But why are they on the rise?     Science writer Moises Velasquez-Manoff offers a new and controversial way of thinking about autoimmune disease—one that may foster a paradigm shift in the way we think about health and hygiene.     In the early twentieth century, the dawn of improved hygiene, water treatment, vaccines, and antibiotics saved countless lives, eradicating diseases that had plagued humanity for millennia. But in the wake of this triumph, a new threat arose: The human immune system began to malfunction.     A growing body of evidence suggests that the very steps we took to cure these maladies have also eradicated organisms that once kept our bodies in balance. To combat this “epidemic of absence,” a group of scientists has begun deliberately reintroducing parasitic worms—helminthes—to calm the immune system of their hosts. This book takes a close look at the scientists at the vanguard of “worm therapy,” which has been proven to not only preempt immune malfunction, but to send a number of disorders—from Crohn’s Disease to multiple sclerosis to asthma—into remission.     Exploring the greater context of rampant immune system dysfunction in the developed world, and its implications for developing countries, Velasquez-Manoff offers an eye-opening and elegant portrait of science’s new view of the human organism.

    Using this example as a springboard, David M. Raup leaps into an egaging discussion of the theories, assumptions, and difficulties associated with the science of species extinction. Woven is along the way are stories of the trilobite eye, tropical reefs, flying reptiles, and the fate of the heath hen on Martha's Vineyard, a very modern extinction.

    Distinguished by the foremost voices and publications—among them Pulitzer Prize-winner Amy Harmon, Nobel Prize–winner Al Gore, and award-winning and bestselling author Oliver Sacks—this anthology is a comprehensive overview of our most advanced and most relevant scientific inquiries.

    Harlen Bretz walked the dry scabland channels of eastern Washington in the 1920s, it dawned on him that he was viewing a landscape sculpted by water. Lots of water. A flood of catastrophic proportions. Glacial Lake Missoula and Its Humongous Floods tells the gripping tale of a huge Ice Age lake that drained suddenly--not just once but repeatedly--and reshaped the landscape of the Northwest. The narrative follows the path of the floodwaters as they raged from western Montana across the Idaho Panhandle, then scoured through eastern Washington and down the Columbia Gorge to the Pacific Ocean. This is also the story of geologists grappling with scientific controversy--"of how personalities, pride, and prejudice sometimes superseded scientific evidence."

    In Evolution Impossible, Dr. John Ashton uses discoveries in genetics, biochemistry, geology, radiometric dating, and other scientific disciplines to explain why the theory of evolution is a myth. Regardless of your level of scientific education, you will finish this book able to cite 12 reasons why evolution cannot explain the origin of life.

    They loom over museum halls, thunder through movies, and are a fundamental part of our collective imagination. In My Beloved Brontosaurus, the dinosaur fanatic Brian Switek enriches the childlike sense of wonder these amazing creatures instill in us. Investigating the latest discoveries in paleontology, he breathes new life into old bones.Switek reunites us with these mysterious creatures as he visits desolate excavation sites and hallowed museum vaults, exploring everything from the sex life of Apatosaurus and T. rex’s feather-laden body to just why dinosaurs vanished. (And of course, on his journey, he celebrates the book’s titular hero, “Brontosaurus”—who suffered a second extinction when we learned he never existed at all—as a symbol of scientific progress.)With infectious enthusiasm, Switek questions what we’ve long held to be true about these beasts, weaving in stories from his obsession with dinosaurs, which started when he was just knee-high to a Stegosaurus. Endearing, surprising, and essential to our understanding of our own evolution and our place on Earth, My Beloved Brontosaurus is a book that dinosaur fans and anyone interested in scientific progress will cherish for years to come.

    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.

    Avian Architecture describes how birds design, engineer, and build their nests, deconstructing all types of nests found around the world using architectural blueprints and detailed descriptions of the construction processes and engineering techniques birds use. This spectacularly illustrated book features 300 full-color images and more than 35 case studies that profile key species worldwide. Each chapter covers a different type of nest, from tunnel nests and mound nests to floating nests, hanging nests, woven nests, and even multiple-nest avian cities. Other kinds of avian construction--such as bowers and harvest wells--are also featured.Avian Architecture includes intricate step-by-step sequences, visual spreads on nest-building materials and methods, and insightful commentary by a leading expert.Illustrates how birds around the world design, engineer, and build their nestsFeatures architectural blueprints, step-by-step sequences, visual spreads on nest-building materials and methods, and expert commentaryIncludes 300 full-color imagesCovers more than 100 bird species worldwide

    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.

    Original line drawings. of color photos.

    This text has invited more than 4 million students into the study of this dynamic and essential discipline.The authors have restructured each chapter around a conceptual framework of five or six big ideas. An Overview draws students in and sets the stage for the rest of the chapter, each numbered Concept Head announces the beginning of a new concept, and Concept Check questions at the end of each chapter encourage students to assess their mastery of a given concept. New Inquiry Figures focus students on the experimental process, and new Research Method Figures illustrate important techniques in biology. Each chapter ends with a Scientific Inquiry Question that asks students to apply scientific investigation skills to the content of the chapter.

    Human tastes in the arts, Dutton argues, are evolutionary traits, shaped by Darwinian selection. They are not, as the past century of art criticism and academic theory would have it, just "socially constructed."Our love of beauty is inborn, and many aesthetic tastes are shared across remote cultures—just one example is the widespread preference for landscapes with water and distant trees, like the savannas where we evolved. Using forceful logic and hard evidence, Dutton shows that we must premise art criticism on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract "theory." He restores the place of beauty, pleasure, and skill as artistic values.Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and uproar in the art world, The Art Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of art and the workings of the human mind.

    Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

    His book A Brief History of Time has sold five and a half million copies worldwide and familiarized a whole generation with complex and intensely exciting scientific theories. When Kitty Ferguson approached Stephen Hawking with the idea of writing a book about him and asked him to make certain she understood his theories, he agreed to do so and in addition supplied her with material about his childhood and life. She also interviewed other eminent physicists about the next frontier of physics. The result is a book that is not a biography per se. Rather, it is the story of one man's quest to find the Theory of Everything--a theory that would be nothing short of an explanation of the universe and everything that happens in it. Illustrated with personal photographs and numerous charts and drawings, this book is an invaluable volume for all who would like to know more about the man and his work.

    But its myriad occurrences in art, nature, and science have been a source of speculation and wonder for thousands of years. Divine Proportion draws upon both religion and science to tell the story of Phi and to explore its manifestations in such diverse places as the structure of the inner ear, the spiral of a hurricane, the majesty of the Parthenon, and the elusive perfection of the Mona Lisa. A universal key to harmony, regeneration, and balance, Phi is at the heart of a tantalizing story begun on clay tablets in ancient Babylon, and which will continue to be written for centuries to come.