LITMIR.BIZ

This edition does not include illustrations.‘A book that lives up to its title – Guy Brown handles an exciting topic with the energy and expertise it deserves. A first-rate read!’ Roy PorterEverybody knows what it is like to be short of energy, or even full of energy, but what is this stuff that drives our bodies and our minds? Where does it come from, and where does it all go? How does it move our muscles and stir our imaginations? Above all, how can I get some more? This brilliant book follows the development of our ideas of biological energy, from their origins in the very concept of life itself to the latest research on body clocks and brain energy.The Energy of Life answers questions like ‘How is it possible for me to lift my arm just by willing it?’; ‘Why can living things move and dead things not?’; ‘Is there a relationship between mental energy and physical energy?’; ‘Is plenty of orange juice the best prevention of cancer and heart disease?’; ‘Is one girl a fat slob and the next a slim livewire by the accident of metabolism, by having too much or too little thyroid hormone?’; ‘Why are there epidemics of obesity in the developed world and of starvation in the developing world?’; ‘Why don’t diets work?’; ‘Are we born shy or bold?’; ‘What are boredom and fatigue for?’; ‘Why is it that some people are more creative, productive or energetic than others?’ Brown explains our sexual energy too: what causes us to be aroused, and how sexual arousal is sustained; what drives our motivations and passions and why does biting your partner beforehand lead to better sex?

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About 30 miles south-west of Land’s End is the low group of rocks and islands that form the Isles of Scilly. Mysterious, romantic and beautiful, they have long exercised the imagination of story tellers and historians.Rosemary Parslow has spent many years working on the islands, each of which has its own unique character and special plants and animals. In this New Naturalist volume she examines the many aspects that make the islands and their flora and fauna so unique: their geography, geology and climate, the people of the islands, the way they used the land and its present day management.She brings to life the major kinds of habitats found in Scilly: the heathlands, the coast, cultivated fields and wetlands. She also discusses the people who have been important in the study of the island flora and fauna, and tells the story of the rise in popularity of the islands for birdwatchers.This book complements other regional titles in the New Naturalist series which include Loch Lomondside, the Broads, the Lakeland area and Northumberland.

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A narrative account of Darwin’s historic 4-year voyage on the Beagle to South America, Australia and the Pacific in the 1830s that combines the adventure and excitement of Alan Moorehead’s famous (and now out of print) account with an expert assessment of the scientific discoveries of that journey. The author is Charles Darwin’s great-grandson.• In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote: ‘The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career; yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose. I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind. I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were already fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was far more important, as reasoning here comes into play.’No biography of Darwin has yet done justice to what the scientific research actually was that occupied Darwin during the voyage. Keynes shows exactly how Darwin’s geological researches and his observations on natural history sowed the seeds of his revolutionary theory of evolution, and led to the writing of his great works on The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.

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An environmental parable for our times – the story of a beautiful blue bird meeting its nemesis at the end of the 20th-century.In December 1897 the Reverend F. G. Dutton lamented that ‘there are so many calls on a parson’s purse, that he cannot always treat himself to expensive parrots.’ He was hoping to purchase a Spix’s Macaw, a rare and beautiful parrot found in a remote area of Brazil. Today, the parson’s search would be in vain. By the turn of the millennium only one survivor, a lone male, existed in the wild.Spix’s Macaw tells the hearbreaking story of a unique band of brilliant blue birds – who talk, fall in love, and grieve – struggling against the forces of extinction and their own desirability. By the second half of the 20th-century the birds became gram for gram more valuable than heroin; so valuable that they drew up to $40,000 on the black markets. When, in 1990, only one was found to be living in the wild, an emergency international rescue operation was launched and an amnesty declared, allowing private collectors to come forward with their illegal birds, possible mates for the last wild Spix.In a breathtaking display of stoicism and endurance, the loneliest bird in the world had lived without a mate for fourteen years, had outwitted predators and second-guessed the poachers. But would he take to a new companion? Spix’s Macaws are like humans – they can’t be forced to love. With exquisite detail, this book tells the dramatic story of the rescue operation, and of the humans whose selfishness and greed brought a beautiful species to the brink of extinction. The long, lonely flight of the last Spix’s Macaw is both a love story and an environmental parable for our times.

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(This ebook contains a limited number of illustrations.)The ebook of the critically-acclaimed popular science book by a writer who is fast becoming a celebrity mathematician.Prime numbers are the very atoms of arithmetic. They also embody one of the most tantalising enigmas in the pursuit of human knowledge. How can one predict when the next prime number will occur? Is there a formula which could generate primes? These apparently simple questions have confounded mathematicians ever since the Ancient Greeks.In 1859, the brilliant German mathematician Bernard Riemann put forward an idea which finally seemed to reveal a magical harmony at work in the numerical landscape. The promise that these eternal, unchanging numbers would finally reveal their secret thrilled mathematicians around the world. Yet Riemann, a hypochondriac and a troubled perfectionist, never publicly provided a proof for his hypothesis and his housekeeper burnt all his personal papers on his death.Whoever cracks Riemann's hypothesis will go down in history, for it has implications far beyond mathematics. In business, it is the lynchpin for security and e-commerce. In science, it has critical ramifications in Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, and the future of computing. Pioneers in each of these fields are racing to crack the code and a prize of $1 million has been offered to the winner. As yet, it remains unsolved.In this breathtaking book, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy tells the story of the eccentric and brilliant men who have struggled to solve one of the biggest mysteries in science. It is a story of strange journeys, last-minute escapes from death and the unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Above all, it is a moving and awe-inspiring evocation of the mathematician's world and the beauties and mysteries it contains.

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The story of two nineteenth-century scientists who revealed one of the most significant and exciting events in the natural history of this planet: the existence of dinosaurs.In ‘The Dinosaur Hunters’ Deborah Cadbury brilliantly recreates the remarkable story of the bitter rivalry between two men: Gideon Mantell uncovered giant bones in a Sussex quarry, became obsessed with the lost world of the reptiles and was driven to despair. Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist, gave the extinct creatures their name and secured for himself unrivalled international acclaim.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

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A book which offers fresh perspectives on the scientific developments of the past hundred years through the complementary work of two of the century’s greatest thinkers, Einstein and Freud.At the turn of the century there was a widespread assumption in scientific circles that the pursuit of knowledge was nearing its end and that all available evidence had been exhausted. However, by 1916 both Einstein and Freud had exploded the myth by leading exploration into the science of the invisible and the unconscious. These men were more than just contemporaries – their separate pursuits were in fact complementary. Freud’s science of psychoanalysis found its cosmological counterpart in the Astronomy of Invisible Light pioneered by Einstein. Together they questioned the little inconsistencies of Newton’s ordered cosmos to reveal a different reality, a natural order that was anything but ordered, a cosmos that was volatile and vast – an organism alive in time. These men inspired a fundamental shift in the history of human thought. They began a revolution that is still in progress and provided one of the past century’s greatest contributions to the history of science.

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The imperative to 'know thyself' is both fundamental and profoundly elusive – for how can we ever truly comprehend the drama and complexity of the human experience?In ‘Why Us?’ James Le Fanu offers a fascinating exploration of the power and limits of science to penetrate the deep mysteries of our existence, challenging the certainty that has persisted since Charles Darwin's Origin of Species that we are no more than the fortuitous consequence of a materialist evolutionary process.That challenge arises, unexpectedly, from the two major projects that promised to provide definitive proof for this most influential of scientific theories. The first is the astonishing achievement of the Human Genome Project, which, it was anticipated, would identify the genetic basis of those characteristics that distinguish humans from their primate cousins. The second is the phenomenal advance in brain imaging that now permits neuroscientists to observe the brain 'in action' and thus account for the remarkable properties of the human mind.But that is not how it has turned out. It is simply not possible to get from the monotonous sequence of genes along the Double Helix to the near infinite diversity of the living world, nor to translate the electrical firing of the brain into the creativity of the human mind. This is not a matter of not knowing all the facts. Rather, science has inadvertently discovered that its theories are insufficient to conjure the wonder of the human experience from the bare bones of our genes and brains.We stand on the brink of a tectonic shift in our understanding of ourselves that will witness the rediscovery of the central premise of Western philosophy that there is 'more than we can know'. Lucid, compelling and utterly engaging, ‘Why Us?’ offers a convincing and provocative vision of the new science of being human.

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A narrative history of the men and women who have explored Mars and mapped its surface from afar, and in so doing conditioned our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour.The maps of Mars are exquisitely detailed representations of a land as large as all the continents of the earth combined. Yet they are being drawn before any human eye has seen the wonders they contain. In this fascinating mix of science, travel and the history of scientific imagination, Oliver Morton tells the story of the men and women who are mapping a dramatic, mysterious landscape, without having once set foot on its surface. Filled with awe-inspiring detail about volcanoes twice the height of Everest, basins deeper than the Pacific, ‘Mapping Mars’ is a breathtaking account of a world opening up to the imagination.

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This edition does not include illustrations.‘Dry Store Room No. 1’ is an intimate biography of the Natural History Museum, celebrating the eccentric personalities who have peopled it and capturing the wonders of scientific endeavour, academic rigour and imagination.Behind the public façade of any great museum there lies a secret domain: one of unseen galleries, locked doors, priceless specimens and hidden lives.Through the stories of the numerous eccentric individuals whose long careers have left their mark on the study of evolutionary science, Richard Fortey, former senior paleaontologist at London's Natural History Museum, celebrates the pioneering work of the Museum from its inception to the present day. He delves into the feuds, affairs, scandals and skulduggery that have punctuated its long history, and formed a backdrop to extraordinary scientific endeavour from Darwin to the present day. He explores the staying power and adaptability of the Museum as it responds to changes wrought by advances in technology and molecular biology – 'spare' bones from an extinct giant bird suddenly become cutting-edge science with the new knowledge that DNA can be extracted from them, and ancient fish are tested with the latest equipment that is able to measure rises in pollution.'Dry Store Room No.1’ is a fascinating and affectionate account of a hidden world of untold treasures, where every fragment tells a story about time past, by a scientist who combines rigorous professional learning with a gift for prose that sparkles with wit and literary sensibility.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.

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