Body Engineering

In the best-selling, prize-winning A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson achieved the seemingly impossible by making the science of our world both understandable and entertaining to millions of people around the globe. Now he turns his attention inwards to explore the human body, how it functions and its remarkable ability to heal itself. Full of extraordinary facts and astonishing stories, The Body: A Guide for Occupants is a brilliant, often very funny attempt to understand the miracle of our physical and neurological makeup.

Achieve Absolute Well-Being with the Classical Science of Yoga The practice of what is commonly known as hatha yoga is but one of eight branches of the body of knowledge that is yoga. Yoga is a sophisticated system of self-empowerment that is capable of harnessing and activating inner energies...

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and...

Our gut is almost as important to us as our brain, yet we know very little about how it works. Gut: The Inside Story is an entertaining, informative tour of the digestive system from the moment we raise a tasty morsel to our lips until the moment our body surrenders the remnants to the toilet bowl. No topic is too lowly for the author's wonder and admiration, from the careful choreography of breaking wind to the precise internal communication required for a cleansing vomit.

The hospital was supposed to heal you. It had other plans. Twenty tales of surgeries that take more than they remove, donors who refuse to stay dead, and medical records that write themselves into flesh. In these pages, the operating room becomes a site of violation, and every procedure leaves something behind that wasn't in the consent forms. A burn survivor's grafted skin begins remembering a life she never lived. A surgeon's transplanted hands practice procedures while she sleeps. A transcriptionist discovers that typing a surgery makes it real. A patient's body produces something every ...

This program is read by the authors. Mo Gawdat is an engineer. What most of us see as insurmountable problems he sees as systems overloads to tackle and solve. Unstressable breaks stress into inputs and effects, classifying human stressors as: stress to the mind, stress to emotions, stress to...

Marcus Aldridge is a software architect at the top of his game — until he wakes up in a dungeon, inhabiting the body of Cedric Thornhaven, a disgraced nobleman sentenced to hang for high treason. The shackles on his wrists aren't just iron — they're circuit boards carved in runic code, siphoning his mana like a parasitic feedback loop. Marcus doesn't pray for salvation. He reverse-engineers his escape. Arriving in Westmarch — the crumbling estate he now legally owns — Marcus discovers a town bleeding to death. The Royal Academy of Magic has embedded tithe-wards into every stone and ...

For millennia, humans have tried—and often failed—to master nature and transcend our limits. But this has started to change. The new scientific frontier is the human body: the greatest engineers of our generation have turned their sights inward, and their work is beginning to revolutionize...

An award-winning scientist offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the mind-body connection and its profound impact on everything from advertising to romance. The human body is not just a passive device carrying out messages sent by the brain but rather an integral part of how we think and make decisions.

“Sarah Wilson is a force of nature – quite literally. She has taken her pain and grief about our sick and troubled world and alchemized it into action, advocacy, adventure, poetry, and true love.” — ELIZABETH GILBERT Will you sleep through the revolution? Or do you want to wake up and...

Where did I come from? Why do I have two arms but just one head? How is my left leg the same size as my right one? Why are the fingerprints of identical twins not identical? How did my brain learn to learn? Why must I die? Questions like these remain biology's deepest and most ancient challenges. They force us to confront a fundamental biological problem: How can something as large and complex as a human body organize itself from the simplicity of a fertilized egg?

Cutting-edge research on the brain's interaction with the body shows that health is directly impacted by our social environments, socioeconomic status, culture, behaviors, relationships, psychological states, and habits of mind, among many factors. Mind-body medicine-working in partnership with traditional medical practice-uses a large range of psychological, physical, and behavioral treatments in a model of health care that aims to treat the whole human being.

The human body is the most fraught and fascinating, talked-about and taboo, unique yet universal fact of our lives. It is the inspiration for art, the subject of science, and the source of some of the greatest stories ever told. In Anatomies, acclaimed author of Periodic Tales Hugh Aldersey-Williams brings his entertaining blend of science, history, and culture to bear on this richest of subjects.

In this uniquely all-encompassing book about fungi, mycologist Keith Seifert looks at a variety of different types of fungi, including those that are invisible to the naked eye, and those that live in relationship to humans, agriculture, animals, forests, cities, and more.

In this rip-roaring space opera, a ragtag band of explorers are out to make the biggest score in the galaxy. On this space jump, no one is who they seem . . . Captain Hammond Roystan is a simple cargo runner who has stumbled across the find of a lifetime: the Hassim, a disabled exploration...

Some signals were never meant to stay buried... Delia Reyes makes her living hunting stray radio noise inside a four-inch steel room in Tucson, Arizona. When her boyfriend buys her a pair of forty-dollar “meteorite” earrings from a folding table at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, the left stone is wrong in weight and deaf to a magnet. That is when she starts hearing a voice inside her head. Something has woken up inside those five grams of dark stone. It is older than written history, it carries a past that humanity can no longer afford to ignore—and it is about to turn Delia’s ...

"A striking thrillride through a future both frightening and tantalizing. Readers should be left begging for a sequel." -- Kirkus Reviews Are you human? How can you know for sure... Tech icon Aiden Markusson has it all--the lake house, the luxury car, the fastest growing company in Seattle, and the love of his life wearing his engagement ring. But his perfect life comes apart at the seams when he begins to experience blinding headaches, sensory distortions, and strange bursts of physical strength. His growing paranoia and need for answers lead him down a rabbit hole of bio-engineering and ...

We are all familiar with the idea that machines are powered by electricity, but perhaps not so aware that this is also true for ourselves. "The Spark of Life" is a spectacular account of the body electric, showing how, from before conception to the last breath we draw, electrical signals in our cells are essential to everything we think and do. These signals are produced by some amazing proteins that sit at the forefront of current scientific research - the ion channels. They are found in every cell in Earth and they govern every aspect of our lives, from consciousness to sexual attraction, fighting infection, our ability to see and hear, and the beating of our hearts.

You don’t fail at marathons because you’re weak. You fail because you were given a bad system. Most first-time marathoners quit quietly—weeks before race day. Not because they lack discipline. Not because they aren’t tough enough. They quit because the traditional advice is biologically illiterate. “Just run more.” “Push through the pain.” “Suffer now, earn the medal.” That philosophy breaks bodies, exhausts minds, and turns intelligent, capable people into injured spectators. Master of Marathons is a rebellion against that myth. Written by lawyers and systems thinkers ...

How living in space will affect future generations—and what the potential unintended consequences of space settlements are. We are on the cusp of a golden age of space travel in which, for the first time, it will be possible for large numbers of people to venture into space. Some intend to...