Since that time he has answered thousands of questions about birds, both at his store and while walking down the aisles of the supermarket. The questions have ranged from inquiries about individual species ("Are flamingos really real?") to what and when to feed birds ("Should I bring in my feeders for the summer?") to the down-and-dirty specifics of backyard birding ("Why are the birds dropping poop in my pool?"). Answering the questions has been easy; keeping a straight face has been hard.Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches? is the solution for the beginning birder who already has a book that explains the slight variation between Common Ground-Doves and Ruddy Ground-Doves but who is really much more interested in why birds sing at 4:30 A.M. instead of 7:00 A.M., or whether it's okay to feed bread to birds, or how birds rediscover your feeders so quickly when you've just filled them after a long vacation. Or, for that matter, whether flamingos are really real.

    Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.

    Welcome to laughing until it hurts while covered in bodily fluids. Welcome to simple math at very high stakes. Welcome to an incredibly inappropriate sense of humor. Welcome to serving people on the most stressful days of their lives. Welcome to putting your hands in places you never imagined they'd be. Welcome to your front row seat to the ballad of life and death. That's not the welcome that this nurse was looking for, but that's the one he got. Irreverent and audacious, this brutally honest memoir covers what it’s like to come of age in an American Hospital. Welcome to a rollicking peak behind the curtain to what medical providers, and the health care system, are truly like.

    You’ll find it fun to read too - written in simple, everyday language.And, if you’re like most people, you’ll find that learning “why” the law of attraction works will pour rocket fuel into your belief in it. And attaining such a level of belief will allow you to unleash the law of attraction more powerfully than you’ve done previously. Why Quantum Physicists Create More Abundance removes your barriers of doubt and resistance concerning the law of attraction. It can be a very powerful tool for you, helping you soar past previous frustrations and manifesting a life much more closely aligned with your dreams and desires.

    

    The nature of football continually changes, which means its analysis must also keep pace. This book is for students, thinkers, and theorists of the game.'Ted Hopkins - Carlton premiership player, author, and co-founder of Champion Data. Australian Rules football has been described as the most data-rich sport on Earth. Every time and everywhere an AFL side takes to the field, it is shadowed by an army of statisticians and number crunchers. The information they gather has become the sport's new language and currency. ABC journalist James Coventry, author of the acclaimed Time and Space, has joined forces with a group of razor-sharp analysts to decipher the data, and to use it to question some of football's long-held truisms. Do umpires really favour the home side? Has goal kicking accuracy deteriorated? Is Geelong the true master of the draft? Are blonds unfairly favoured in Brownlow medal voting? And are Victorians the most passionate fans? Through a blend of entertaining storytelling and expert analysis, this book will answer more questions about footy than you ever thought to ask. Praise for Time and Space:'Brilliant, masterful' - The Guardian'Arguably one of the most important books yet written on Australian Rules football.' - Inside History'Should find its way into the hands of every coach.' - AFL Record

    The trilobites, which dominated the ocean floors for 300 million years, are gone. The last of the dinosaurs was wiped out by a Mount Everest-sized meteorite that slammed into the earth 65 million years ago. The great flying reptiles are gone, and so are the marine reptiles, some of them larger than a humpback whale. Before humans crossed the Bering land bridge some 15,000 years ago, North America was populated by mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, and cave bears. They too are MIA. Passenger pigeons once flew over North America in flocks that numbered in the billions; the last one died in 1914.In this book you will meet creatures that were driven to extinction even more recently, as well as some that were brought back from the brink. You will even encounter animals not known to exist until recently -- an antidote to extinction.

    They have also become vibrant educational centers, full of engaging exhibits that share those discoveries with students and an enthusiastic general public.   At the heart of it all from the very start have been curators. Yet after three decades as a natural history curator, Lance Grande found that he still had to explain to people what he does. This book is the answer—and, oh, what an answer it is: lively, exciting, up-to-date, it offers a portrait of curators and their research  like none we’ve seen, one that conveys the intellectual excitement and the educational and social value of curation. Grande uses the personal story of his own career—most of it spent at Chicago’s storied Field Museum—to structure his account as he explores the value of research and collections, the importance of public engagement, changing ecological and ethical considerations, and the impact of rapidly improving technology. Throughout, we are guided by Grande’s keen sense of mission, of a job where the why is always as important as the what.   This beautifully written and richly illustrated book is a clear-eyed but loving account of natural history museums, their curators, and their ever-expanding roles in the twenty-first century.

    These great beasts, or “megafauna,” lived on every habitable continent and on many islands. With a handful of exceptions, all are now gone.What caused the disappearance of these prehistoric behemoths? No one event can be pinpointed as a specific cause, but several factors may have played a role. Paleomammalogist Ross D. E. MacPhee explores them all, examining the leading extinction theories, weighing the evidence, and presenting his own conclusions. He shows how theories of human overhunting and catastrophic climate change fail to account for critical features of these extinctions, and how new thinking is needed to elucidate these mysterious losses.Along the way, we learn how time is determined in earth history; how DNA is used to explain the genomics and phylogenetic history of megafauna—and how synthetic biology and genetic engineering may be able to reintroduce these giants of the past. Until then, gorgeous four-color illustrations by Peter Schouten re-create these megabeasts here in vivid detail.

    In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.

    The narcissist provides the direct and no-nonsense explanations and answers to the questions which matter most to you. The narcissist manages to keep a hook in you by leaving you with unanswered questions. These questions prevent you from gaining understanding, make you susceptible to the pull of the narcissist in the future and cause you untold anguish and anxiety. Not any more. A range of incisive questions covering the narcissistic spectrum of behaviours have been posed by those who have been on the receiving end of narcissistic behaviour. Real questions posed by those who know exactly what it is like to be held in the grasp of the narcissist. Real answers provided by the narcissist himself which will provide understanding, enlightenment and freedom.

    All of those organisms are rooted in a single origin, with a common code that underwrites our existence. This paradox - that our biology is indistinct from all life, yet we consider ourselves to be special - lies at the heart of who we are.In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores how many of the things once considered to be exclusively human are not: we are not the only species that communicates, makes tools, utilises fire, or has sex for reasons other than to make new versions of ourselves. Evolution has, however, allowed us to develop our culture to a level of complexity that outstrips any other observed in nature.THE BOOK OF HUMANS tells the story of how we became the creatures we are today, bestowed with the unique ability to investigate what makes us who we are. Illuminated by the latest scientific discoveries, it is a thrilling compendium of what unequivocally fixes us as animals, and reveals how we are extraordinary among them.

    In the life and career of underseaexplorer Jacques Cousteau, that legacy beats in the heart of the sea and inthe heart of his son, Jean-Michel, the noted French environmentalist,educator and documentary film producer who has spent most of his adult lifenurturing the work of his famous father.In My Father, The Captain, Jean-Michel Cousteau takes an open and intimate look at the life he shared with his father, and the legend he has taken itupon himself to carry. In so doing, he hopes to shed new and meaningfullight on the life and work of a man who inspired millions to reconsider ourrelationship with the sea and its creatures-and, in the process, tounderstand a little more about himself and his family as well."Captain Cousteau was a complicated man," the younger Cousteau writes. "Hewas a man of many different personalities, many different moods. But thisis how it is with all great men, yes? We know the public mask, but it isthe private face that reveals a man's true character. It is the man weknow when the cameras are not filming."My Father, The Captain is shot-through with new material and fresh insight"into the life and mind of a man who helped to jump-start a globa"conservation effort that continues to flourish. Jean-Michel Cousteau an"his collaborator, New York Times best-selling author Daniel Paisner, offe"an intimate reappraisal of the many touchstone moments Jean-Michel share"with his father, as well as the seminal moments from his father's life tha"have become part of the Cousteau family lore and legend.

    These first geologists were made up primarily, and inevitably, of gentlemen with the necessary wealth to support their interests, yet boosting their numbers, expanding their learning and increasing their findings were clergymen, academics – and women. This lively and eclectic collection of characters brought passion, eccentricity and towering intellect to geology and Brenda Maddox in Reading the Rocks does them full justice, bringing them to vivid life. The new science of geology was pursued by this assorted band not only because they loved it but also because it opened a window on Earth's ancient past. They showed great courage in facing the conflict between geology and Genesis that immediately presented itself: for the rocks and fossils being dug up showed that the Earth was immeasurably old, rather than springing from a creation made in the six days that the Bible claimed. Moreover, the fossil evidence revealed upward progress in the changing forms of life. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin was a keen geologist.The individual stories of these first geologists, their hope and fears, triumphs and disappointments, the theological, philosophical and scientific debates their findings provoked, and the way that as a group, they were to change irrevocably and dramatically our understanding of the world is told by Brenda Maddox with a storyteller's skill and a fellow scientist's understanding. The effect is absorbing, revelatory and strikingly original. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/reading-...

    Written for the non-scientist, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's living matter-air, ocean, and land surfaces-forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life. Since Gaia was first published, many of Jim Lovelock's predictions have come true, and his theory has become a hotly argued topic in scientific circles. Here, in a new Preface, Lovelock outlines his present state of the debate.