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21) Great adaptations: star-nosed moles, electric eels, and other tales of evolution's mysteries solved
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From star-nosed moles that have super-sensing snouts to electric eels that paralyze their prey, animals possess unique and extraordinary abilities. In Great Adaptations, Kenneth Catania presents an entertaining and engaging look at some of nature's most remarkable creatures. Telling the story of his biological detective work, Catania sheds light on the mysteries behind the behaviors of tentacled snakes, tiny shrews, zombie-making wasps, and more....
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A Harvard museum curator draws on the latest breakthroughs in evolutionary biology to examine how tiny, random convergences, from mutations to butterfly sneezes, have triggered remarkable evolutionary changes.
"Earth's natural history is full of fascinating instances of convergence: phenomena like eyes and wings and tree-climbing lizards that have evolved independently, multiple times. But evolutionary biologists also point out many examples of contingency,...
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It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean?...
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Every fossil tells a story. Best-selling paleontology author Donald R. Prothero describes twenty-five famous, beautifully preserved fossils in a gripping, scientific history of life on Earth. Recounting the adventures behind the discovery of these objects and fully interpreting their significance within the larger fossil record, Prothero creates a riveting and enlightening overview for anyone interested in the history of life on our planet. The twenty-five...
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"A natural history of cheating from selfish genes to lying politicians. Nature is rife with cheating. Possums play possum, feigning death to cheat predators. Crows cry wolf to scare off rivals. Amphibians and reptiles are inveterate impostors. Even genes and cells cheat. The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars explores the evolution of cheating in the natural world, revealing how dishonesty has given rise to wondrous diversity. Blending cutting-edge...
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"Gripping narrative non-fiction with STEM and social justice themes that proves cities can be surprisingly wild places--and why understanding urban nature matters. What can city bees tell us about climate change? How are we changing coyote behavior? And what the heck is a science bike? Featuring the work of a diverse group of eleven scientists--herself included!--Dr. Cylita Guy shows how studying urban wildlife can help us make cities around the world...
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Deep is a voyage from the ocean's surface to its darkest trenches, the most mysterious places on Earth. Fascinated by the sport of freediving-- in which competitors descend great depths on a single breath-- James Nestor embeds with a gang of oceangoing extreme athletes and renegade researchers. He finds whales that communicate with other whales hundreds of miles away, sharks that swim in unerringly straight lines through pitch-black waters, and other...
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How does a single-cell creature, such as an amoeba, lead such a sophisticated life? How does it hunt living prey, respond to lights, sounds, and smells, and display complex sequences of movements without the benefit of a nervous system? This book offers a startling and original answer.
In clear, jargon-free language, Dennis Bray taps the findings from the discipline of systems biology to show that the internal chemistry of living cells is a form...
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Each step of the life cycle for a variety of living creatures is covered in this book, guiding readers from the first stages of development for many plants and animals-including flowers, insects, fish, and mammals-through later phases and death. Also addressed are the different environments required for each step in the life cycle and the dangers these species may encounter throughout their lives. Critical thinking activities such as compare-and-contrast...
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"The renowned Nobel Prize-winning scientist's elegant and concise explanation of the fundamental ideas in biology and their uses today. Hailed by Philip Pullman as "a great communicator" who is also "as distinguished a scientist as there could be," Paul Nurse writes with delight at life's richness and a sense of the urgent role of biology in our time. With What Is Life? he delivers a brief but powerful work of popular science in the vein of Carlo...
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This book discusses the history of biology and science. Focusing on heredity, which Jacobs considers the fundamental feature of living things, he shows how, since the sixteenth century, the scientific understanding of inherited traits has moved not in a linear, progressive way, from error to truth, but instead through a series of frameworks. He reveals how these successive interpretive approaches--focusing on visible structures, internal structures...
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Key biological terms are defined in a way that all readers can understand in this book that explains the essential concepts of life processes and how living and nonliving things relate to each other. The basics of feeding, respiration, waste, and reproduction, among other important activities that sustain living things, are explained in clear, simple language, with colorful photographs to illustrate them. Non-living things are defined and described,...
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"In this brilliantly speculative work of popular science, Annalee Newitz, editor of io9.com, explains that although global disaster is all but inevitable, our chances of long-term species survival are better than ever. 'Scatter, Adapt, and Remember' explores how scientific breakthroughs today will help us avoid disasters tomorrow, from simulating tsunamis or studying central Turkey's ancient underground cities, to cultivating cyanobacteria for "living...
37) Next: a novel
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Cancer survivor Frank Burnet and his daughter and grandson are targets of an unscrupulous drug company that wants to profit from their unique disease-fighting genes. Meanwhile other genetic-engineering experiments involving a boy/chimpanzee hybrid and a talking parrot have gone awry.
38) Purpose & desire: what makes something "alive" and why modern Darwinism has failed to explain it
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"SUNY professor, biologist, and physiologist J. Scott Turner argues that modern Darwinism's materialist and mechanistic biases have led to a scientific dead end, unable to define what life is--and only an openness to the qualities of "purpose and desire" will move the field forward. Turner surveys the history of evolutionary thought, identifying "purpose and desire" as the keys to a coherent science of life and its evolution. In Purpose and Desire,...
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Neurogeneticist Moalem takes us on a trip from prehistory to the forefront of cutting-edge medical research, and through a bedroom or two, to tell the story of how human sexuality has developed over time. This book challenges common perceptions about our bodies and presents astonishing discoveries from the frontiers of science as it traces the transformation of sex across species and through time to its current role in human societies. Find out the...
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