Rain: A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett

 

 "Barnett beautifully evokes universal themes of connecting cycles of water, air, wind, and earth to humankind across time and culture, leaving readers contemplating their deeper ties with the natural world."
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

 

Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen by Philip Ball

 "As a harvest of fascinating facts delivered with sharp wit and insight, it is hard to fault" (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Daily Telegraph)

"A fascinating compendium… Another author might struggle to manage such an esoteric collection [of stories of invisibility] but Mr Ball’s writing is incisive enough to keep the different elements hanging and working together" (The Economist)

If you could be invisible, what would you do? The chances are that it would have something to do with power, wealth or sex. Perhaps all three.

But there's no need to feel guilty. Impulses like these have always been at the heart of our fascination with invisibility: it points to realms beyond our senses, serves as a receptacle for fears and dreams, and hints at worlds where other rules apply. Invisibility is a mighty power and a terrible curse, a sexual promise, a spiritual condition.

Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself - Jamie A. Davies

  "From egg to adult body, Life Unfolding by Jamie Davies is a demanding but wonder-filled account of the simple interactions that create complex structures." -- Claire Ainsworth,New Scientest

"Davies offers a detailed ride through the mind-boggling number of simultaneous self-organizing activities of growth." - Publishers Weekly

Climbing Mount Improbable - Richard Dawkins

A brilliant book celebrating improbability as the engine that drives life, by the acclaimed author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

The human eye is so complex and works so precisely that surely, one might believe, its current shape and function must be the product of design. How could such an intricate object have come about by chance? Tackling this subject—in writing that the New York Times called "a masterpiece"—Richard Dawkins builds a carefully reasoned and lovingly illustrated argument for evolutionary adaptation as the mechanism for life on earth.

Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos - Peter M. Hoffmann

The cells in our bodies consist of molecules, made up of the same carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms found in air and rocks. But molecules, such as water and sugar, are not alive. So how do our cells—assemblies of otherwise “dead” molecules—come to life, and together constitute a living being?

Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World by Amir Alexander

The De-Textbook: The Stuff You Didn't Know About the Stuff You Thought You Knew - Cracked.com

 
You are an idiot.

Don't get defensive! It's not your fault. For decades your teachers, authority figures and textbooks have been lying to you. You do not have five senses. Your tongue doesn't have neatly segregated taste-bud zones. You don't know what the pyramids really looked like. You're even pooping wrong - Jesus, you're a wreck!

AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World's Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena

 From the creators of the wildly popular and seriously scientific YouTube channel, AsapSCIENCE, comes entertaining, irreverent, and totally accessible answers to the questions you never got to ask in science class.

“From hiccup cures to the 5 second rule, this book put a bemused smile on my face and answered the oddball questions of life. An irreverent stroll through the arcane and taboo, guided by the science behind it.” (Chris Hadfield, author of "An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth" and "You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes")

"Science is big fun. The ASAP guys get that, and they'll show you— they'll even draw you a diagram." (Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” CEO, The Planetary Society and author of "Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation")

"From concise examinations of tiny topics like the science of love and aging, to answers to questions you actually care about--should you use the snooze button?--this book has something for everyone who is curious about the world around them. (That is to say: everyone.) This is science at its most fun, accessible, and well-illustrated." (David Epstein, author of the New York Times bestseller "The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance")

"Entertaining...valuable...particularly for the young and curious." (Publishers Weekly)

Download [PDF]:

https://userscloud.com/n0b0g0etpt72

Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle - Andreas Wagner

 

 

“Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. Nature’s many innovations—some uncannily perfect—call for natural principles that accelerate life’s ability to innovate.”

The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man by Michael Tennesen

While examining the history of our planet and actively exploring our present environment, science journalist Michael Tennesen describes what life on earth could look like after the next mass extinction.

A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

For decades after identifying the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98% of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose. Yet recently researchers have discovered variations and modulations in this junk DNA that underwrite a number of intractable diseases. This knowledge has led to innovative research and treatment approaches that may finally control these conditions.

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way - Amanda Ripley

 How do other countries create “smarter” kids? What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education superpowers? The Smartest Kids in the World “gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures and manages to make our own culture look newly strange....The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes” (The New York Times Book Review).

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character - Paul Tough

“Drop the flashcards—grit, character, and curiosity matter even more than cognitive skills. A persuasive wake-up call.”—People

Why do some children succeed while others fail? The story we usually tell about childhood and success is the one about intelligence: success comes to those who score highest on tests, from preschool admissions to SATs. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter more have to do with character: skills like perseverance, curiosity, optimism, and self-control.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction - Matthew B. Crawford

A groundbreaking new book from the bestselling author of Shop Class as Soulcraft

In his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.

We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

A masterful commentary on the history of science from the Greeks to modern times, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg—a thought-provoking and important book by one of the most distinguished scientists and intellectuals of our time.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

From the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame.

'It's about the terror, isn't it?' 'The terror of what?' I said. 'The terror of being found out.'

For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work. Once their transgression is revealed, collective outrage circles with the force of a hurricane and the next thing they know they're being torn apart by an angry mob, jeered at, demonized, sometimes even fired from their job.

Building the H Bomb: A Personal History by Kenneth W Ford

 

In this engaging scientific memoir, Kenneth Ford recounts the time when, in his mid-twenties, he was a member of the team that designed and built the first hydrogen bomb. He worked with — and relaxed with — scientific giants of that time such as Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Stan Ulam, John von Neumann, and John Wheeler, and here offers illuminating insights into the personalities, the strengths, and the quirks of these men. Well known for his ability to explain physics to nonspecialists, Ford also brings to life the physics of fission and fusion and provides a brief history of nuclear science from the discovery of radioactivity in 1896 to the ten-megaton explosion of "Mike" that obliterated a Pacific Island in 1952.

Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger

An impassioned defense of intellectual freedom and a clarion call to intellectual responsibility, Galileo’s Middle Finger is one American’s eye-opening story of life in the trenches of scientific controversy. For two decades, historian Alice Dreger has led a life of extraordinary engagement, combining activist service to victims of unethical medical research with defense of scientists whose work has outraged identity politics activists. With spirit and wit, Dreger offers in Galileo’s Middle Finger an unforgettable vision of the importance of rigorous truth seeking in today’s America, where both the free press and free scholarly inquiry struggle under dire economic and political threats.

Beneath the Surface: Killer Whales, SeaWorld, and the Truth Beyond Blackfish - John Hargrove

Over the course of two decades, John Hargrove worked with 20 different whales on two continents and at two of SeaWorld's U.S. facilities. For Hargrove, becoming an orca trainer fulfilled a childhood dream. However, as his experience with the whales deepened, Hargrove came to doubt that their needs could ever be met in captivity. When two fellow trainers were killed by orcas in marine parks, Hargrove decided that SeaWorld's wildly popular programs were both detrimental to the whales and ultimately unsafe for trainers.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

It has been called “the great destroyer” and “the evil.” The Pentagon refers to it as “the pervasive menace.” It destroys cars, fells bridges, sinks ships, sparks house fires, and nearly brought down the Statue of Liberty. Rust costs America more than $400 billion per year—more than all other natural disasters combined.