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Evolution in Everyday Life
Today, evolutionary biology is much more than an explanatory concept. It is indispensable to the world we live in. This book provides the first truly accessible and balanced account of how evolution has become a tool with applications that are thoroughly integrated, and deeply useful, in our everyday lives and our societies, often in ways that we do not realize. The Evolving World convinces us as never before that evolutionary biology has become absolutely necessary for human existence.
Regional Advantage in a Global Economy
A new perspective on globalization, The New Argonauts tells the story of the foreign-born, technically skilled investors and entrepreneurs who return home to start new companies while remaining tied to powerful economic and professional communities in the United States. AnnaLee Saxenian's research brings a fresh perspective to the way that technology entrepreneurs build regional advantage in order to compete in global markets.
Life Without Water
This beautifully illustrated book tells the diverse stories about people in very hot, very cold, or very high places, who spend their lives collecting, chasing, piping, and trapping the water that life requires. In a world of finite resources, where the struggle for shrinking sources of water intensifies daily, these stories are a source of hope and wonder.
Technology and Obsolescence in America
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. Giles Slade explains how disposability was a necessary condition for America's rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives, we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.
Portraits from the Tropical Forests of Costa Rica
Gathered by biologists in the tropical forests of Costa Rica, over 100 large-format photographs of caterpillars document the dizzying variety of shapes, vivid colors, and cryptic markings among these species. The pictures are accompanied by capsule species accounts and magnificent images of the adult butterfly or moth. Throughout, the authors convey an intimate sense of these creatures by focusing on how their features figure in their behavior and ecology, and on the beauty of nature in this life stage.
Insects in and over the Water
In his hallmark companionable style, Gilbert Waldbauer introduces us to the aquatic insects that have colonized ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers, especially those in North America. Along the way we learn about the diverse forms these arthropods take, as well as their remarkable modes of life. While learning about the evolution, natural history, and ecology of these insects, readers also discover more than a little about the scientists who study them.
In his exploration of insect societies that don't fit the eusocial schema, James T. Costa gives these interesting phenomena their due. He synthesizes the scattered literature about social phenomena across the arthropod phylum: beetles and bugs, caterpillars and cockroaches, mantids and membracids, sawflies and spiders. This wide-ranging tour takes a rich narrative approach that interweaves theory and data analysis with the behavior and ecology of these remarkable groups.
Biology, Conservation, and Human Interactions
Benjamin Oldroyd has teamed with Siriwat Wongsiri to provide a comparative work synthesizing the rapidly expanding Asian honey bee literature. The authors underscore the pressures colonies face and detail the long and amazing history of the honey hunt. This book provides a cornerstone for future investigations on these species, insights into the evolution across species, and a direction for conservation efforts to protect these keystone species of Asia's tropical forests.
Toward an Evolutionary Biology of
Language
In this forcefully argued
book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language provides a
framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition.
Philip Lieberman asserts that the widely influential theories of
language's development are inconsistent with principles and findings
of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. In his view, the human
language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate
evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work
together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
In this companion volume to Bird Coloration: Volume 1, Mechanisms and Measurements, Geoffrey E. Hill and Kevin J. McGraw explain the function of the colorful displays of birds and examine the factors that shape the evolution of color signals. This sumptuously illustrated book will be essential reading for biologists studying animal coloration, but it will also be treasured by anyone curious about why birds are colorful and how they got that way.
The Standard of Greatness
For Einstein, 1905 was a remarkable year. It was also a miraculous year for the history and future of science. In six short months, he published five papers that would transform our understanding of nature. This unparalleled period is the subject of Rigden's book, which deftly explains what distinguishes 1905 from all other years in the annals of science, and elevates Einstein above all other scientists of the twentieth century.
new in paperback
In Fire Ants, Walter Tschinkel provides not just an encyclopedic overview of Solenopsis invicta but a lively account of how research is done, how science establishes facts, and the pleasures and problems of a scientific career. The reader learns much about ants, the practice of science, and humans' role in the fire ant's North American success.
A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC
20,000 B.C., the peak of the last ice age--the atmosphere is heavy with dust, glaciers span vast regions, and people face the threat of extinction. But these people live on the brink of seismic change--10,000 years of climate shifts culminating in abrupt global warming that will usher in a fundamentally changed human world. This is the story of this momentous period--one in which a seemingly minor alteration in temperature could presage anything from the spread of lush woodland to the coming of apocalyptic floods--and one in which we find the origins of civilization itself.
new in paperback
Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology
By focusing on the history of the Gemini Observatory--twin 8-meter telescopes located on mountain peaks in Hawaii and Chile--Giant Telescopes tells the story behind the planning and construction of modern scientific tools, offering a detailed view of the technological and political transformation of astronomy in the postwar era.
new in paperback
Auyang ranges widely in demonstrating that engineering today is not only a collaborator with science but its equal. In concise accounts of the emergence of industrial laboratories and chemical and electrical engineering, and in whirlwind histories of the machine tools and automobile industries and the rise of nuclear energy and information technology, her book presents a broad picture of modern engineering.
new in paperback
The Temporal Factor in Consciousness
Our subjective inner life is what really matters to us as human beings--and yet we know relatively little about how it arises. Over a long and distinguished career Libet has conducted experiments that have helped us see, in clear and concrete ways, how the brain produces conscious awareness. For the first time, Libet gives his own account of these experiments and their importance to our understanding of consciousness.
new in paperback
This large-format volume of color photographs takes readers on a magnificent visual journey into the remote world of small tropical organisms critical to biodiversity. A unique introduction to the marvelous variety of the overlooked life under our feet, Naskrecki's book returns us to a child's sense of wonder with a fully informed, deeply felt understanding of the importance of the world's smaller, teeming life.
Icons of Knowledge
In this beautifully designed book, the equations that govern our world unfold in all their formal grace--and their deeper meaning as core symbols of our civilization. The renowned Dutch physicist Sander Bais has produced a book that delves into the details of seventeen equations that form the very basis of what we know of the universe today.
Defenses of Insects, Spiders, Scorpions, and Other Many-Legged Creatures
Part handbook, part field guide, part photo album, Secret Weapons, the follow-up to the award-winning For Love of Insects, chronicles the diverse and often astonishing defensive strategies that have allowed insects, spiders, scorpions, and other many-legged creatures not just to survive, but to thrive.
The plates in this book capture incredibly detailed impressions and casts of ancient life, contrasting them with forms, such as the horseshoe crab and the chambered nautilus, that persist today virtually unchanged. Paul D. Taylor and David N. Lewis, both of the Natural History Museum, London, have written a comprehensive and accessible resource, one that provides undergraduates and amateur fossil enthusiasts with a means to understand and interpret this rich fossil record.
In this natural history of primate parenting, Smith compares parenting by nonhuman and human primates. In a narrative rich with vivid anecdotes derived from interviews with primatologists, from her own experience breeding cottontop tamarin monkeys for over thirty years, and from her clinical psychology practice, Smith describes the ways that primates care for their offspring, from infancy through young adulthood.
How birds produce the brilliant and striking coloration of their feathers and other body parts is the focus of this first volume of Bird Coloration. It has been more than 40 years since the mechanisms of color production of birds have been reviewed and synthesized. Geoffrey Hill and Kevin McGraw have assembled the world's leading experts in perception, measurement, and control of bird coloration to contribute to this book. This sumptuously illustrated volume synthesizes more than 1,500 technical papers in this field.
A Determined Scientist
Often referred to as the Newton of France, Pierre Simon Laplace has been called the greatest scientist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this compact biography, Hahn illuminates the man in his historical setting. Elegantly written, Pierre Simon Laplace reflects a lifetime of thinking and research by a distinguished historian of science on the fortunes of a singularly important figure in the annals of Enlightenment science.
How Fat Works is a concise and up-to-date primer on the workings of fat. It is essential reading for professionals entering careers in medicine and public health administration or anyone wanting a better understanding of one of our most urgent health crises.
Biological Weapons since 1945
The threat of biological weapons has never attracted as much public attention as in the past five years. Yet there has been little historical analysis of such weapons over the past half-century. Deadly Cultures sets out to fill this gap by analyzing the historical developments since 1945 and addressing three central issues: why states have continued or begun programs for acquiring biological weapons, why states have terminated biological weapons programs, and how states have demonstrated that they have truly terminated their biological weapons programs.
Neural and Genetic Mechanisms
In Brain Arousal and Information Theory, Donald Pfaff presents a daring perspective on the long-standing puzzle of what arousal is. Pfaff argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain.
Neural Mechanisms of Somatic Sensation
Vernon Mountcastle has devoted his career to studying the neurophysiology of sensation in the hand. In The Sensory Hand he provides an astonishingly comprehensive account of the neural underpinnings of the rich and complex tactile experiences evoked by stimulation of the hand. His new book thus becomes a sequel to his earlier volume, Perceptual Neuroscience, in which he offered a detailed analysis of the role of the distributed systems of the neocortex in perception generally.
Cross-sectional Atlas of the Brain provides a set of high-resolution color cross-sections of the human brain (six times higher than that of the only complete data set available to date), and each image is accompanied by state-of-the-art MRI and CT scans of the same specimen. The more than two hundred detailed and fully annotated images in this atlas provide a complete body of reference to the gross anatomy of the brain. The accompanying line drawings of these images provide a roadmap for easy orientation, and the unparalleled resolution of the images makes it possible to derive cross-sections of the same specimen in all standard orientations.
Imagine beetles ejecting defensive sprays as hot as boiling water; female moths holding their mates for ransom; caterpillars disguising themselves as flowers by fastening petals to their bodies; termites emitting a viscous glue to rally fellow soldiers--and you will have entered an insect world once beyond imagining, a world observed and described down to its tiniest astonishing detail by Thomas Eisner. The story of a lifetime of such minute explorations, For Love of Insects celebrates the small creatures that have emerged triumphant on the planet, the beneficiaries of extraordinary evolutionary inventiveness and unparalleled reproductive capacity.
The New Language of Science
Information is poised to replace matter as the primary stuff of the universe, von Baeyer suggests; it will provide a new basic framework for describing and predicting reality in the twenty-first century. Despite its revolutionary premise, the book is written lucidly and offers a superb introduction to classical and quantum information.
new in paperback
In spite of the conventional wisdom that innovation is driven by the promise of individual and corporate wealth, Steven Weber argues, ensuring the free distribution of code among computer programmers can create a more effective process for developing intellectual products. Weber argues that the success of open source is not a freakish exception to economic principles and explains the political and economic dynamics of this critical market development.
new in paperback
Quantum Physics for Everyone
The laws governing the very small and the very swift defy common sense and stretch our minds to the limit. Drawing on a deep familiarity with the discoveries of the twentieth century, Ford gives an appealing account of quantum physics that will help the serious reader make sense of a science that, for all its successes, remains mysterious.
new in paperback
From the Rhythm of Time to the Making of Matter
The principle of the pendulum's swing marks a simple yet fundamental system in nature, one that ties the rhythm of time to the very existence of matter in the universe. Newton sets the stage for Galileo's discovery with a look at biorhythms in living organisms and at early calendars and clocks--contrivances of nature and culture that, however adequate in their time, did not meet the precise requirements of seventeenth-century science and navigation.
new in paperback
Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal
One of Us views conjoined twinning and other "abnormalities" from the point of view of people living with such anatomies, and considers these issues within the larger historical context of anatomical politics. This deeply thought-provoking and compassionate work exposes the extent of the social frame upon which we construct the "normal."
new in paperback
Career Processes and Outcomes
Why do so few women choose a career in science--even as they move into medicine and law in ever-greater numbers? In one of the most comprehensive studies of gender differences in science careers ever conducted, Women in Science provides a systematic account of how U.S. youth are selected into and out of science education in early life, and how social forces affect career outcomes later in the science labor market.
new in paperback
Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies
The editors of this volume argue that future research into complex animal societies and intelligence will change the perception of animals as gene machines, programmed to act in particular ways and perhaps elevate them to a status much closer to our own. At a time when humans are perceived more biologically than ever before, and animals as more cultural, are we about to witness the dawn of a truly unified social science, one with a distinctly cross-specific perspective?
new in paperback
This book, one of the few comprehensive attempts at integrating behavioral research into human and nonhuman primates, does precisely that--and in doing so, offers a clear, in-depth look at the mutually enlightening work being done in psychology and primatology. The authors focus primarily on social processes in areas including aggression, conflict resolution, sexuality, attachment, parenting, social development and affiliation, cognitive development, social cognition, personality, emotions, vocal and nonvocal communication, cognitive neuroscience, and psychopathology.
new in paperback
Widely regarded as the most creative scholar in the field of river morphology, Leopold presents a coherent description of the river, its shape, size, organization, and action, along with a consistent theory that explains much of the observed character of channels.
new in paperback