sunday Times We have to learn to live as part of nature, not apart from it. And the first step is to start looking after the insects, the little creatures that make our shared world go round. Insects are essential for life as we know it - without them, our world would look vastly different. Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research and a lifetime's study, Dave Goulson reveals the long decline of insect populations that has taken place in recent decades and its potential consequences. Eye-opening and inspiring, Silent Earth asks for profound change at every level and a passionate argument or us to love, respect and care for our six-legged friends. 'Compelling - Silent Earth is a wake-up call' Isabella Tree, author of Wilding 'Enlightening, urgent and funny, Goulson's book is a timely call for action' New Statesman

How do individuals decide whether to accept human causes of climate change, vaccinate their children against childhood diseases, or practice social distancing during a pandemic? Democracies depend on educated citizens who can make informed decisions for the benefit of their health and well-being, as well as their communities, nations, and planet. Understanding key psychological explanations for science denial and doubt can help provide a means for improving scientific literacy and understanding-critically important at a time when denial has become deadly. In Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It, the authors identify the problem and why it matters and offer tools for addressing it. This book explains both the importance of science education and its limitations, shows how science communicators may inadvertently contribute to the problem, and explains how the internet and social media foster misinformation and disinformation. The authors focus on key psychological constructs such as reasoning biases, social identity, epistemic cognition, and emotions and attitudes that limit or facilitate public understanding of science, and describe solutions for individuals, educators, science communicators, and policy makers. If you have ever wondered why science denial exists, want to know how to understand your own biases and those of others, and would like to address the problem, this book will provide the insights you are seeking.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST, OBSERVER, NEW SCIENTIST, BBC FOCUS, INDEPENDENT AND WASHINGTON POST 'A rollicking tour of the wildest physics. . . Like an animated discussion with your favourite quirky and brilliant professor' Leah Crane, New Scientist 'Weird science, explained beautifully' - John Scalzi We know the universe had a beginning. But what happens at the end of the story? With lively wit and wry humour, astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us on a mind-bending tour through each of the cosmos' possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, Vacuum Decay, the Big Rip and the Bounce. Guiding us through major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory and much more, she describes how small tweaks to our incomplete understanding of reality can result in starkly different futures. Our universe could collapse in upon itself, or rip itself apart, or even - in the next five minutes - succumb to an inescapable expanding bubble of doom. This captivating story of cosmic escapism examines a mesmerizing yet unfamiliar physics landscape while sharing the excitement a leading astrophysicist feels when thinking about the universe and our place in it. Amid stellar explosions and bouncing universes, Mack shows that even though we puny humans have no chance of changing how it all ends, we can at least begin to understand it. The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.

A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2022: POLITICS Significant strides have been made in recent years in the movement for LGBTQ+ rights, visibility and empowerment, but the conversation is far from over. After years of feeling the crushing dearth of information on bisexuality, psychological scientist and bestselling author Dr Julia Shaw dug deep and found a colourful and fascinating world that she is bringing out of the shadows. It is a personal journey that starts with her own openly bisexual identity, and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. In Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, Shaw explores all that we know about the world's largest sexual minority. From the hunt for a bi gene, to the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, to asylum seekers who need to prove their bisexuality in a court of law, there is more to explore than most have ever realised. This rigorous and fun book will challenge us to think deeper about who we are and how we love.

Have you ever done something stupid, dangerous or self-sabotaging just to get one over someone else? Most of us have. Simon McCarthy-Jones draws on psychology, current affairs, literature and genetics to illuminate – whether we admit it or not – our spiteful side. What is that part of us that secretly wants our friends to fail? Did Americans put Trump in the White House just to stick it to Hillary Clinton? And then there are the legion of stories about toxic behaviour in supermarkets and over the privet hedge, ramping up to incendiary divorces, vicious business practices, backbiting politics and scorched-earth terrorism. There’s a hopeful message too – the upside of our dark side. Spite can drive us forward, and Simon provides a fresh perspective on the concept by showing the evolutionary benefits of spite as a social leveller, an enabler of defiance, a wellspring of freedom and a vital weapon in our everyday armoury.

How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can an orchid get jet lag? Does a tomato plant feel pain when you pluck a fruit from its vines? And does your favourite fern care whether you play Bach or the Beatles? Combining cutting-edge research with lively storytelling, biologist Daniel Chamovitz explores how plants experience our shared Earth – through sight, smell, touch, hearing, memory, and even awareness. Whether you are a green thumb, a science buff, a vegetarian, or simply a nature lover, this rare inside look at the life of plants will surprise and delight.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller -- a beautiful story of rebellion and science 'Popular science has rarely been so good' Prospect 'A triumph. . . We are left in a world that is not disenchanted by science, but even more magical' Financial Times In June 1925, twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg, suffering from hay fever, had retreated to the treeless, wind-battered island of Helgoland in the North Sea in order to think. Walking all night, by dawn he had wrestled with an idea that would transform the whole of science and our very conception of the world. In Helgoland Carlo Rovelli tells the story of the birth of quantum physics and its bright young founders who were to become some of the most famous Nobel winners in science. It is a celebration of youthful rebellion and intellectual revolution. An invitation to a magical place. Here Rovelli illuminates competing interpretations of this science and offers his own original view, describing the world we touch as a fabric woven by relations. Where we, as every other thing around us, exist in our interactions with one another, in a never-ending game of mirrors. A dazzling work from a celebrated scientist and master storyteller, Helgoland transports us to dizzying heights, reminding us of the many pleasures of the life of the mind. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell Chosen as a Book of the Year by The Times, Financial Times, Sunday Times, Guardian and Prospect

Is lowering your temperature when you have a fever helpful? Do you really need to finish every course of antibiotics? Or could some of the treatments you think are healing you actually be harming you? Medicine has significantly advanced in the last few decades. But while we have learned a lot, we still rely on medical interventions that are vastly out of date and can adversely affect our health. In this game-changing book, infectious-disease expert and Rotavirus vaccine inventor Dr Offit highlights fifteen common medical interventions still recommended and practised by medical professionals, despite clear evidence that they are harmful - including the treatment of acid reflux in babies and the reliance on heart stents and knee surgery. By presenting medical alternatives, Overkill gives patients invaluable information to help them ask their doctors better questions and to advocate for their own health.

Reef Life is the story of how Callum Roberts, Britain's pre-eminent marine conservation scientist, fell in love with coral reefs and embarked on a thirty-year career. He began as a young university student who had never been abroad, spending a summer helping to map the unknown reefs of Saudi Arabia. And from that moment, when Callum first cleared his mask, he's never looked back, moving on to survey Sharm El Sheikh, and from there diving and researching all over the world, including Australia's imperilled Great Barrier Reef and the more resilient reefs of the Caribbean. His stories are astonishing, lyrical and laced with a wonderful wry humour - and they allow us privileged access to, and understanding of, the science of our oceans and reefs. Reading this book will also commit readers to support Callum's goal to get marine reserve status for ten percent of the world's ocean.

Publishers Weekly Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2019
A New York Times Editor’s Pick
People Best Books Fall 2019
Chicago Tribune 28 Books You Need to Read Now
Booklist’s Top Ten Sci-Tech Books of 2019

“It blew my mind to discover that teenage animals and teenage humans are so similar. Both are naive risk-takers. I loved this book!” —Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human and Animals in Translation

A revelatory investigation of human and animal adolescence and young adulthood from the New York Times bestselling authors of Zoobiquity.

With Wildhood, Harvard evolutionary biologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and award-winning science writer Kathryn Bowers have created an entirely new way of thinking about the crucial, vulnerable, and exhilarating phase of life between childhood and adulthood across the animal kingdom.

In their critically acclaimed bestseller, Zoobiquity, the authors revealed the essential connection between human and animal health. In Wildhood, they turn the same eye-opening, species-spanning lens to adolescent young adult life. Traveling around the world and drawing from their latest research, they find that the same four universal challenges are faced by every adolescent human and animal on earth: how to be safe, how to navigate hierarchy; how to court potential mates; and how to feed oneself. Safety. Status. Sex. Self-reliance. How human and animal adolescents and young adults confront the challenges of wildhood shapes their adult destinies.

Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers illuminate these core challenges through the lives of four animals in the wild: Ursula, a young king penguin; Shrink, a charismatic hyena; Salt, a matriarchal humpback whale; and Slavc, a roaming European wolf. Through their riveting stories—and those of countless others, from adventurous eagles and rambunctious high schooler to inexperienced orcas and naive young soldiers—readers get a vivid and game-changing portrait of adolescent young adults as a horizontal tribe, sharing behaviors and challenges, setbacks and triumphs.

Upending our understanding of everything from risk-taking and anxiety to the origins of privilege and the nature of sexual coercion and consent, Wildhood is a profound and necessary guide to the perilous, thrilling, and universal journey to adulthood on planet earth.

An easy-to-understand introduction to the complexities of today's and tomorrow's physics. The author assess what is and what is not actually possible according to the laws of physics, among all the weird and wonderful things that Kirk, Spock and Scottie got up to in their parallel universe.

"Can science be funny?" takes a close look at an element of modern science communication that is as innovative as it is promising for the future: comedy! Readers are guided through vividly presented academic theory as well as exciting hands-on and best practice examples from renowned practitioners and cabaret artists: - What do sheep's cheese and car tires have in common? - Can laughter break down walls? - How does "Die Anstalt" work? - How does magic create knowledge? - Is there humor in museums? - When a Dalmatian comes to the cash register - Three steps to humor - Serving suggestion for the Holy Spirit - dictatorship of stupidity - And much more! But it's not all just funny. Comedy can also take away some of the biting sharpness of criticism, making it digestible, even palatable, for the addressees. "Can Science Be Funny?" navigates between criticism and cabaret, tackling comedy in various guises from different perspectives. 22 contributions show how the results of science, research and technology can be brought to the general public in new ways. In particular, they also demonstrate how humour can be used as a critical and questioning force - valuable for all types of communication and helpful so that they come across more shrewdly in the future.

This comprehensive book about the lives of bats is about a group of peculiar, mythical and fascinating animals. They are mammals, just like us, but still so different. The book covers bats from Latin American Maya temples to Swedish potato cellars; from the plains of Kenya to the Taiwanese mountains. We perceive their shadows flitting by in the summer nights, hear their mating calls in the darkness of autumn and see their silhouettes in the dim street light. The bats live in our houses and forage in our gardens and parks. But who are they and how do they lead their lives? The text and exquisite photos give an unsurpassed insight into the world of sounds and smells that bats encounter each night. We are told about how their senses, way beyond our human perception abilities, shape their lives. We get to know more about their habits, their long evolution and their cohabitation with humans, and how important they are to the environment. You will never again feel lonely in the darkness of the night.

By spinning 28 engaging mathematical tales, Orlin shows us that calculus is simply another language to express the very things we humans grapple with every day - love, risk, time and, most importantly, change. Divided into two parts, "Moments" and "Eternities," and drawing on everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Mark Twain to David Foster Wallace, Change is the Only Constant unearths connections between calculus, art, literature and a beloved dog named Elvis. This is not just maths for maths' sake; it's maths for the sake of becoming a wiser and more thoughtful human.

The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win. So wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory whether in battle, business, or life by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to change the game to their own advantage.

The aim of David McAdams s Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom not just to win in every strategic situation (or game ) you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better.

Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more.

The book then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public s lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the book to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that game-awareness to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem.

So get ready for a fascinating journey. You ll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. Just one Game-Changer is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place, McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together."

A neurosurgeon explores how our tendency to prioritize short-term consumer pleasures spurs climate change, but also how the brain's amazing capacity for flexibility can-and likely will-enable us to prioritize the long-term survival of humanity. Increasingly politicians, activists, media figures, and the public at large agree that climate change is an urgent problem. Yet that sense of urgency rarely translates into serious remedies. If we believe the climate crisis is real, why is it so difficult to change our behavior and our consumer tendencies? Minding the Climate investigates this problem in the neuroscience of decision-making. In particular, Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD, points to the evolution of the human brain during eons of resource scarcity. Understandably, the brain adapted to prioritize short-term survival over more uncertain long-term outcomes. But the resulting behavioral architecture is poorly suited to the present, when scarcity is a lesser concern and slow-moving, novel challenges like environmental issues present the greatest danger. Duhaime details how even our acknowledged best interests are thwarted by the brain's reward system: if a behavior isn't perceived as immediately beneficial, we probably won't do it-never mind that we "know" we should. This is what happens when we lament climate change while indulging the short-term consumer satisfactions that ensure the disaster will continue. Luckily, we can sway our brains, and those of others, to alter our behaviors. Duhaime describes concrete, achievable interventions that have been shown to encourage our neurological circuits to embrace new rewards. Such small, incremental steps that individuals take, whether in their roles as consumers, in the workplace, or in leadership positions, are necessary to mitigate climate change. The more we understand how our tendencies can be overridden by our brain's capacity to adapt, Duhaime argues, the more likely we are to have a future.

As humans evolved, we developed technologies to modify our environment, yet these innovations are increasingly affecting our behavior, biology, and society. Now we must figure out how to function in the world we've created. Over thousands of years, humans have invented ingenious ways to gain mastery over our environment. The ability to communicate, accumulate knowledge collectively, and build on previous innovations has enabled us to change nature. Innovation has allowed us to thrive. The trouble with innovation is that we can seldom go back and undo it. We invent, embrace, and exploit new technologies to modify our environment. Then we modify those technologies to cope with the resulting impacts. Gluckman and Hanson explore what happens when we innovate in a way that leads nature to bite back. To provide nourishment for a growing population, humans developed methods to process and preserve food; but easy access to these energy-dense foods results in obesity. To protect ourselves from dangerous pathogens we embraced cleanliness and invented antibiotics, which has led to rising rates of autoimmune diseases and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. More recently, our growing dependence on the internet and social media has been linked to mental health concerns and declining social cohesion. And we are only at the beginning of the digital transformation that will influence every part of our existence. Our ingenuity has not only changed our world-it has changed us. Focusing on immediate benefits, we rarely pause to consider the longer-term costs of innovation. Yet we are now starting to see how our choices affect the way our brains develop and our bodies function. The implications are profound. Ingenious opens our eyes to the dangers we face and offers solutions we cannot ignore.

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena-the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and "read" waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth's compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.

Why does water always take a winding course in streams and rivers? Do common principles and rhythms underlie its movement - whether it be in the sea, in a plant, or even in the blood of a human being? In this seminal and thought-provoking work, the laws apparent in the subtle patterns of water in movement are shown to be the same as those perceptible in the shaping of bones, muscles and a myriad of other forms in nature. Fully illustrated, Sensitive Chaos reveals the unifying forces that underlie all living things. The author observes and explains such phenomena as the flight of birds, the formation of internal organs such as the heart, eye and ear, as well as mountain ranges and river deltas, weather and space patterns, and even the formation of the human embryo. A perennial bestseller since publication, Sensitive Chaos is an essential book for anyone interested in the mysteries of life on earth.

Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"--The Guardian), posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work.

Jared Diamond on biological electricity - Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress - Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict - Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition - Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity - Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism - BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition - Richard Thaler on the power of commitment - V. S. Ramachandran on the "neural code" of consciousness - Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "Lord Acton's Dictum" - Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism - plus contributions by Martin J. Rees - Kevin Kelly - Clay Shirky - Daniel C. Dennett - Sherry Turkle - Philip Zimbardo - Lee Smolin - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein - Seth Lloyd - Stewart Brand - George Dyson - Matt Ridley

Von den spektakulären Windungen des Großhirns bis zu den filigranen Formen einzelner Nervenzellen – von den einzigartigen Schleifen, Schichten und Schlaufen des Kleinhirns bis in die feinen Verästelungen der Nervenfasern unserer Muskeln – von der Funktion unserer Sinne bis an die Grenzen der modernen Hirnforschung: Dieses Buch nimmt Sie mit in die spannende Welt des Gehirns und bietet atemberaubende Einblicke in die Architektur und Funktion der Nervenzellen. Doppelseitige Kurzkapitel, gespickt mit spektakulären Abbildungen, stellen jeweils ein konkretes Thema der Neurobiologie kompakt und verständlich vor. Faszinierende und zum Teil noch nie gezeigte Aufnahmen verdeutlichen die ganze Ästhetik der Welt in unserem Kopf und machen Lust auf die Wissenschaft der Nervenzellen. Ein Buch zum Durchlesen, Querlesen und Vorlesen. Für jeden, der sich für das Gehirn interessiert. Ohne unnötige Fachbegriffe, dafür mit viel Begeisterung für eine der spannendsten Wissenschaften unserer Zeit.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians the Netherlands has ever known. Einstein called him "a living work of art, a perfect personality". During his funeral in 1928, the entire Dutch nation mourned. The national telegraph service was suspended for three minutes and his passing was national and international front-page news. The cream of international science, an impressive list of dignitaries, including the Prince Consort, and thousands of ordinary people turned out to see Lorentz being carried to his last resting place. This biography describes the life of Lorentz, from his early childhood, as the son of a market gardener in the provincial town of Arnhem, to his death, as a towering figure in physics and in international scientific cooperation and as a trailblazer for Einstein's relativity theory. A number of chapters shed light on his unique place in science, the importance of his ideas, his international conciliatory and scientific activities after World War One, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his important role as Einstein's teacher and intellectual critic. By making use of recently discovered family correspondence, the authors were able to show that there lies a true human being behind Lorentz's facade of perfection. One chapter is devoted to Lorentz's wife Aletta, a woman in her own right, whose progressive feminist ideas were of considerable influence on those of her husband. Two separate chapters focus on his most important scientific achievements, in terms accessible to a general audience.

Insects conquered the Earth long before we did and will remain here long after we’re gone.

They outnumber us in the billions and are essential to many of the natural processes that keep us alive and that we take for granted. Yet, despite this, very few of us know much about the hidden world of insects.

In this fascinating new book, entomologist and broadcaster George McGavin takes a deep dive to reveal the unknown truths about the most successful and enduring animal group the world has ever seen, and to show the unseen effects this vast population has on our planet, if only we care to look.

McGavin explores not only the incredible traits that insects have evolved to possess, such as dragonflies that can fly across oceans without resting or beetles that lay their eggs exclusively in corpses, but also the vital lessons we have learnt from them, including how therapy using maggots can save lives and how bees can help grow rich tomato yields.

The Hidden World reveals the wonderful complexity of our relationship with insects, how they have changed the course of our history and how, if we continue to learn from them, they could even be the key to our future and survival.

Evolution is one of the most important processes in life. It not only explains the detailed history of life on earth, but its scope also extends into many aspects of our own contemporary behavior-who we are and how we got to be here, our psychology, our cultures-and greatly impacts modern advancements in medicine and conservation biology. Perhaps its most important claim for science is its ability to provide an overarching framework that integrates the many life sciences into a single unified whole. Yet, evolution-evolutionary biology in particular-has been, and continues to be, regarded with suspicion by many. Understanding how and why evolution works, and what it can tell us, is perhaps the single most important contribution to the public perception of science. This book provides an overview of the basic theory and showcases how widely its consequences reverberate across the life sciences, the social sciences and even the humanities. In this book, Robin Dunbar uses examples drawn from plant life, animals and humans to illustrate these processes. Evolutionary science has important advantages. Most of science deals with the microscopic world that we cannot see and invariably have difficulty understanding, but evolution deals with the macro-world in which we live and move. That invariably makes it much easier for the lay audience to appreciate, understand and enjoy. Evolution: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) takes a broad approach to evolution, dealing both with the core theory itself and its impact on different aspects of the world we live in, from the iconic debates of the nineteenth century, to viruses and superbugs, to human evolution and behavior.