Showing titles in Science & Engineering

The Yukon river is over 2,000 miles long, flowing northwest from Canada through the Yukon Territory and Alaska to the Bering Sea. Every summer, hundreds of thousands of king salmon migrate the distance of this river to their spawning grounds, where they breed and die in what is the longest salmon run in the world. For the communities that live along the Yukon, the fish have long been the lifeblood of the economy and local culture.

Most of us have enjoyed walking on a bridleway at some time, but we rarely stop to think about how these old routes came to be. These ancient networks criss-cross the British countryside and are so familiar to walkers and riders that they have become almost invisible as we meander our way along them. From atop a horse and on foot, Tiffany Francis-Baker provides listeners with a new perspective on bridleways and a glimpse into their intriguing history.

This original audiobook considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history. Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.

This series on SpaceX delves into the company's journey from its inception to its groundbreaking achievements and ambitious future plans. The first episode explores the visionary origins of SpaceX, highlighting Elon Musk's motivations and the company's early challenges. The second episode focuses on the technological innovations that have revolutionized space travel, including the development of reusable rockets and successful missions to the International Space Station. The final episode looks ahead to SpaceX's future, examining the Starship project, plans for lunar exploration, and the ...

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens explores money, energy, economy, and the environment with world experts and leaders to understand how everything fits together, and where we go from here.

These 12 half-hour lectures are about what Einstein got wrong. He may have kindled a scientific revolution with his famous theory of relativity and his proof that atoms and light quanta exist, but he balked at accepting the most startling implications of these theories - such as the existence of black holes, the big bang, gravity waves, and mind-bendingly strange phenomena in the quantum realm. This course by research physicist Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago assumes no background in science and uses very little math.

Britain's most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know. Science is king. Every week headlines announce new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, new technologies that will transform our environment, new medical advances that will extend our lives. Science is giving us unprecedented insight into some of the big questions that have challenged humanity ever since we've been able to formulate those questions.

Douglas W. Tallamy's first book, Bringing Nature Home, awakened thousands of individuals to an urgent situation: wildlife populations are in decline because the native plants they depend on are fast disappearing. His solution? Plant more natives. In this new book, Tallamy takes the next step and outlines his vision for a grassroots approach to conservation.

Leif Bersweden has always been fascinated by wild plants. From a young age, his afternoons were spent hunting for and cataloguing the plants in his local area. But it is a landscape that is fast disappearing. Climate change, habitat destruction and declining pollinator populations mean that the future for plant life looks bleaker than ever before. Many of us are also unable to identify, or even notice, the plants that grow around us. Now a botanist, Leif decides to go on a mission, to explore the plants that Britain and Ireland have to offer.

Carolyn Spring is a writer and speaker in the field of trauma recovery and mental health. Her podcast is an encouraging, inspirational and yet candid look at some of the key issues, for both survivors and helping professionals, in reversing adversity. Check out her website at www.carolynspring.com

There is no more profound, enduring, or fascinating question in all of science than that of how time, space, and matter began. Now John Barrow, who has been at the cutting edge of research in this area and has written extensively about it, guides us on a journey to the beginning of time, into a world of temperatures and densities so high that we cannot recreate them in a laboratory.

The atom. The big bang. DNA. Natural selection. All ideas that have revolutionised science - and that were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven't stopped: here, Michael Brooks, best-selling author of 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, investigates the new wave of unexpected insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Through 11 radical new insights, Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world.

Stick and Rudder is the first exact analysis of the art of flying ever attempted. It has been continuously in print for 33 years. It shows precisely what the pilot does when he flies, just how he does it, and why. Because the basics are largely unchanging, the book therefore is applicable to large airplanes and small, old airplanes and new, and is of interest not only to the learner but also to the accomplished pilot and to the instructor himself.

The number-one Sunday Times best seller. A fascinating explanation of how evolution works from best-selling author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins. Complete and unabridged and read by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward. The river of Dawkins' title is a river of DNA, flowing through time from the beginning of life on Earth to the present and onwards.

Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. He takes listeners from Rome's pinnacle in the second century, when the empire seemed an invincible superpower, to its unraveling by the seventh century, when Rome was politically fragmented and materially depleted.

Sky at Night presenter Dr Tim Gregory takes us on a journey through the very earliest days of our Solar System to the spectacular meteorite falls that produced 'fiery rain' in 1792, to the pre-solar grains (literally stardust) that were blown in from other solar systems and are the oldest solid objects ever discovered on earth. Meteorites reveal a story much bigger than ourselves or our planet. As Tim says, 'It is an epic beyond compare.'

For millennia humans have fasted for spiritual, emotional, and physical reasons—as a way to heal their bodies, reconnect to the sacred, regain a sense of life’s purpose, and allow their souls to detoxify. We are evolutionarily designed to fast, and the body knows how to do it very well. Fasting allows the body and all its systems to rest, purify, and heal. Offering step-by-step guidelines to fully prepare yourself for a deep fast, Buhner explores what to expect during and after spiritual, emotional, and physical fasting and detoxification.

We would all be better off if everyone saw mathematics as a practical ally. Sadly, most of us fear maths and seek to avoid it. This is because mathematics doesn't have good 'people skills' - it never hesitates to bluntly point out when we are wrong. But it is only trying to help! Mathematics is a friend which can fill the gaps in what our brains can do naturally. Luckily, even though we don't like sharing our own mistakes, we love to listen to tales about what happens when maths errors make the everyday go horribly wrong....

Our understanding of the ‘tree of life’, with powerful implications for human genetics, human health and our own human nature, has recently completely changed. This book is about a new method of telling the story of life on earth - through molecular phylogenetics. It involves a fairly simple method - the reading of the deep history of life by looking at the variation in protein molecules found in living organisms. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection.

This is a landmark in science writing. It resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the 16th century. Who is he? A gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes. This stubborn and unworldly man was the son of a lawyer and a brothel keeper but also a gifted physician and the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics.