As early as 2030 the Arctic Ocean could lose essentially all of its ice during the warmest months of the year-a radical transformation that would destroy virtually all of the Arctic ecosystems and disrupt or destroy many northern communities, if not many communities along the coastal areas of Earth. Even now concentrations of Greenhouse gases are rising dramatically - because of mankind's industry as well as human overpopulation leading to the destruction of the cycle of photosynthesis. The human of Earth seems to be leading its own extinction. Has the cycle reached its "critical mass" and now unable to be reversed? Will popular social efforts such as "Going Green" help in any way whatsoever at this point in a global evolutionary crisis? In only a few - perhaps two - generations of the human race might we know the answers to whether the human race will have a planet capable of sustaining life without ever leaving this world.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

This book is an introduction to the mechanical properties, the force generating capacity, and the sensitivity to mechanical cues of the biological system. To understand how these qualities govern many essential biological processes, we also discuss how to measure them. However, before delving into the details and the techniques, we will first learn the operational definitions in mechanics, such as force, stress, elasticity, viscosity and so on. This book will explore the mechanics at three different length scales - molecular, cellular, and tissue levels - sequentially, and discuss the measurement techniques to quantify the intrinsic mechanical properties, force generating capacity, mechanoresponsive processes in the biological systems, and rupture forces.

In this comprehensive study, Kenneth Morgan provides an authoritative account of European exploration and discovery in Australia. The book presents a detailed chronological overview of European interests in the Australian continent, from initial speculations about the 'Great Southern Land' to the major hydrographic expeditions of the 19th century. In particular, he analyses the early crossings of the Dutch in the 17th century, the exploits of English 'buccaneer adventurer' William Dampier, the famous voyages of James Cook and Matthew Flinders, and the little-known French annexation of Australia in 1772. Introducing new findings and drawing on the latest in historiographical research, this book situates developments in navigation, nautical astronomy and cartography within the broader contexts of imperial, colonial, and maritime history.

The articulation between persistence and change is relevant to a great number of different disciplines. It is particularly central to the study of urban and rural forms in many different fields of research, in geography, archaeology, architecture and history. Resilience puts forward the idea that we can no longer be truly satisfied with the common approaches used to study the dynamics of landscapes, such as the palimpsest approach, the regressive method and the semiological analysis amongst others, because they are based on the separation between the past and the present, which itself stems from the differentiation between nature and society. This book combines spatio-temporalities, as described in archeogeography, with concepts that have been developed in the field of ecological resilience, such as panarchy and the adaptive cycle. Thus revived, the morphological analysis in this work considers landscapes as complex resilient adaptive systems. The permanence observed in landscapes is no longer presented as the endurance of inherited forms, but as the result of a dynamic that is fed by this constant dialogue between persistence and change. Thus, resilience is here decisively on the side of dynamics rather than that of resistance.

Understanding the human mind and how it relates to the world that we experience has challenged philosophers for centuries. How then do we even begin to think about 'minds' that are not human? Science now has plenty to say about the properties of mind. In recent decades, the mind - both human and otherwise - has been explored by scientists in fields ranging from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where they might be found - including in plants, aliens, and God - Philip Ball pulls these multidisciplinary pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, arguing that in order to understand our own minds and imagine those of others, we need to move on from considering the human mind as a standard against which all others should be measured, and to think about the 'space of possible minds'. By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions. What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? The more we learn about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and to imagine the potential minds of computers and alien intelligences, the greater the perspective we have on if and how our own is different. Ball's thrillingly ambitious The Book of Minds about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.