Showing titles in Earth Sciences

Join David and Will as they explore the paleontologists’ perspective on various topics in life and earth history. Each episode features a main discussion on a topic requested by the listeners, presented as a lighthearted and educational conversation about fossils, evolution, deep time, and more. Before the main discussion, each episode also includes a news segment, covering recent research related to paleontology and evolution. Each episode ends with the answer to a question submitted by subscribers on Patreon. New episodes with new topics every fortnight!

A series of glasses of transparent liquids is in front of you: but which will quench your thirst and which will kill you? And why? Why does one liquid make us drunk and another power a jumbo jet? Sometimes dangerous, often delightful and always fascinating, discover the secret lives of liquids, from one of our best known scientists. From the best-selling author of Stuff Matters comes a fascinating tour of the world of these surprising or sinister substances - the droplets, heartbeats and ocean waves we encounter day to day.

Own the room with this hilarious collection of fact-tastic myth-busters and jaw-dropping trivia exploring science, history, sport and lesser-known facts from across the universe. Did you know that the Moon has a Bishop? That ostriches DON'T bury their heads in the sand? And that powdered rice was used as cement in the Great Wall of China? What do souls weigh? What can't 60% of the human population smell? And what on earth is rhinotillexomania? And the big one . . . are farts actually invisible? The answers to these questions are all here.

A journey around the United States in search of the truth about the threat of earthquakes leads to spine-tingling discoveries, unnerving experts, and ultimately the kind of preparations that will actually help guide us through disasters. It's a road trip full of surprises.

The news is full of hotly debated divergent claims about the impacts and risks of climate change. Lawrence Krauss, one of the world's most respected physicists and science populizers, cuts through the confusion by succinctly presenting the underlying science of climate change. The audiobook provides a unique, clear, accurate and easily accessible perspective of climate science and the risks of global inaction.

Meadowland gives a unique and intimate account of an English meadow’s life from January to December, together with its biography. In exquisite prose, John Lewis-Stempel records the passage of the seasons from cowslips in spring to the hay-cutting of summer and grazing in autumn, and includes the biographies of the animals that inhabit the grass and the soil beneath: the badger clan, the fox family, the rabbit warren, the skylark brood and the curlew pair, among others.

Worlds in Collision - written in a brilliant, easily understandable, and entertaining style and full to the brim with precise information-can be considered one of the most important and most challenging books in the history of science. Not without reason was this book found open on Einstein's desk after his death. For all those who have ever wondered about the evolution of the earth, the history of mankind, traditions, religions, mythology or just the world as it is today, Worlds in Collision is an absolute must-listen!

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must-listen for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

Drawing upon a lifetime of scientific expertise and an abiding love of nature, Richard Fortey uses his small wood to tell a wider story of the ever-changing British landscape, human influence on the countryside over many centuries and the vital interactions between flora, fauna and fungi. The trees provide a majestic stage for woodland animals and plants to reveal their own stories.

The fox is our apex predator, our most beautiful and clever killer. We have witnessed its wild touch, watched it slink by bins at night and been chilled by its high-pitched scream. And yet we long to stroke the tumbling cubs outside their tunnel homes and watch the vixen stalk the cornfield. There is something about foxes. They captivate us like no other species. Exploring a long and sometimes complicated relationship, The Wild Life of the Fox captures our love - and sometimes loathing - of this magnificent creature in vivid detail and lyrical prose.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped - and about human folly.

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth's surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century. And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider--it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought. Jay Owen's Dust sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight.

What is it that helps both scorpions and cyclists to survive? What do raw eggs and gyroscopes have in common? And why does it matter? In an age of string theory, fluid dynamics and biophysics, it can seem as if the science of our world is for only specialists and academics. Not so, insists Helen Czerski - and in this sparkling new audiobook she explores the patterns and connections that illustrate the grandest theories in the smallest everyday objects and experiences.

At dusk on 24 September 1975, Doug Scott and Dougal Haston became the first Britons to reach the summit of Everest as lead climbers on Chris Bonington's epic expedition to the mountain's immense south-west face. As darkness fell, Scott and Haston scraped a small cave in the snow 100 metres below the summit and survived the highest bivouac ever - without bottled oxygen, sleeping bags and, as it turned out, frostbite.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

Dinosaurs. No other class of animals captures the hearts of both children and adults alike. Paleontologist Armin Schmitt brings us a firsthand account of the latest research on dinosaurs and their lives millions of years ago, including his spectacular global excavations and fascinating discoveries in the field. With the help of cutting-edge technology and unbelievable new finds, the age-old tale of the dinosaurs is now revitalized for the very first time, complete with astonishing illustrations by Ben Rennen that help us imagine dinosaurs like never before.

Climate change is a major topic of concern today and will be so for the foreseeable future, as predicted changes in global temperatures, rainfall, and sea level continue to take place. But as Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams reveal in The Goldilocks Planet, the climatic changes we are experiencing today hardly compare to the changes the Earth has seen over the last 4.5 billion years.

Mars, the red planet, is ingrained in our culture, from David Bowie's extra-terrestrial spiders to Captain Scarlet to War of the Worlds. It has inspired hundreds of authors, scientists and science-fiction writers - but why? What is it about this particular planet that makes it so intriguing? Ancient mythologies defined Mars as a violent harbinger of war, star-gazers puzzled over its peculiar motion, and astrologers defined human personalities by its position and bizarre dance through the sky.

Where is the best place to find life beyond Earth? We often look to Mars as the most promising site in our solar system, but recent scientific missions have revealed that some of the most habitable real estate may actually lie farther away. Beneath the frozen crusts of several of the small, ice-covered moons of Jupiter and Saturn lurk vast oceans that may have been in existence for as long as Earth, and together may contain more than 50 times its total volume of liquid water. Could there be organisms living in their depths?

Drawing on his decades of field research and up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest science, renowned geologist Andrew H. Knoll delivers a rigorous yet accessible biography of Earth, charting our home planet's epic 4.6 billion-year story. Placing 21st-century climate change in deep context, A Brief History of Earth is an indispensable look at where we’ve been and where we’re going.