Basic Books: 1466 books
by David Darling
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2007
Language: English
Release Date: October 15, 2007
To many people, the main question about extraterrestrial life is whether it exists. But to the scientific community, that question has already been answered: it does, and within our solar system. The new science of astrobiology is already being practiced at NASA's Astrobiology Institute and the University...
What It's Like to Be a Dog
And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience
Language: English
Release Date: September 5, 2017
"Dog lovers and neuroscientists should both read this important book." --Dr. Temple Grandin
What is it like to be a dog? A bat? Or a dolphin? To find out, neuroscientist and bestselling author Gregory Berns and his team did something nobody had ever attempted: they trained dogs to...
The Cichlid Fishes
Nature's Grand Experiment In Evolution
Language: English
Release Date: December 15, 2008
Cichlid fishes are amazing creatures. In terms of sheer number of species, they are the most successful of all families of vertebrate animals, and the extent and speed with which they have evolved in some African lakes has made them the darlings of evolutionary biologists. With warmth and wit, Barlow...
by Thomas Sowell
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
Language: English
Release Date: August 4, 2008
The painful and baffling mystery as to why some obviously bright children do not begin talking until long after the ”normal” time is explored in this book through personal experiences and the findings of scientific research. The author's own experiences as the father of such a child led to the...
Mean Genes
From Sex To Money To Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts
Language: English
Release Date: October 2, 2012
Why do we want—and why do we do—so many things that are bad for us? And how can we stop? In Mean Genes economist Terry Burnham and biologist Jay Phelan offer advice on how to conquer our own worst enemy—our survival-minded genes. Having evolved in a time of scarcity, when our ancestors struggled...
Mismatch
How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It
Language: English
Release Date: October 9, 2012
Affirmative action in higher education started in the late 1960s as a noble effort to jump-start racial integration in American society and create the conditions for genuine equal opportunity. Forty years later, it has evolved into a swampland of posturing, concealment, pork-barrel set-asides, and—worst...
The Edge of the Sky
All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is
Language: English
Release Date: September 23, 2014
From the big bang to black holes, from dark matter to dark energy, from the origins of the universe to its ultimate destiny, The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the most important discoveries and mysteries in modern cosmology-with a twist. The book's lexicon is limited to the thousand most common...
Symbiotic Planet
A New Look At Evolution
Language: English
Release Date: August 5, 2008
Although Charles Darwin's theory of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology, it did not tell the whole story. Most remarkably, The Origin of Species said very little about, of all things, the origins of species. Darwin and his modern successors have shown very convincingly how inherited variations...
Quirkology
How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things
Language: English
Release Date: November 20, 2007
For over twenty years, psychologist Richard Wiseman has examined the quirky science of everyday life. In Quirkology, he navigates the oddities of human behavior, explaining the tell-tale signs that give away a liar, the secret science behind speed-dating and personal ads, and what a person's sense...
The Vanishing Face of Gaia
A Final Warning
Language: English
Release Date: April 14, 2009
The global temperature is rising, the ice caps are melting, and levels of pollution across the world have reached unprecedented heights. According to eminent scientist James Lovelock, in order to survive an assault from her dependents, the Earth is lurching ever closer to a permanent hot state.”...
The Revenge of Gaia
Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity
Language: English
Release Date: August 2, 2007
The key insight of Gaia Theory is that the entire Earth functions as a single living super-organism. But according to James Lovelock, the theory's originator, that organism is now sick. It is running a fever born of increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. Earth will adjust to these stresses, but the...
Restless Creatures
The Story of Life in Ten Movements
Language: English
Release Date: February 23, 2016
From flying pterodactyls to walking primates, the story of life as told through the evolution of locomotion.
Most of us never think about how we get from one place to another. For most people, putting one foot in front of the other requires no thought at all. Yet the fact that we and other...
by Chad Orzel
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: February 28, 2012
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. But what about relativity?
Physics professor Chad Orzel and his inquisitive canine companion, Emmy, tackle the concepts of general relativity in this irresistible introduction to Einstein's physics. Through armchair-and sometimes passenger-seat-conversations...
A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination
How Matter Becomes Imagination
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2008
In A Universe of Consciousness, Gerald Edelman builds on the radical ideas he introduced in his monumental trilogy-Neural Darwinism, Topobiology, and The Remembered Present-to present for the first time an empirically supported full-scale theory of consciousness. He and the neurobiolgist Giulio Tononi...