Showing titles in Biological Sciences

First heard every weekday morning at 5.58am on BBC Radio 4, Tweet of the Day captured the imagination of early risers and bird lovers, proving so popular that it was named Radio Programme of the Year 2014. Each episode begins with a bird call or song, followed by fascinating ornithological detail about its owner. This collection contains every edition from the first series, British Birds.

James Herriot brings back familiar and much-loved friends, including his partner Siegfried and his most lucrative patient, the delightful Tricki Woo. There are some some new arrivals too, such as the abandoned and terrified mongrol Titch who finds the perfect home with a gruff grocer and feral kittens Olly and Ginny who live in James and wife Helen's back garden. Above all, the veterinary practise in Darrowby is enlivened by a marvelouslly eccentric assistant, Calum Buchanan, who arrives with a pet badger and proceeds to add dogs, owls and a monkey called Mortimer to his growing menagerie.

This book comes at a critical time. Thirty years ago, Africa was home to a million elephants; today the figure stands at less than half that. Meanwhile in the span of a lifetime, the human population has more than doubled. In Levison Wood's The Last Giants, he explores the rapid decline of one of the world's favourite animals. Filled with stories from his own time spent travelling with elephants in Africa, the book is a passionate wake-up call for this endangered species we take for granted.

From the familiar to the improbable, the gross to the endearing, The Modern Bestiary is a compendium of curious creatures. It includes both animals that have made headlines and those you've probably never heard of, such as skin-eating caecilians, harp sponges or zombie worms—also known as bone-eating snot flowers. Arranged by elements (Earth, Water, Air), The Modern Bestiary contains well-known species told from unexpected new angles (rats that drive cars; fish that communicate by passing wind), as well as stranger and lesser-known creatures.

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.

Humans are the only mammals to walk on two, rather than four, legs. From an evolutionary perspective, this is an illogical development, as it slows us down. But here we are, suggesting there must have been something tremendous to gain from bipedalism. First Steps takes our ordinary, everyday walking experience and reveals how unusual and extraordinary it truly is. The seven-million-year-long journey through the origins of upright walking shows how it was in fact a gateway to many of the other attributes that make us human.

First published more than 50 years ago, this award-winning classic brings Rachel Carson's unique vision to a new generation of listeners. The Sense of Wonder is Carson's intimate account of adventures with her young nephew, Roger, as they enjoy walks along the rocky coast of Maine and through dense forests and open fields, observing wildlife, strange plants, moonlight, and storm clouds, and listening to the "living music" of insects in the underbrush.

Join the Nicholson family for this heartwarming journey through a typical springtime on their South Yorkshire farm. Throughout the book, they reflect on the childhood stories, testing times, poignant memories and enriching experiences that have shaped the lives they lead today. With the coming of a new season, Roger and Cynthia Nicholson and their sons Richard, Robert and David show how the farming year is shaped around the arrival of baby goats, lambs, calves and piglets galore.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

Oaks sustain a complex and fascinating web of wildlife. The Nature of Oaks reveals what is going on in oak trees month by month, highlighting the seasonal cycles of life, death, and renewal. From woodpeckers who collect and store hundreds of acorns for sustenance to the beauty of jewel caterpillars, Tallamy illuminates and celebrates the wonders that occur right in our own backyards. The Nature of Oaks will inspire you to treasure these trees and to act to nurture and protect them.

Since the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's remarkable On the Origin of Species, the modern science of biology and genetics has added surprising new dimensions to evolutionary theory. In this course, you’ll discover what Darwin didn’t know, covering much of the curriculum of an introductory college course in evolutionary biology. No background in science is needed to follow these engaging lectures, delivered by Professor Scott Solomon of Rice University, a gifted teacher and widely traveled field biologist.

In 1865 a broken Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy’s storm-warning system and ‘forecasts’ would return, the model for what we use today. In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God’s great wrath, 19th-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma.

What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story. In Beasts Before Us, paleontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago. They made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs.

This modern classic of nature writing by the author of The Once and Future King was an inspiration for and featured in Helen Macdonald's prize-winning H Is for Hawk. "No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality. In a way, it is the psychiatrist's art. One is matching one's mind against another mind with deadly reason and interest. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart."

From the secret fossils of London to the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Scottish Highlands, and from state-of-the-art Californian laboratories to one of the world's most dangerous volcanic complexes hidden beneath the green hills of western Naples, set out on an adventure to those parts of the world where the Earth's life-story is written into the landscape. Helen Gordon turns a novelist's eye on the extraordinary scientists who are piecing together this planetary drama.

Leading neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow draws vividly from everyday life and other experts in their field to show the extraordinary potential as well as dangers which come with being able to predict our likely futures - and looking at how we can alter what's in store for us. Lucid, illuminating, awe-inspiring, The Science of Fate revolutionises our understanding of who we are - and empowers us to help shape a better future for ourselves and the wider world.

In Science(ish), Rick Edwards and Dr Michael Brooks confront all the questions that your favourite movies provoke. Inspired by their award-winning podcast, this popular (hopefully) science (definitely) audiobook dedicates each chapter to a different sci-fi classic and wittily explores the fascinating issues that arise. Covering movies from 28 Days Later to Ex Machina, this is a joyous ride through astrophysics, neuroscience, psychology, botany, artificial intelligence, evolution and plenty more subjects you've always wanted to grasp.

Here is the story of SARS-CoV-2 and its fierce journey through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its origin, its ever-changing nature, and its capacity to kill us. David Quammen expertly shows how strange new viruses emerge from animals into humans as we disrupt wild ecosystems, and how those viruses adapt to their human hosts, sometimes causing global catastrophe. He explains why this coronavirus will probably be a 'forever virus,' destined to circulate among humans and bedevil us endlessly.

Anthony Trollope is most famous for his portrait of the professional and landed classes of Victorian England, especially in his Palliser and Barsetshire novels. But he was also the author of one of the most fascinating autobiographies of the nineteenth century. Trollope was born in 1815, the product of a formidable mother and a tragically unsuccessful father who was socially ambitious for his sons. He was the victim of vicious bullying at Harrow and Winchester. But he had inherited his mother's determination, and managed later to carve out a successful career in the General Post Office while devoting every spare moment to writing. How he paid his groom to wake him every morning at 5:30 a.m. and disciplined himself to write 250 words every fifteen minutes has become part of literary legend. His efforts resulted in over sixty books, a sizable fortune, and fame, and his autobiography. Trollope looks back on his life with satisfaction. Perhaps as interesting as the facts he reveals and the opinions he records about Dickens and George Eliot, politics and the civil service are the judgments he passes on his own character.