To find a meal, the female bolas spider releases pheromones that mimic a female moth, luring male moths into her sticky lasso web. The Glyptapanteles wasp injects a caterpillar with her young, which feed on the victim, erupt out of it, then mind-control the poor (and somehow still living) schmuck into protecting them from predators.These are among the curious critters of The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, a jaunt through evolution’s most unbelievable, most ingenious solutions to the problems of everyday life, from trying to get laid to finding food. Join Wired science writer Matt Simon as he introduces you to the creatures that have it figured out, the ones that joust with their mustaches or choke sharks to death with snot, all in a wild struggle to survive and, of course, find true love.

    Gonzalez-Crussi, from the Introduction An international bestseller, translated into eighteen languages, Paul de Kruif’s classic account of the first scientists to see and learn about the microscopic world continues to fascinate new readers. This is a timeless dramatization of the scientists, bacteriologists, doctors, and medical technicians who discovered the microbes and invented the vaccines to counter them. De Kruif writes about how seemingly simple but really fundamental discovers of science—for instance, how a microbe was first viewed in a clear drop of rain water, and when, for the first time, Louis Pasteur discovered that a simple vaccine could save a man from the ravages of rabies by attacking the microbes that cause it.

    Their tools in this hunt are both fossils and cutting-edge genetic technologies. Some of these scientists are driven by sheer curiosity; others view the lost species as a powerful weapon in the fight to preserve rapidly changing ecosystems. It seems certain that these animals will walk the earth again, but what world will that give us? And is any of this a good idea? Science journalist Torill Kornfeldt travelled the world to meet the men and women working to bring these animals back from the dead. Along the way, she has seen the mammoth that has been frozen for 20,000 years, and visited the places where these furry giants will live again.

    In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been ex....

    Providing a concise introduction to abstract algebra, this work unfolds some of the fundamental systems with the aim of reaching applicable, significant results.

    He untangles the pattern of interconnecting events, the accidents of time, circumstance, and place that gave rise to major inventions of the world. Says Burke, "My purpose is to acquaint the reader with some of the forces that have caused change in the past, looking in particular at eight innovations - the computer, the production line, telecommunications, the airplane, the atomic bomb, plastics, the guided rocket, and television - which may be most influential in structuring our own futures.... Each one of these is part of a family of similar devices, and is the result of a sequence of closely connected events extending from the ancient world until the present day. Each has enormous potential for humankind's benefit - or destruction."

    In Denialism, New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter reveals that Americans have come to mistrust institutions and especially the institution of science more today than ever before. For centuries, the general view had been that science is neither good nor bad—that it merely supplies information and that new information is always beneficial. Now, science is viewed as a political constituency that isn’t always in our best interest. We live in a world where the leaders of African nations prefer to let their citizens starve to death rather than import genetically modified grains. Childhood vaccines have proven to be the most effective public health measure in history, yet people march on Washington to protest their use. In the United States a growing series of studies show that dietary supplements and “natural” cures have almost no value, and often cause harm. We still spend billions of dollars on them. In hundreds of the best universities in the world, laboratories are anonymous, unmarked, and surrounded by platoons of security guards—such is the opposition to any research that includes experiments with animals. And pharmaceutical companies that just forty years ago were perhaps the most visible symbol of our remarkable advance against disease have increasingly been seen as callous corporations propelled solely by avarice and greed. As Michael Specter sees it, this amounts to a war against progress. The issues may be complex but the choices are not: Are we going to continue to embrace new technologies, along with acknowledging their limitations and threats, or are we ready to slink back into an era of magical thinking? In Denialism, Specter makes an argument for a new Enlightenment, the revival of an approach to the physical world that was stunningly effective for hundreds of years: What can be understood and reliably repeated by experiment is what nature regarded as true. Now, at the time of mankind’s greatest scientific advances—and our greatest need for them—that deal must be renewed.

    Konrad Lorenz was gifted with a similar power of understanding the animal world. He was that rare beast, a brilliant scientist who could write (and indeed draw) beautifully. He did more than any other person to establish and popularize the study of how animals behave, receiving a Nobel Prize for his work. King Solomon's Ring, the book which brought him worldwide recognition, is a delightful treasury of observations and insights into the lives of all sorts of creatures, from jackdaws and water-shrews to dogs, cats and even wolves. Charmingly illustrated by Lorenz himself, this book is a wonderfully written introduction to the world of our furred and feathered friends, a world which often provides an uncanny resemblance to our own. A must for any animal-lover!

    In Code Breaking , Rudolf Kippenhahn offers readers both an exciting chronicle of cryptography and a lively exploration of the cryptographer’s craft. Rich with vivid anecdotes from a history of coding and decoding and featuring three new chapters, this revised and expanded edition makes the often abstruse art of deciphering coded messages accessible to the general reader and reveals the relevance of codes to our everyday high-tech society. A stylishly written, meticulously researched adventure, Code Breaking explores the ways in which communication can be obscured and, like magic, made clear again.

    Described on the book jacket as an "autodidact extraordinaire," Zacks is also the author of History Laid Bare, making him something of an expert guide through history's back alleys and side streets. There's no fact too seamy or perverse for Zacks to drag out into the light of day, from matters scatological and sexual to some of history's most truly bizarre episodes. Curious about ancient nose-blowing etiquette? What about the sexual proclivities of Catherine the Great? Throughout chapters such as "The Evolution of Underwear" and "Dentistry Before Novocaine," Zacks proves a tireless debunker of popular myths as well as a muckraker par excellence.

    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context.  Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science.

    For among the finches of Daphne Major, natural selection is neither rare nor slow: it is taking place by the hour, and we can watch.In this dramatic story of groundbreaking scientific research, Jonathan Weiner follows these scientists as they watch Darwin's finches and come up with a new understanding of life itself. The Beak of the Finch is an elegantly written and compelling masterpiece of theory and explication in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould.With a new preface.

    Stewart's Calculus is successful throughout the world because he explains the material in a way that makes sense to a wide variety of readers. His explanations make ideas come alive, and his problems challenge, to reveal the beauty of calculus. Stewart's examples stand out because they are not just models for problem solving or a means of demonstrating techniques--they also encourage readers to develp an analytic view of the subject. This edition includes new problems, examples, and projects. This version of Stewart's book introduced exponential and logarithmic functions in the first chapter and their limits and derivatives are found in Chapters 2 and 3.

    In 1996 Joseph LeDoux's "The Emotional Brain" presented a revelatory examination of the biological bases of our emotions and memories. Now, the world-renowned expert on the brain has produced with a groundbreaking work that tells a more profound story: how the little spaces between the neurons-the brain's synapses--are the channels through which we think, act, imagine, feel, and remember. Synapses encode the essence of personality, enabling each of us to function as a distinctive, integrated individual from moment to moment. Exploring the functioning of memory, the synaptic basis of mental illness and drug addiction, and the mechanism of self-awareness, "Synaptic Self" is a provocative and mind-expanding work that is destined to become a classic.

    The volatile debate was at first carried on in academic journals and in magazines like Nature and Scientific American. It even engaged the attention of leading evolutionists like Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg and prominent naturalist Stephen Jay Gould. Johnson was invited to debate several of his opponents at universities across the country. And he was himself the subject of debate: Michael Ruse, author of Darwinism Defended, spoke at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on the topic "Nonliteralist Anti-Evolutionism: The Case of Phillip Johnson."Darwin on Trial also shook up theistic evolutionists. William Hasker (Huntington College, Indiana) in the Christian Scholar's Review, Howard Van Till (Calvin College, Michigan) in First Things and Owen Gingerich (Harvard Center for Astrophysics) in Perspectives on Science & the Christian Faith all published their critiques of Darwin on Trial.Clearly, Johnson's arguments have been taken seriously by Darwinists of every sort. And though at first the mainstream press seemed to be out of earshot (except for reviews in Publisher's Weekly and The National Review), news of Darwin on Trial eventually reached wider audiences. Last summer, Johnson appeared with William F. Buckley on Firing Line. And in May 1995 he was interviewed on the PBS telecast In the Beginning: The Creationist Controversy with Randall Balmer. These and other indications of expanding interest in his critique is good news for all who wish to bring the debate over Darwinism into the bright light of day.