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Easy-to-read explanations of large-scale Earth processes, such as weather systems and oceanic currents Introducing The Science of Earth – an informative, visually arresting introduction to planet Earth. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. Buy Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming. Buy Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez
An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why Western conservationism isn’t working. Buy The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall The world J.R.R. Tolkien created is one of the most beloved in all of literature, and continues to capture hearts and imaginations around the world. From Oxford to ComiCon, the Middle Earth is analyzed and interpreted through a multitude of perspectives. But one essential facet of Tolkien and his Middle Earth has been overlooked: science. This great writer, creator of worlds and unforgettable character, and inventor of language was also a scientific autodidact, with an innate interest and grasp of botany, paleontologist and geologist, with additional passions for archeology and chemistry. A comprehensive account of ore-forming processes, revised and updated The revised second edition of Introduction to Ore-Forming Processesoffers a guide to the multiplicity of geological processes that result in the formation of mineral deposits.The second edition has been updated to reflect the most recent developments in the study of metallogeny and earth system science. This second edition contains new information about global tectonic processes and crustal evolution that continues to influence the practice of economic geology and maintains the supply of natural resources in a responsible and sustainable way. The replenishment of depleted natural resources is becoming more difficult and environmentally challenging. There is also a change in the demand for mineral commodities and the concern around the non-sustainable supply of 'critical metals' is now an important consideration for planners of the future. The book puts the focus on the responsible custodianship of natural resources and the continuing need for all earth scientists to understand metallogeny and the resource cycle. This new edition: Provides an updated guide to the processes involved in the formation of mineral deposits Offers an overview of magmatic, hydrothermal and sedimentary ore-forming processes Covers the entire range of mineral deposit types, including the fossil fuels and supergene ores Relates metallogeny to global tectonics by examining the distribution of mineral deposits in space and time Contains examples of world famous ore deposits that help to provide context and relevance to the process-oriented descriptions of ore genesis Written for students and professionals alike, Introduction to Ore-Forming Processesoffers a revised second edition that puts the focus on the fact that mineral deposits are simply one of the many natural wonders of geological process and evolution. Our planet’s epic story possesses power, poetry and a lot of important details, so my five books span genres. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and John Grotzinger and Tom Jordan’s Understanding Earth are elegant, accessible textbooks written almost two centuries apart. Andy Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet and David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet celebrate the 4-billion-year co-evolution of Earth and life from the perspective of paleontology. Finally, John McPhee’s rhapsodic Annals of the Former World provides a poetic tribute to our dynamic home and the geologists who devote their lives to its study.A gripping narrative of a fearless paleontologist, the founding of America’s most loved museums and the race to find the largest dinosaurs on record. Buy Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey by Florence Williams A myth-busting voyage into sexual anatomy. Buy Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. Ed Yong brings us into the unique sensory worlds of the animals that detect such elements. Buy Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross Astronauts looking at Earth from orbit have reported a shift in their thinking. They feel more inclined to unify societies and protect the planet—a phenomenon called the overview effect. These are the feelings that astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson aims to elicit in Starry Messenger. He argues for taking a “cosmic,” evidence-based perspective when it comes to the hot-button issues that shape politics today. Deep time is the timescale of the geological events that have shaped our planet. Whilst so immense as to challenge human understanding, its evidence is nonetheless visible all around us. Buy Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, by Carl ZimmerThis is an informative, visually arresting introduction to planet Earth. The core of The Science of the Earth features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speak volumes about an aspect of Earth's environments and how they work. For example, bubbles of ancient air trapped inside an Antarctic ice core reveal how Earth's climate has changed over time. A piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide.
Tolkien was an acute observer of flora and fauna and mined the minds of his scientific friends about ocean currents and volcanoes. It is these layers science that give his imaginary universe—and the creatures and characters that inhabit it—such concreteness. Within this gorgeously illustrated edition, a range of scientists—from astrophysicists to physicians, botanists to volcanologists—explore Tolkien’s novels, poems, and letters to reveal their fascinating scientific roots. Suzanne Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life. The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration, by Sarah Everts The story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Buy Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson Explore the Earth's natural riches with this beautiful book that brings every corner of the planet, from core to atmosphere, to life! The surprising and illuminating look at how Tolkien's love of science and natural history shaped the creation of his Middle Earth, from its flora and fauna to its landscapes.
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Increasingly environmental scientists, palaeoceanographers and geologists are collecting quantitative records of environmental changes (time-series) from sediments, ice cores, cave calcite, corals and trees. This book explains how to analyse these records, using straightforward explanations and diagrams rather than formal mathematical derivations. All the main cyclostratigraphic methods are covered including spectral analysis, cross-spectral analysis, filtering, complex demodulation, wavelet and singular spectrum analysis. Practical problems of time-series analysis, including those of distortions of environmental signals during stratigraphic encoding, are considered in detail. Recent research into various types of tidal and climatic cycles is summarised. The book ends with an extensive reference section, and an appendix listing sources of computer algorithms. This book provides the ideal reference for all those using time-series analysis to study the nature and history of climatic and tidal cycles. It is suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental science, palaeoceanography and geology. Hernandez grew up in Los Angeles, the child of immigrants pushed from their ancestral lands. Her Zapotec mother is from Oaxaca, Mexico, and her Maya Ch’orti’ father is from El Salvador. As Hernandez earned graduate degrees in environmental sciences in the United States, professors routinely belittled the Indigenous knowledge and perspectives she brought. Through Fresh Banana Leaves, Hernandez directly delivers Indigenous lessons that are missing from Western education and environmentalism. Did you know that bubbles of ancient air trapped inside the Antarctic ice core can reveal how Earth’s climate has changed over time? Or that a piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide? Well, now you do! Learn all about our weird and wonderful planet with The Science of Earth. In the former camp was a man named Barnum Brown, who yearned to escape his humble origins in Kansas farm country. With sponsorship from curator Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, Brown scoured the hills of Wyoming and Montana with, as Randall puts it, “a magical ability to unearth a specimen, like someone who can sit down and complete a jigsaw puzzle without first needing to find the edges.” Brown’s unassuming diligence contrasts with Osborn’s rigid—and skewed—vision of the natural world: Osborn saw the history of the Earth as a kind of morality tale, in which good prevails over evil, intelligence trumps brute strength (witness the extinction of the dinosaurs), and people of Anglo-Saxon descent inevitably rose to the top. The Monster’s Bones deftly weaves paleontology and adventure—and shows how “objective” science can be shaped by the personalities and ideologies of its practitioners.
In Breathless, David Quammen has constructed a masterful book about scientists’ efforts to understand SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Make no mistake, the book is not about healthcare and our response to Covid-19. The main character in this tale is the virus, and Quammen crafts a detective tale about the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 by chronicling the efforts of scientists around the world to identify it, search for its origins, understand how it mutates and respond to it. He interviewed 95 scientists and allows readers to look over the shoulders of many of them as they use their specialized expertise to study the virus. To show how the scientific process works on a global scale, he details the work of a genomic epidemiologist here, an evolutionary virologist there and a computational biologist somewhere else. Each expert adds or refutes some important detail about the rapidly evolving virus that has created a pandemic. Each discovery builds on those that came before. A rewarding combination of literary exploration and scientific discovery, The Science of Middle-earth reveals the hidden meaning of the Ring’s corruption, why Hobbits have big feet, the origins of the Dwarves, the animals which inspired the dragons, and even whether or not an Ent is possible. Oxford Academic includes over 40,000 academic ebooks from Oxford University Press and other university presses, including: The core of the book features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speaks volumes about an aspect of Earth's environments and how they work. Structured around an imaginary journey that takes the reader from the inner core to Earth's surface (including both land and oceans) and up to the top of the atmosphere, whilst taking in environments such as grasslands, forests, and reefs, the coverage includes both living and inanimate realms! In The God Equation, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku writes about his almost lifelong mission to find what he calls the “Holy Grail of physics,” a “theory of everything.” His ultimate goal is to write an equation that encompasses the whole of physics and that can explain everything from the Big Bang to the end of the universe. Such an idea started with Isaac Newton and stumped Albert Einstein, who couldn’t come up with a theory that would unify all of the forces at play. If that all sounds too heavy, rest assured that Kaku makes it approachable by taking the reader along on his journey and writing about science in clean, concise language.
In An Immense World , science journalist Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts. As humans, we move through the world within our Umwelt—a term for subjective sensory experience Yong borrows from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. But every creature on Earth has its own Umwelt that we can scarcely imagine. Through interviews with scientists around the globe, Yong teases out the astonishing details of other animals’ perceptions, introducing us to their fantastic Umwelten. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes with impressive resolution, but their brains are likely not complex enough to receive and process such crisp images. Some butterflies can perceive ultraviolet color patterns on their wings that distinguish them from other species. And hammerhead sharks have receptors that scan the seafloor for the electric fields emitted by hidden prey, “as one might use metal detectors,” Yong writes. But many creatures’ senses have been thrown off by human activity, he notes. For example, our visually centered society has erected artificial lights that disorient migrating birds and hatchling sea turtles. Explore the Earth’s natural riches with this beautiful book that brings every corner of the planet, from core to atmosphere, to life! Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history. Buy The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, by Michio Kaku Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard penned our favorite book by a scientist this year with her deeply personal and engaging Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. Simard grew up in Canada in a logging family and, at age 20, worked as a seasonal employee for a logging company. But even early on, she had a sense that clear-cutting forests and poisoning the earth so monocultures could grow was the wrong approach. Simard suspected that forests were made up of interconnected entities that helped each other out, and so she pursued a career in science—studying silviculture for the Forest Service and eventually earning a PhD in forest sciences at Oregon State University. In experiments, she documented that birch and Douglas fir trees traded carbon underground. She established that the forest is a “ wood-wide web,” with plants exchanging nutrients and chemical signals via their roots and fungal networks, and found that large old trees, or “ Mother Trees,” were at the center of these networks, often helping their offspring.
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