Showing titles in Biological Sciences

In the chaotic last days of the war, a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find - his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world's finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine - an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food.

Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years - to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes.

Over 500,000 years ago, a single gene mutated. It spread over time, becoming critical in the journey transforming our earliest ancestors into fully modern humans, capable of navigating the entire planet and beyond. Then just a few thousand years ago, humans gradually outsourced knowledge to writing, and we displaced art and music from the heart of learning. This is the extraordinary story of the discovery of a supergene that makes us uniquely human.

Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself). In Running Smart, Mariska van Sprundel, a science journalist and recreational runner who has had her fair share of injuries, sets out to explore the science behind such claims.

Steve Mann knows dogs. His incredible ability to understand dogs quickly has earned Steve the gratitude of more than 100,000 dogs and their owners everywhere, including a host of celebrities. Easy Peasy Doggy Squeezy provides solutions to hundreds of dog-training problems, including socialising, excessive barking and recall. Steve passes on his wisdom gained from working with thousands of dogs throughout his career. He teaches owners how to work out what kind of pet carer they are and what techniques will work best with their pup.

Molecular biologist Nicklas Brendborg takes us on a journey from farthest reaches of the globe to the most cutting-edge research to explore what nature has to teach us about longevity. From immortal lobsters, backwards-aging jellyfish and the centuries-old Greenland shark to the woman who successfully edited her own DNA in search of immortality, Jellyfish Age Backwards brings together everything the natural world and science have to offer on the mystery of ageing.

As the human world settles down each evening, nocturnal animals prepare to take back the countryside. Taking listeners on four walks through the four seasons, acclaimed nature writer and farmer John Lewis-Stempel reveals a world bursting with life and normally hidden from view. Out beyond the cities, it is still possible to see the night sky full of stars, or witness a moonbow, an arch of white light in the heavens. It is time for us to leave our lairs and go tramping. To join our fellow creatures of the night.

The Origin of Species sold out on the first day of its publication in 1859. It is the major book of the 19th century and one of the most readable and accessible of the great revolutionary works of the scientific imagination. Though, in fact, little read, most people know what it says—at least they think they do. The Origin of Species was the first mature and persuasive work to explain how species change through the process of natural selection. Upon its publication, the book began to transform attitudes about society and religion.

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We each possess an extraordinary power to realize our greatest potential and live the life we want. Dr. James Doty is living proof. Having grown up in an environment of poverty and neglect, James Doty was 12 years old when he walked into a magic shop and met an extraordinary woman who introduced him to a series of teachings that changed the trajectory of his life. With Lessons from the Magic Shop, Dr. Doty offers an in-depth training program with the same transformational practices that helped him overcome great odds.

Happy dog. Happy owner. A dog with behavioural issues is an unhappy dog. And likely has an unhappy owner. But the good news is that, at heart, every dog is a good dog. Every dog wants to behave well for you and make you happy, but whether they're being diverted by fear, stress or uncertainty, something is stopping them. Enter: the Dogfather. Having worked with more than 5,000 dogs - from Great Danes to Chihuahuas and everything in between - he has seen every behavioural issue going, whether it’s aggression, house destruction, refusal to obey commands or extreme anxiety.

Leaving her garden to the mercy of the slugs, award-winning writer Alys Fowler set out in an inflatable kayak to explore Birmingham's canal network, full of little-used waterways where huge pike skulk and kingfishers dart. Her book is about noticing the wild everywhere and what it means to see beauty where you least expect it. What happens when someone who has learned to observe her external world in such detail decides to examine her internal world with the same care?

How can a blind person learn to see with her tongue or a deaf person learn to hear with his skin? What does a baby born without a nose tell us about our sensory machinery? Might we someday control a robot with our thoughts? And what does any of this have to do with why we dream? The answers to these questions are not right in front of our eyes; they're right behind our eyes. This book is not simply about what the brain is but what it does. Covering decades of research to the present day, Livewired also presents new findings from Eagleman's own research.

We use DNA routinely - to cure diseases, solve crimes, and reunite families. Yet we've known about it for only 60 years. And what we're continuing to learn about it every day has the potential to transform our health, our nutrition, our society, and our future. But what, exactly is DNA, the self-replicating material present in nearly all living organisms?

You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome - the bacterial fauna that populates our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross the next frontier of scientific understanding: discover your body's electrome.

When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a deeply personal journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers, much to her own astonishment, an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina is not merely flesh, but an intrinsic component of the female brain - and thus has a fundamental connection to female consciousness itself.

Looking to the skies above, we have variously worshipped them as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves in their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently, attempted to protect them. Award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on an epic and dazzling journey through this mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to Renaissance experiments on woodpecker anatomy, from Victorian obsessions with egg-collecting to the present fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats.

With the trademark dramatic storytelling techniques of The Planets and The Universe, Andrew Cohen and Chris Packham narrate the biography of the Earth, revealing the most epic moments from its history, from the first seconds of its existence to the arrival of its most incredible inhabitants, us. But humans take a back seat for this story as the Earth takes centre stage. We’ll witness those moments where our planet’s future hung in the balance in the face of massive bombardments from space, extreme changes in climate, the collision of whole continents and more.

Meadowland gives a unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others.

In his beloved book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben revealed astonishing discoveries about the social networks of trees and how they communicate. Now, in The Power of Trees, he turns to their future, with a searing critique of forestry management, tree planting and the exploitation of old growth forests.