Should you act like ‘top dog’ to maintain control? No, you’re better off displaying your friendliness – and not just to your dog. Which breed is the cleverest? That’s the wrong question to ask.These are just some of the extraordinary insights to be found in 'The Genius of Dogs' – the seminal book on how dogs evolved their unique intelligence by award-winning scientist Dr Brian Hare. He shares more than two decades of startling discoveries about the mysteries of the dog mind and how you can use his groundbreaking work to build a better relationship with your own dog.

    He made pilgrimages to true time capsules like a remote lagoon in Western Australia, spent time in research collections photographing forms of microscopic life, and even found ways to create visual parallels between the growth of organs in the human body and the patterns seen on the surface of the earth. The resulting volume is a glorious picture book of planet earth depicting the amazing biodiversity that surrounds us all. Lanting's true gift lies beyond his technical mastery: it is his eye for geometry in the beautiful chaos of nature that allows him to show us the world as it has never been seen before. From crabs to jellyfish, diatoms to vast geological formations, jungles to flowers, monkeys to human embryos, LIFE is a testament to the magical beauty of life in all its forms and is Lanting's most remarkable achievement to date. The photographer: Dutch-born Frans Lanting has been hailed as one of the great nature photographers of our time. For the past two decades he has documented wildlife and our relationship with nature in environments from the Amazon to Antarctica. Exhibits of his photographs have been shown at major museums in Paris, Milan, Tokyo, New York, Madrid, and Amsterdam. Lanting's previous TASCHEN titles include Eye to Eye, Jungles, and Penguin. The editor: Christine Eckstrom is a writer and editor specializing in natural history. She collaborates with Lanting on fieldwork, books, and other publishing projects from their home base in California.

     A distraught woman who regrets not going to see a GP sooner. More Googled self-diagnoses than one can count… After three years as one of London’s doctors - as full-time night-time GP doing the house calls that no-one else wants to do - Alex Rudd has switched to working in surgeries. Rudd travels to a different place surgery each day, helping those struggling to cope with patient numbers and seeing those that might not otherwise be seen. With limited time to spend on each patient, he must walk the difficult line between caring for patients while diagnosing and prescribing efficiently. Hilarious diagnoses mix with genuine tragedies as Rudd sees a variety of patients, with all sorts of medical conditions. In this follow-up to “London Call-Out: Confessions of a Doctor in the Capital”, Rudd presents us with another window into the world of the freelance GP today, and the challenges they face. With moments that stir admiration and sadness, this timely and insightful memoir is as thought-provoking as it is entertaining.

    A three-dimensional journey is conveyed by the use of a window on the cover and cut-outs on each spread to show the Earth's layers. A double gatefold provides the starting point for this fascinating scientific adventure that explores territory never seen by humankind. Dimensions (inches): 10 x 12

    Keep your eyes on them. Oh, and make sure you have insurance.’Not the most comforting words of wisdom, but probably the most useful for a trainee vet, Jo would say. From well-equipped surgeries to windswept hills and ramshackle barns, Jo has to be able to diagnose and treat any animal, at any time of the day or night. It’s not quite as easy as James Herriot made it seem.Jo’s final year of training saw her race from rectal examinations of cows to spine surgery on a Great Dane, and from treating an eventing horse with a heart problem to inserting a contraceptive implant into a monkey.And then there were the owners – the tough guy who sobbed when his cat was diagnosed with cancer, the woman who was convinced her dog was embarrassed by its stomach upset, and the farmer who loved his cows as much as anyone loves their pets.Gruelling days of animal treatments and visits combined with long nights of study and revision made Jo’s final year of training the most demanding and rewarding year of her life. Her book tells of the highs and lows, the pets that stole her heart, and the lifelong friends that she made – with two legs and four.

    Few people know bears as intimately as Else Poulsen. She has raised bears, comforted bears, taught bears, learned from bears, had bears communicate their needs to her, and nursed bears back to health. This remarkable book reveals the many insights about bears and their lives that she has gained through her work with them. In the eighties, Poulsen became a zookeeper in Calgary, where she rehabilitated bears in crisis. She has shared in the joy of a polar bear discovering soil under her paws for the first time in twenty years, felt the pride of a cub learning to crack nuts with her molars, and grieved at the horror of captivity for Asian black bears in China.Smiling Bears provides an enlightening and moving portrait of bears in all their richness and complexity and of Poulsen's exhilarating work with them. Also available in paperback.

    He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

    Byrd set out on his second Antarctic expedition in 1934, he was already an international hero for having piloted the first flights over the North and South Poles. His plan for this latest adventure was to spend six months alone near the bottom of the world, gathering weather data and indulging his desire “to taste peace and quiet long enough to know how good they really are.” But early on things went terribly wrong. Isolated in the pervasive polar night with no hope of release until spring, Byrd began suffering inexplicable symptoms of mental and physical illness. By the time he discovered that carbon monoxide from a defective stovepipe was poisoning him, Byrd was already engaged in a monumental struggle to save his life and preserve his sanity.When Alone was first published in 1938, it became an enormous bestseller. This edition keeps alive Byrd’s unforgettable narrative for new generations of readers.

    For the past several years, acclaimed Science reporter Jon Cohen has been following the DNA hunt, as well as eye-opening new studies in ape communication, human evolution, disease, diet, and more.In Almost Chimpanzee, Cohen invites us on a captivating scientific journey, taking us behind the scenes in cutting-edge genetics labs, rain forests in Uganda, sanctuaries in Iowa, experimental enclaves in Japan, even the Detroit Zoo. Along the way, he ferries fresh chimp sperm for a time-sensitive analysis, gets greeted by pant-hoots and chimp feces, and investigates an audacious attempt to breed a humanzee. Cohen offers a fresh and often frankly humorous insider's tour of the latest research, which promises to lead to everything from insights about the unique ways our bodies work to shedding light on stubborn human-only problems, ranging from infertility and asthma to speech disorders.And in the end, Cohen explains why it's time to move on from Jane Goodall's plea that we focus on how the two species are alike and turns to examining why our differences matter in vital ways—for understanding humans and for increasing the chances to save the endangered chimpanzee.

     When Bronwen Dickey brought her new dog home, she saw no traces of the infamous viciousness in her affectionate, timid pit bull. Which made her wonder: How had the breed—beloved by Teddy Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and Hollywood’s “Little Rascals”—come to be known as a brutal fighter? Her search for answers takes her from nineteenth-century New York City dogfighting pits—the cruelty of which drew the attention of the recently formed ASPCA—to early twentieth‑century movie sets, where pit bulls cavorted with Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton; from the battlefields of Gettysburg and the Marne, where pit bulls earned presidential recognition, to desolate urban neighborhoods where the dogs were loved, prized—and sometimes brutalized. Whether through love or fear, hatred or devotion, humans are bound to the history of the pit bull. With unfailing thoughtfulness, compassion, and a firm grasp of scientific fact, Dickey offers us a clear-eyed portrait of this extraordinary breed, and an insightful view of Americans’ relationship with their dogs.

    What is going on inside the head of a nightingale as it sings, and how does its brain improvise? How do desert birds detect rain hundreds of kilometers away? How do birds navigate by using an innate magnetic compass?Tracing the history of how our knowledge about birds has grown, particularly through advances in technology over the past fifty years, Bird Sense tells captivating stories about how birds interact with one another and their environment. More advanced testing methods have debunked previously held beliefs, such as female starlings selecting mates based on how symmetrical the male's plumage markings are. (Whereas females can discern the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical markings, they are not very good at detecting small differences among symmetrically marked males!)Never before has there been a popular book about how intricately bird behavior is shaped by birds' senses. A lifetime spent studying birds has provided Tim Birkhead with a wealth of fieldwork experiences, insights, and a unique understanding of birds, all firmly grounded in science. No one who reads Bird Sense can fail to be dazzled by it.

    Follow dedicated wildlife officers as they use their wits and skills in the pursuit of poachers and wildlife law violators.”—Tom Mastin, forester and managing broker, Mossy Oak Properties Legacy Realty Services “Lee recounts his amazing and challenging career as a Florida game warden with wit, wisdom, and careful attention to detail. You will travel with him as he boats the St. Johns River, walk beside him as he wades past resting alligators, and listen for that gunshot on a cold Putnam County night.”—Jeff Hahr, former patrol supervisor, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission In the underbelly of Florida, hardened poachers operate in the dark, out of sight and away from residents who sleep soundly through the night. But poachers are not the only midnight hunters. In the state’s public wilderness tracts, cattle ranches, and water courses, wildlife thieves are stealthily and silently tracked. Most people have never imagined the often dicey, comical, and sometimes bizarre job of a Florida game warden. Backcountry Lawman tells what it’s like to catch an armed poacher in the act—alone, at night, without backup or a decent radio to call for help. These stories describe the cat-and-mouse games often played between game wardens and poachers of ducks, turkeys, hogs, deer, gators, and other species. Few people realize that “monkey fishing”—electrocution of catfish—had the same outlaw mystique in the rivers of Florida as moonshining once did in the hills of Georgia and Tennessee. With thirty years of backcountry patrol experience in Florida, Bob Lee has lived through incidents of legend, including one of the biggest environmental busts in Florida history. His fascinating memoir reveals the danger and the humor in the unsung exploits of game wardens.Bob H. Lee spent over three decades as a water patrol officer on the St. Johns River and a land patrol lieutenant in Putnam, St. Johns, and Flagler counties. Before retiring in 2007, he taught man-tracking classes through the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

    In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys.But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.

    While some liked the cut of his jib, others did not and England coach Duncan Fletcher already had a foot in the latter camp when Swann missed the bus for the first of two times on that tour. Suddenly he was judged on temperament and not talent. Although Swann candidly concedes he was nowhere near good enough for the top level at that stage in his career, his jettisoning back to county cricket for the next seven years, following a solitary one-day international, hinted at a career wasted. A clash with then Northamptonshire coach Kepler Wessels triggered his move to Nottinghamshire in 2005. A County Championship winner in his debut season, he was back in the England fold at the end of his third. Forever a flamboyant showman, he made up for lost time with two wickets in his first over against India—his habit of striking in his opening over a spell has become a party piece. You cannot keep the spotlight off him for long. Since moving into the top ten of the world rankings for bowlers on the back of eight wickets in the Ashes-defining Oval Test of 2009, he has not dropped outside it, and has been widely tipped to be the decisive factor in the defense of the urn in Australia.

    He has proven his ability to scientists exploring the nature of mediumship and has astounded them with the consistency and accuracy of his messages. Spirit Messenger is Gordon's first book, originally published in 2004, and in it he describes the development of his mediumistic skills and the training that he undertook to develop his extraordinary gifts. Since its publication, many people have asked Gordon for advice on how to develop their own psychic and mediumistic ability, and so he has added teaching, tips and practical exercises. Gordon tells you how to: recognize psychic abilities in children and remember your own psychic childhood experiences understand the difference between psychic awareness and tuning in to the spirit world develop your ability to hear messages from spirit learn the difference between your imagination and a true message.