Elizabeth Blackburn discovered a biological indicator called telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes telomeres, which protect our genetic heritage. Dr. Blackburn and Dr. Elissa Epel's research shows that the length and health of one's telomeres are a biological underpinning of the long-hypothesized mind-body connection. They and other scientists have found that changes we can make to our daily habits can protect our telomeres and increase our health spans (the number of years we remain healthy, active, and disease-free).THE TELOMERE EFFECT reveals how Blackburn and Epel's findings, together with research from colleagues around the world, cumulatively show that sleep quality, exercise, aspects of diet, and even certain chemicals profoundly affect our telomeres, and that chronic stress, negative thoughts, strained relationships, and even the wrong neighborhoods can eat away at them. Drawing from this scientific body of knowledge, they share lists of foods and suggest amounts and types of exercise that are healthy for our telomeres, mind tricks you can use to protect yourself from stress, and information about how to protect your children against developing shorter telomeres, from pregnancy through adolescence. And they describe how we can improve our health spans at the community level, with neighborhoods characterized by trust, green spaces, and safe streets. THE TELOMERE EFFECT will make you reassess how you live your life on a day-to-day basis. It is the first book to explain how we age at a cellular level and how we can make simple changes to keep our chromosomes and cells healthy, allowing us to stay disease-free longer and live more vital and meaningful lives.

    Humans have feared them for centuries, long considering them the assassins and pariahs of the natural world.Now, in Venomous, the biologist Christie Wilcox investigates and illuminates the animals of our nightmares, arguing that they hold the keys to a deeper understanding of evolution, adaptation, and immunity. She reveals just how venoms function and what they do to the human body. With Wilcox as our guide, we encounter a jellyfish with tentacles covered in stinging cells that can kill humans in minutes; a two-inch caterpillar with toxic bristles that trigger hemorrhaging; and a stunning blue-ringed octopus capable of inducing total paralysis. How do these animals go about their deadly work? How did they develop such intricate, potent toxins? Wilcox takes us around the world and down to the cellular level to find out.Throughout her journey, Wilcox meets the intrepid scientists who risk their lives studying these lethal beasts, as well as “self-immunizers” who deliberately expose themselves to snakebites. Along the way, she puts her own life on the line, narrowly avoiding being envenomated herself. Drawing on her own research, Wilcox explains how venom scientists are untangling the mechanisms of some of our most devastating diseases, and reports on pharmacologists who are already exploiting venoms to produce lifesaving drugs. We discover that venomous creatures are in fact keystone species that play crucial roles in their ecosystems and ours—and for this alone, they ought to be protected and appreciated.Thrilling and surprising at every turn, Venomous will change everything you thought you knew about the planet’s most dangerous animals.

    More and more people are discovering the power of their minds to shape the world around them faster than ever before. The question is: how do you create the reality of your design?Brian Scott wants to help you find the answer. After walking away unscathed from a near-fatal shooting in his home, Brian began a fanatical search for answers. He deepened his research into parallel realities, quantum mechanics, and consciousness to uncover what happened in his close call with death. Along the way, he developed a series of techniques capable of creating profound transformations.In The Reality Revolution: The Mind-Blowing Movement to Hack Your Reality, Brian introduces you to the techniques that have helped his clients find lasting love, create wealth, and revitalize health. You'll learn how to surf through parallel realities and unlock the power of your mind through a mix of researched and science-backed techniques like qi gong, meditation, quantum jumping, energy work, and reality transurfing. If you're ready to create an incredible reality for yourself, this book shows you the way.

    Including accessible primers on: • The early Ancient Greek philosophers and the ‘big three’: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle • Key schools of philosophy and their impact on modern life • Insights into the main questions philosophers have explored over the years: Who am I? What is the meaning of life? Do I have free will? • Practical applications for the theories of Descartes, Kant, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Nietzsche and many more. This illuminating little book will introduce you to the key thinkers, themes and theories you need to know to understand how human ideas have sculpted the world we live in and the way we think today.

    Some of their responses to those outbreaks are almost too strange to believe in hindsight. Get Well Soon delivers the gruesome, morbid details of some of the worst plagues we’ve suffered as a species, as well as stories of the heroic figures who selflessly fought to ease the suffering of their fellow man. With her signature mix of in-depth research and storytelling, and not a little dark humor, Jennifer Wright explores history’s most gripping and deadly outbreaks, and ultimately looks at the surprising ways they’ve shaped history and humanity for almost as long as anyone can remember.

    A paralyzed teen recovers overnight. A woman complains her breast implants speak. A man and his dog become gravely ill at the exact same time. These strange real-life cases and many more can be found in author and physician Clifton K. Meador’s newest collection, Fascinomas. Combining the word “fascinating” with the term for a tumor or growth, “fascinoma” is medical slang for an unusually interesting medical case. These are the extraordinary stories medical professionals recall forever and pass from one colleague to another in hospital lounges and hallways. Every medical professional has at least one fascinoma to tell, and in this collection of bizarre-but-true stories, Meador retells some of the most memorable. In the vein of Berton Roueché, the famed medical writer for The New Yorker, the author of True Medical Detective Stories is back with an all-new book of complex cases, where medical professionals must often race against the clock to find clues in the most unusual places. Fascinomas is an entertaining and informative collection for physicians, nurses, medical students and those who simply can’t get enough of bizarre clinical cases. Written from the point of view of an experienced doctor, the stories are crafted in an engaging style that can be enjoyed by medical professionals and laypeople alike. More than just interesting tales, however, these real-life mysteries serve as great examples of the need for doctors to listen closely to and ask the right questions of their patients, even in the computer age, when so much information is at their fingertips. Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and you never know where a crucial piece of evidence will be found by one of the detectives of the medical world.

    Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. People with migraines may see shimmering arcs of light or tiny, Lilliputian figures of animals and people. People with failing eyesight, paradoxically, may become immersed in a hallucinatory visual world. Hallucinations can be brought on by a simple fever or even the act of waking or falling asleep, when people have visions ranging from luminous blobs of color to beautifully detailed faces or terrifying ogres. Those who are bereaved may receive comforting “visits” from the departed. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one’s own body. Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks had both a personal and a professional interest in psychedelics. These, along with his early migraine experiences, launched a lifelong investigation into the varieties of hallucinatory experience. Here, with his usual elegance, curiosity, and compassion, Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.

    This is the science that people actually want to learn, shared in a friendly, engaging style. And in the spirit of science, no subject is taboo. Amid the humor is great information and cocktail conversation fodder, all thoughtfully presented. Whether you're a total newbie or the next Albert Einstein, this guide is sure to educate and entertain...ASAP.

    It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation.In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

    Narrated by some of the most celebrated doctors from across the world, Dear People, with Love and Care, Your Doctors weaves together inspirational and personal stories of medical excellence and brilliance, interjected with feelings of triumph, loss, fear, strength, valour and empathy.

    The most fatal virus known to science, rabies — a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans — kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes.

    Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation, performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587.Lively, action-packed, and loaded with mordant wit, Working Stiff offers a firsthand account of daily life in one of America's most arduous professions, and the unexpected challenges of shuttling between the domains of the living and the dead. The body never lies, and through the murders, accidents, and suicides that land on her table, Dr. Melinek lays bare the truth behind the glamorized depictions of autopsy work on shows like CSI and Law and Order to reveal the secret story of the real morgue.

    But what happens between you conking out and waking up? And what does the anaesthetist have to do with it all? Do they just sit around playing sudoku while the rest of the team do all the hard work? And why are they so obsessed with what time you ate dinner?Join Colin Black on his journey from accidental medical student to HSE and NHS trainee and, finally, Consultant Paediatric Anaesthetist at the largest children’s hospital in Ireland, where any given day could end in laughter or tears – and that’s just the staff.Razor-sharp and forthright, Gas Man is a disarming and frequently hilarious account of life in one of the most fascinating and thrilling professions at medicine’s frontline, where every day is a heady cocktail of severe pressure, poignancy, and profound social awkwardness.

    But it’s also messy, fallible, and about 50,000 years out of date. We cling to superstitions, remember faces but not names, miss things sitting right in front of us, and lie awake at night while our brains endlessly replay our greatest fears. Idiot Brain is for anyone who has ever wondered why their brain appears to be sabotaging their life—and what on earth it is really up to.A Library Journal Science Bestseller and a Finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award in Science Technology.

    From Quantum Mechanics to Natural Selection, what we have instead are theories - ideas explain why things happen the way they do. We don't know for certain these are correct - no one ever saw the Big Bang - but with them we can paint beautiful, breathtaking pictures of everything from human behaviour to what the future may hold. Profiling the key scientists behind each theory, "30-Second Theories" presents each entry in a unique, eye-catching full-colour design, with thought-provoking extras and stylish illustrations. It is essential for anyone keen on expanding their mind with science's most thrilling ideas.