Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Science

The Tragedy of American Science explores how the US economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite.

Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study.

There is no denying that the emotional bond between horses and the humans who love them can reach mystical proportions, and nowhere is that relationship more evident than in these 24 true-life accounts of horses rescuing people. Many of the stories recount incidents where death or physical injury was imminent, and only because a horse intervened are the narrators alive to tell the tale.

Each day, headlines warn that baby bottles are leaching dangerous chemicals, nonstick pans are causing infertility, and plastic containers are making us fat. What if green chemistry could change all that? What if rather than toxics, our economy ran on harmless, environmentally-friendly materials? Elizabeth Grossman, an acclaimed journalist who brought national attention to the contaminants hidden in computers and other high tech electronics, now tackles the hazards of ordinary consumer products.

The history of particle physics, the hunt for the most elusive particle, and the fundamental questions the search has inspired.

It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology - the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nanotechnology will give us complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build any substance or structure permitted by the Laws of Nature. Placing atoms as if they were bricks, nano-machines could turn grass clippings into prime sirloins - directly, without cows.

In Getting to Green, Frederic C. Rich argues that meaningful progress on urgent environmental issues can be made only on a bipartisan basis. Rich reminds us of American conservation's conservative roots and of the bipartisan political consensus that had Republican congressmen voting for, and Richard Nixon signing, the most important environmental legislation of the 1970s.

An entertaining guide to the statistics of personal risk, The Norm Chronicles will enlighten anyone who has ever worried about the dangers we encounter in our daily lives.

Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman's face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the Air Force's best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground?

Bottled & Sold shows how water went from being a free natural resource to one of the most successful commercial products of the last 100 years - and why we are poorer for it. It's a big story and water is big business. Every second of every day in the United States, a thousand people buy a plastic bottle of water, and every second of every day a thousand more throw one of those bottles away. That adds up to more than 30 billion bottles a year and tens of billions of dollars of sales. Are there legitimate reasons to buy all those bottles?

When Columbus first returned to Spain from the Caribbean, he dazzled King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with exotic parrots, tropical flowers, and bits of gold. Inspired by the promise of riches, countless seafarers poured out of the Iberian Peninsula and wider Europe in search of spices, treasure, and land. Many returned with strange tales of the New World. Curiosity began to percolate through Europe as the New World’s people, animals, and plants ruptured prior assumptions about the biblical description of creation.

Jon Levy used to be a nerd. Now he runs with the bulls in Pamplona, battles Kiefer Sutherland in Jenga, and crashes million-dollar weddings. How did he do it? The E.P.I.C. Model of Adventure, a breakthrough four-step process (Establish, Push Boundaries, Increase, Continue) for building the perfect adventure, from picking the right team to choosing the right mission and taking the right risks - with plenty of stories from his own exploits to show you how it's done.

A collection of answers to the philosophical questions on people's minds - from the big to the personal to the ones you didn't know you needed answered. Based on real-life questions from his Ask a Philosopher series, Ian Olasov offers his answers to questions such as: Are people innately good or bad? Is it okay to have a pet fish? Is it okay to have kids? Is color subjective? If humans colonize Mars, who will own the land?

まだ見ぬ「神」を探して――岡潔×小林秀雄の名著『人間の建設』の現代版がここに誕生！話者のひとりはカオス理論の確立者であり、複雑系科学の第一人者の数学者、物理学者の津田一郎。

¿Cuál es el futuro de la humanidad ante la inminente tragedia de haber dañado profundamente a la Tierra, el único hogar con el que contamos hasta el día de hoy? En Un mar de esperanza, Andrea Sáenz-Arroyo, una bióloga marina con un doctorado en Economía ambiental, nos guía por un viaje personal a través de sociedades e ideas contrastantes, y llega a la siguiente conclusión: el arribo de la era de la comunicación nos revela que degradar nuestro entorno y despojar los recursos de otros para satisfacer nuestras necesidades no sólo es poco inteligente, sino evolutivamente inviable.

Delve deeper into the scientific terms and theories at the core of the Peabody-winning, cult favorite show. With exclusive insights from the show's cocreator, Graeme Manson, and science consultant Cosima Herter, The Science of Orphan Black takes you behind the closed doors of the Dyad Institute and inside Neolution.

In this fascinating exploration of the changing status of dogs and cats in society, pet lover and award-winning journalist David Grimm explores the rich and surprising history of our favorite companion animals. He treks the long and often torturous path from their wild origins to their dark days in the middle ages to their current standing as the most valued animals on Earth. For pet lovers or anyone interested in how we decide who gets to be a “person” in today’s world, Citizen Canine is a must-have. It is a pet tale like no other.

Die Welt der Quanten ist voller atemberaubender Geschichten und Ideen – von winzigen Teilchen, die sich an zwei verschiedenen Orten gleichzeitig befinden, von Katzen, die gleichzeitig lebendig und tot sind, von geheimnisvoller Teleportation. Gleichzeitig bestimmt Quantenphysik längst unseren Alltag: Laser, Mikrochips oder MRT-Bilder wären ohne Quantentheorie nicht möglich. Immer wieder heißt es: Quanten sind so kompliziert, dass sie höchstens von ein paar Wissenschaftsgenies verstanden werden können.

¿Sabes quién es el erizo McFlurry? ¿O que el mal uso del plástico no solo es un problema de basura aunque a cada ser humano le correspondan unos 40 kilos? ¿Conoces los "tecnofósiles"? ¿Sabías que cada año fabricamos 500 millones de botellas de plástico? ¿Y que los microplásticos del subsuelo podrían llegar a afectar a los cultivos? ¿O que llegan a lugares tan remotos que incluso alcanzan a la fauna del Amazonas?

An entertaining and revealing look at the science behind the emotion of disgust. Disgust originated to prevent us from eating poisonous food, but this simple safety mechanism has since evolved into a uniquely human emotion that dictates how we treat others, shapes our cultural norms, and even has implications for our mental and physical health.