Everyone smells! The sense of smell plays a crucial part in survival, communication, and taste, and is the basis of a multi-billion-dollar industry. But, despite all this, it’s the sense we often know least about.

This hilarious and fact-packed book puts that right. Find out everything you could ever want to know about stinks, whiffs and pongs, from the...

Any realistic response to climate change will require reducing carbon emissions to a sustainable level. Yet even people who already recognize that the climate is the most urgent issue facing the planet struggle to understand their individual responsibilities. Is it even possible to live with a sustainable carbon footprint in modern American society—much...

How do we say goodbye to a loved one after they die? This book broaches a difficult topic in a heartfelt way by exploring the beauty in how animals mourn. From elephants to whales, parrots to bonobos, and lemurs to humans, we all have rituals to commemorate our loved ones and to lift each other up in difficult times.

New from the award-winning team...

A leading physician and scientist explains how a series of scientific breakthroughs led to the medical scandal of the decade

In November 2018, Dr. He Jiankui of Shenzhen, China, announced via YouTube that he had made the world’s first gene-edited babies. It soon became clear that this was not a historic scientific achievement, but rather a historic ethical...

Providing a cover for our delicate and intricate bodies, the skin is our largest and fastest-growing organ. We see it, touch it, and live in it every day. It is a habitat for a mesmerizingly complex world of micro-organisms and physical functions that are vital to our health and our survival. It is also a waste removal plant, a warning system for underlying...

A call for the Left and Right — the business community and environmentalists, bankers and activists — to join together, reclaim capitalism, and force profits to align with the planet.

A warming climate and a general distrust of Wall Street has opened a new cultural divide: anti-market critics from Naomi Klein to the Pope target capitalism itself as a root...

Inside the difficult questions about humanity's search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

What will happen if humanity makes contact with another civilization on a different planet? In The Contact Paradox, space journalist Keith Cooper tackles some of the myths and assumptions that underlie SETI--the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

In 1974 a...

A groundbreaking study that transforms how we see and address the most misunderstood problem on college campuses: widespread sexual assault.

The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience. And for far too many students, that fear is realized. Research has shown that by the time they graduate, as many as one in...

A revelatory investigation of friendship, with profound implications for our understanding of what humans and animals alike need to thrive across a lifetime.

The phenomenon of friendship is universal and elemental. Friends, after all, are the family we choose. But what makes these bonds not just pleasant but essential, and how do they affect our bodies and...

Every year in the United States, 12% of all births are preterm births, 5% of all babies need help to breathe at birth, and 3% of neonates are born with at least one severe malformation. Many of these babies are hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit. Annie Janvier and her husband, Keith Barrington, are both pediatricians who specialize in the care...

Facing droughts, floods, and water security challenges, society is increasingly forced to develop new policies and practices to cope with the impacts of climate change. From taken-for-granted values and perceptions to embodied, existential modes of engaging our world, human perspectives impact decision-making and behavior.

The Wonder of Water explores how...

Free yourself from cosmological tyranny!

Everything started in a big bang? Invisible dark matter? Black holes? Why accept such a weird cosmos?

For all those who wonder about this bizarre universe, and those who want to overthrow the big bang, this handbook gives you 'just the facts': the observations that have shaped these ideas and theories.

While the big...

Sometimes solving climate change seems impossibly complex, and it is hard to know what changes we all can and should make to help.

This book offers hope. Drawing on the latest research, Mark Jaccard shows us how to recognize the absolutely essential actions (decarbonizing electricity and transport) and policies (regulations that phase out coal plants and...

Sigmund Freud's theories on the unconscious revolutionized the way we approach human behavior. This accessible and entertaining guide introduces Freud's key ideas, including:

• Psychoanalysis and its principles
• Therapeutic techniques such as dream analysis and hypnosis
• Psychosexual development, including the Oedipus complex
• The ego, id and superego
• Life...

Most of us crave new experiences and sensations. Whether it's our attraction to that new burger place or the latest gadget, newness tugs at us. But what about those who can't seem to get enough? They jump out of planes, climb skyscrapers, and will eat anything (even poisonous pufferfish) … Prompting others to ask 'what's wrong' with them. These are high...

Through his pioneering work in science, technology and language design, Stephen Wolfram has developed his own signature way of thinking about an impressive range of subjects. In this lively book of essays, Wolfram takes the reader along on some of his most surprising and engaging intellectual adventures. From science consulting for a Hollywood movie...

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers-—and why they often go wrong.

How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust...

The future of food depends on tiny seeds in orchards and fields the world over. In 1943, one of the first to recognize this fact, the great botanist Nikolay Vavilov, lay dying of starvation in a Soviet prison. In the years before Stalin jailed him as a scapegoat for the country's famines, Vavilov had traveled across five continents, collecting hundreds of...

"If you care about science-or a scientist- this will be the most important book you'll ever read," says Randy Olson of his Don't Be Such a Scientist. He's only half joking.

In the United States we have a clear communication gap between the world of science and the general public. For starters, the vast majority of scientists say evolution is a...

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Conventional management approaches cannot meet the challenges faced by ocean and coastal ecosystems today. Consequently, national and international bodies have called for a shift toward more comprehensive ecosystem-based marine management. Synthesizing a vast amount of current knowledge, Ecosystem-Based Management for the Oceans is a...

“The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger” and “Hero of the Environment 2009” --Time Magazine

“I trust Joe Romm on climate.” -- Paul Krugman, New York Times

“America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger” and one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America” -- Rolling Stone

“One of the most influential energy and environmental policy...

The central concept guiding the management of parks and wilderness has been "naturalness" - to a large extent the explicit purpose in establishing these special areas was to keep them in their "natural" state. But what does that mean, particularly as the effects of stressors such as habitat fragmentation, altered disturbance regimes, invasive species, and...

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Most scientists and researchers aren’t prepared to talk to the press or to policymakers—or deal with backlash. Many have the horror stories to prove it. What’s clear, according to Nancy Baron, is that scientists, journalists and public policymakers come from different cultures. They follow different sets of rules, pursue different goals...

For more than three decades, David Orr has been one of the leading voices of the environmental movement, championing the cause of ecological literacy in higher education, helping to establish and shape the field of ecological design, and working tirelessly to raise awareness of the threats to future generations posed by humanity's current unsustainable...

First developed in the 1880s as a way to monitor glaciers in Europe, repeat photography -the practice of taking photographs at different points in times from the same physical vantage point-remains an essential and cost-effective technique for scientists and researchers working to track and study landscape change.

This volume explores the technical...

Seasonally Dry Tropical Forests brings together a range of experts in diverse fields including biology, ecology, biogeography, and biogeochemistry, to review, synthesize, and explain the current state of our collective knowledge on the ecology and conservation of this endangered ecosystem.

The book offers a synthetic and cross-disciplinary review of...

Robert J. Cabin uses the restoration of tropical dry forestland in Hawaii as an in-depth case study to investigate the scientific, practical, and philosophical issues associated with performing ecological restoration in the messy real world.
Interweaving entertaining narratives of his own on-the-ground experiences as a practicing restorationist with...

Restoration ecology is a young field that integrates theory and knowledge from a range of disciplines, including the biological, physical, and social sciences as well as the humanities. This new textbook, written for upper-division undergraduates and first-year graduate students, offers a real-life introduction to the field and an interdisciplinary...

It's a tough time to be a scientist: universities are shuttering science departments, federal funding agencies are facing flat budgets, and many newspapers have dropped their science sections altogether. But according to Marc Kuchner, this antiscience climate doesn't have to equal a career death knell-it just means scientists have to be savvier about...

Just as people schedule regular check-ups with physicians, our planet needs regular check-ups to catch issues as early as possible, before they become more serious and harder to heal. That is the much-needed service provided on a global scale by the Worldwatch Institute in this new book, Vital Signs 2012.
By taking stock of global consumption, Vital...

In 2006, Resilience Thinking addressed an essential question: As the natural systems that sustain us are subjected to shock after shock, how much can they take and still deliver the services we need from them? This idea caught the attention of both the scientific community and the general public.
In Resilience Practice, authors Brian Walker and David...

Climate and Conservation presents case studies from around the world of leading-edge projects focused on climate change adaptation-regional-scale endeavors where scientists, managers, and practitioners are working to protect biodiversity by protecting landscapes and seascapes in response to threats posed by climate change.

The book begins with...