Showing results by publisher "Picador" in Science

Many scientists believe that we are currently living through the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate not seen for tens of millions of years – a trend that will only accelerate as climate change and other pressures intensify. What does it mean to live in such a time? And what exactly do we lose when a species goes extinct? In Lost Wonders conservationist and science writer Tom Lathan tells the stories of ten species that have lived, died out and been declared extinct since the turn of the twenty-first century.

In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the 16th century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky and ‘frost fairs’ were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns and even brothels that became a semipermanent part of the city.

In Air-borne, Carl Zimmer, Baillie Gifford-shortlisted author of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh and science columnist for The New York Times, traces the history and pre-history of the young science of aerobiology, from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes under his hand-made microscopes in the seventeenth century to Darwin’s revelation, while aboard the Beagle in the middle of the Atlantic, that this invisible life can soar across the planet – he found sixty-seven different North African species that had travelled thousands of miles from the Sahara.

In several of the compassionate case histories collected here, Sacks considers for the first time the enigmas of depression, psychosis, and schizophrenia, and in others he returns to conditions that have long fascinated him: Tourette’s syndrome, ageing, dementia and hallucinations. In counterpoint to these elegant investigations of what makes us human, this volume also includes pieces that celebrate Sacks’s love of the natural world – and his last meditations on life in the 21st century. Everything in Its Place gives us an intimate portrait of a master writer and thinker at work.