Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Science & Engineering

Why do Internet, financial service, and beer commercials dominate Super Bowl advertising? How do political ceremonies establish authority? Why does repetition characterize anthems and ritual speech? Why were circular forms favored for public festivals during the French Revolution? This book answers these questions using a single concept: common knowledge.

Everything about the sense of smell fascinates us, from its power to evoke memories to its ability to change our moods and influence our behavior. From brain-imaging laboratories to the high-stakes world of scent marketing, What the Nose Knows takes us on a tour of the strange and surprising realm of smell.

Cuando pensamos en las plantas, nos sentimos tentados a atribuirles dos características: inmovilidad e insensibilidad. Pero investigaciones científicas llevadas a cabo durante los últimos cincuenta años han demostrado que las plantas son sensibles, se comunican e intercambian información, duermen, memorizan, cuidan de sus hijos, tienen su propia personalidad, toman decisiones e incluso son capaces de manipular a otras especies. Su capacidad para resolver los problemas que se les presentan ha sido probada por los estudios más recientes.

We inherit mechanisms for survival from our primeval past - none so obviously as those involved in reproduction. The hormone testosterone underlies the organization of activation of masculinity: It changes the body and brain to make a male. It is involved not only in sexuality but in driving aggression, competitiveness, risk-taking - all elements that were needed for successful survival and reproduction in the past. But these ancient systems are carried forward into a modern world.

Tales of adventures on the high seas captivate both sailors and those who stand on the shore and gaze out across the oceans. In this original collection of sea stories, edited by veteran writer Dick Durham, the gamut of human experience is mirrored in a world of tragic shipwrecks and sea monsters, epic races and brave rescues, tall ships and tiny dinghies.

Eric Scerri presents the intriguing stories of these seven elements - protactinium, hafnium, rhenium, technetium, francium, astatine and promethium. The book follows the historical order of discovery, roughly spanning the two world wars, beginning with the isolation of protactinium in 1917 and ending with that of promethium in 1945. For each element, Scerri traces the research that preceded the discovery, the pivotal experiments, the personalities of the chemists involved, the chemical nature of the new element, and its applications in science and technology.

In Nature’s Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make. The forests, floodplains, and oyster reefs often seen simply as raw materials or as obstacles to be cleared in the name of progress are, in fact as important to our future prosperity as technology or law or business innovation.

The author of the beloved number one best seller The Shepherd's Life returns with a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm. James Rebanks was taught by his grandfather to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, that landscape had profoundly changed.

In this thrilling road trip from "Peking to Paris", a woman tries to save her car, her marriage, and her confidence from breaking down. In May 2007, leaving China’s Great Wall is Car 84, one of 128 antique autos racing in the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. It’s guided by one Dina Bennett, the world’s least likely navigator: a daydreamer prone to carsickness, riddled with self-doubt, and married to a thrill-seeking perfectionist who is half-human, half-racecar. What could possibly go wrong?

The Space Age began just as the struggle for civil rights forced Americans to confront the long and bitter legacy of slavery, discrimination, and violence against African Americans. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson utilized the space program as an agent for social change, using federal equal employment opportunity laws to open workplaces at NASA and NASA contractors to African Americans while creating thousands of research and technology jobs in the Deep South to ameliorate poverty.

In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale.

The world needs to change. We have unleashed an ecological mega-crisis which is threatening the future of life on Earth. The actions we take over the next decade are critical. They will determine the destiny of our descendants and the fate of our world. How Soon Is Now presents a compelling manifesto for personal and planetary change. It proposes a revolutionary new narrative for a unified social movement. Through global cooperation, we can face this collective threat ecologically, socially, politically and spiritually.

Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over 15 years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life. Moving from the river's tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, what Lara calls 'the longest archaeological site in the world'.

An entertaining guide to what math and physics can reveal about sports. How can sprinter Usain Bolt break his world record without expending any additional effort? Which demands a faster reaction time, tennis or baseball? What dates of birth give rise to the best professional athletes? Is it better to have the inside or outside lane during a race? And how can you improve your balance just by changing your posture? Drawing on vivid, real-life examples, John D. Barrow shows how math and physics can give us surprising, often counterintuitive insights into the world of sports.

James Howard Kunstler's critically acclaimed and best-selling The Long Emergency, originally published in 2005, quickly became a grassroots hit, going into nine printings in hardcover. Kunstler's shocking vision of our post-oil future caught the attention of environmentalists and business leaders alike, and stimulated widespread discussion about our dependence on fossil fuels and our dysfunctional financial and government institutions.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, an epidemic swept Europe: arsenic poisoning. Available at any corner shop for a few pence, arsenic was so frequently used by potential beneficiaries of wills that it was nicknamed "the inheritor's powder." But it was difficult to prove that a victim had been poisoned, let alone to identify the contaminated food or drink since arsenic was tasteless. Then came a riveting case.

Many people think wild tigers are on the road to recovery, but they are in greater danger than ever - from a menace few experts saw coming. There may be only three thousand wild tigers left in the entire world. More shocking is the fact that twice that many - some six thousand - have been bred on farms, not for traditional medicine but to supply a luxury-goods industry that secretly sells tiger-bone wine, tiger-skin decor, and exotic cuisine enjoyed by China's elite.

La física cuántica trata de todo. Sí, así como suena. Si te han dicho que solo va de vibraciones cósmicas que resuenan en el universo, no te han contado más que tonterías. Para transmitirnos la auténtica magia de una extraña teoría que describe el comportamiento de los átomos y la luz, y que hasta un niño de diez años o un adulto después de unas cuantas copas puedan entenderlo, Lukas Neumeier y James Douglas han decidido escribir la historia de Bob, un hippie espiritual, y Alice, una ingeniosa nerd que se pasa el día soñando con la física cuántica.

¿Cuáles son los mayores retos con los que se presenta el planeta, cuáles las mayores amenazas, dónde buscar la solución a los descomunales problemas con los que se enfrenta nuestra generación y las futuras? El origen y evolución del universo, la naturaleza del tiempo, la estructura de la materia, el infinito,las estrellas fugitivas, las ondas gravitacionales…Estos son algunos de los grandes temas que Rafael Bachiller aborda en este libro tanto desde un punto de vista científico como desde una perspectiva filosófica y humanista.

More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future.