Despite this brutal logic, some species have learned to survive in even the most hostile conditions. Others couldn't—and perished. While incremental genetic adaptations hone the physiology of nearly every creature on this planet, there's another evolutionary force that is just as important: the power of choice. In this explosive investigation into the limits of endurance, journalist Scott Carney discovers how humans can wedge control over automatic physiological responses into the breaking point between stress and biology. We can reclaim our evolutionary destiny.In his New York Times bestseller, What Doesn't Kill Us, Carney submerged himself in ice water and learned breathing techniques from daredevil fitness guru Wim Hof. It gave him superhuman levels of endurance and quieted a persistent autoimmune illness. At the core of those methods is a technique called The Wedge that can give a person an edge in just about any situation.In this thrilling exploration into the human body's potential, Carney searches the globe for people who understand the subtle language of how the body responds to its environment. He confronts fear at a cutting-edge neuroscience laboratory at Stanford, and learns about flow states by tossing heavy weights with partners. He meets masters of mental misdirection in the heat of a Latvian sauna, experiments with breathing routines that bring him to the cusp of transcendence, searches his mind in sensory deprivation tanks, and ultimately ends up in the Amazon jungle with a shaman who promises either madness or universal truth. All of this in service of trying to understand what we're really capable of. What can we accomplish when we there are no true human limits?

    By weaving together their own research, interviews with pioneering scientists and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

    This crash course in brewing chemistry makes it easy for every homebrewer to make better beer. Using simple language and helpful diagrams, Lee W. Janson guides you through every chemical reaction in the brewing process and explains how you can avoid potential problems. Steer away from common mistakes in taste, fermentation, and alcohol content, and use your newfound knowledge to successfully brew your most delicious beer yet.

    Readers take an extraordinary trip, starting in the 1600s with an alchemist's air conditioning of Westminster Abbey and scientists' creation of thermometers. Later, while entrepreneurs sold Walden Pond ice to tropical countries -- packed in "high-tech" sawdust -- researchers pursued absolute zero and interpreted their work as romantically as did adventurers to remote regions. Today, playing with ultracold temperatures is one of the hottest frontiers in physics, with scientists creating useful particles Einstein only dreamed of. Tom Shachtman shares a great scientific adventure story and its characters' rich lives in a book that has won a grant from the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Absolute Zero is for everyone who loves history and science history stories, who's eager to explore Nobel Prize-winning physics today, or who has ever sighed with pleasure on encountering air conditioning.

    This “privileged moment for change” prepares people to be receptive to a message before they experience it. Optimal persuasion is achieved only through optimal pre-suasion. In other words, to change “minds” a pre-suader must also change “states of mind.”His first solo work in over thirty years, Cialdini’s Pre-Suasion draws on his extensive experience as the most cited social psychologist of our time and explains the techniques a person should implement to become a master persuader. Altering a listener’s attitudes, beliefs, or experiences isn’t necessary, says Cialdini—all that’s required is for a communicator to redirect the audience’s focus of attention before a relevant action.From studies on advertising imagery to treating opiate addiction, from the annual letters of Berkshire Hathaway to the annals of history, Cialdini draws on an array of studies and narratives to outline the specific techniques you can use on online marketing campaigns and even effective wartime propaganda. He illustrates how the artful diversion of attention leads to successful pre-suasion and gets your targeted audience primed and ready to say, “Yes.”

    Starting once again with fossils, he turns his gaze skyward, showing us how the entirety of the universe’s fourteen-billion-year history can be seen in our bodies. As he moves from our very molecular composition (a result of stellar events at the origin of our solar system) through the workings of our eyes, Shubin makes clear how the evolution of the cosmos has profoundly marked our own bodies. Fully illustrated with black and white drawings.

    It's goal is the successful design and operation of chemical reactors. This text emphasizes qualitative arguments, simple design methods, graphical procedures, and frequent comparison of capabilities of the major reactor types. Simple ideas are treated first, and are then extended to the more complex.

    Brenda Maddox tells a powerful story of a remarkably single-minded, forthright, and tempestuous young woman who, at the age of fifteen, decided she was going to be a scientist, but who was airbrushed out of the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century.

    You will be disgusted and amazed.'Graham Young, confessing his crimes to detectivesThere are few criminal cases more astonishing yet less well-known than that of Graham Young. A quintessentially British crime story, it involves two sensational trials, murders both certain and probable, a clutch of forgiving relatives, and scores of surviving victims.A Passion for Poison tells the absorbing life of master poisoner, Graham Young, who killed many tens of people in a murderous career, which began as a 13 year-old schoolboy in a North-west London suburb, with the murder of his step-mother in 1960 before culminating in four further life sentences in 1971.Best-selling true crime writer, Carol Ann Lee takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through suburban streets with which we are all familiar, but where the commonplace - dull, even - soon becomes oppressively sinister. Set against the backdrop of modern Britain, from post-war austerity to the gloom and glam of the 1970s, it sheds light on a rapidly changing society and a gruesome British true crime story.

    Finding the visual form of data can simplify this deluge into pearls of understanding.” —Kim Rees, Periscopic    The most creative and effective data visualizations from the past year, edited by Brain Pickings creator Maria Popova   The rise of infographics across nearly all print and electronic media—from a graphic illuminating the tweets of the women of Isis to a memorable depiction of the national geography of beer—reveals patterns in our lives and the world in often startling ways. The Best American Infographics 2015 showcases visualizations from the worlds of politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more. From an elegant graphic comparison of first sentences in classic novels to a startling illustration of the world’s deadliest animals, “You’ll come away with more than your share of . . . mind-bending moments—and a wide-ranging view of what infographics can do” (Harvard Business Review). “This is what information design does at its best – it gives pause, makes visible the unsuspected yet significant invisibilia of life, and by astonishing us into mobilization, it catapults us toward one of the greatest feats of human courage: the act of changing one’s mind.”—from the Introduction by Maria Popova Guest introducer MARIA POPOVA is the one-woman curation machine behind Brain Pickings, a cross-disciplinary blog showcasing content that makes people smarter. She has more than half a million monthly readers and over 480,000 Twitter followers. Popova is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow and has written for the New York Times, Atlantic, Wired UK, GOOD Magazine, The Huffington Post, and the Nieman Journalism Lab.   Series editor GARETH COOK is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, and the editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American’s neuroscience blog.  He helped invent the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section and served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. His work has also appeared in NewYorker.com, WIRED, Scientific American, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

    Until, one dark and stormy night, her latest experiment goes awry and her newest creation COMES TO LIFE!A picture book twist on horror movies like Frankenstein and The Blob, that also explores the scientific method and the importance of recording observations and results. The author has also included a couple of Victoria’s best slime recipes, although you'll notice the secret formula for making a Frankenstein slime is missing.