Book picks similar to
Horns and Beaks: Ceratopsian and Ornithopod Dinosaurs by Kenneth Carpenter
paleontology
science
evolution
it-wikipedia
Katzung & Trevor's Pharmacology Examination & Board Review (Mc Graw Hill Specialty Board Review)
Anthony J. Trevor - 1990
The latest version is far superior, both in content and presentation, to previous versions. I give it my highest recommendation."--"Doody's Review Service"From the authors of "Basic and Clinical Pharmacology," the leading pharmacology textbook, here is the newest edition of the best review book available for medical pharmacology course exams and board examinations. This skill-building guide comes with over 1000 review questions and answers -- far more than most other pharmacology reviews -- and a chapter-based approach that facilitates use with course notes or larger texts. Features: A new full-color presentation Organized to reflect course syllabi, focusing on the clinical use and pharmacology of drug categories, rather than individual drugs Two complete practice exams A valuable appendix of test-taking strategies Chapters that include valuable learning aids such as: --Short discussion of the major concepts that underlie basic principles or drug groups--Explanatory figures and tables--Review questions followed by answers and explanations--Drug Trees in drug-oriented chapters that visually organize drug groups--A list of high-yield terms and definitions you need to know Skill Keeper questions that prompt you to review previous material to understand links between related topics A checklist of tasks you should be able to do, once you have finished the chapter Summary Tables that list the important drugs and include key information about their mechanisms of action, effects, clinical uses, pharmacokinetics, drug interactions, and toxicities
Abraham Lincoln's DNA and Other Adventures in Genetics
Philip R. Reilly - 2000
Twenty-four true, wide-ranging tales of crime, history, human behavior, illness, and ethics, told from the personal perspective of the author, an eminent physician-lawyer who uses the stories to illustrate the principles of human genetics and to discuss the broader issues.
Test Of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb
Brian Cathcart - 2016
He ordered a superhuman effort to make Britain a nuclear power. Although Britain had been a junior partner in the Manhattan Project which had produced the American bombs, no British scientist had more than partial knowledge of the complex physics involved. The war over, the Americans cut off all help. At a time of daunting economic difficulty and amid the growing tension of the Cold War, the project hurriedly took shape behind a cloak of almost paranoid secrecy and in an atmosphere of constant stringency and shortage. Brian Cathcart’s book ranges over politics, diplomacy, espionage and science, but above all it tells the story of the brilliant young scientist William Penney, his team and their struggle. The men who worked behind the security fences at Aldermaston have been allowed to speak. The tales include fearsome risks, vast resourcefulness, bureaucratic obstruction, naval intransigence and a measure of black humour. The veil is also lifted on the extraordinary contribution of Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet spy. Finally the high drama of the test itself, conducted off the coast of Australia after a naval operation which came close to total fiasco, is recounted in gripping detail. Test of Greatness draws on what at the time the book was published were newly declassified documents. Cathcart also speaks uses primary sources, such as the words of the participants, illustrating and illuminating in vivid, human terms a secret but crucial chapter of post-war British history. Praise for Brian Cathcart: ‘The story of the British bomb mixes science, politics, espionage, Essex and morality. A nation is changed for ever when it decides to become a nuclear power. Brian Cathcart takes this complicated array of factors and makes them rise out of the page and walk to a very wide audience.’ – Sir Peter Hennessy, military historian Brian Cathcart was Assistant Editor of the Independent on Sunday when he wrote Test of Greatness. Since then he has taken up a position at Kingston University London and founded Hacked Off in the aftermath of the tabloid phone-hacking scandal. He has just published his eighth book, The News from Waterloo. His previous works include accounts of the murders of Jill Dando and Stephen Lawrence.
X and Why: The rules of attraction: why gender still matters
Tom Whipple - 2018
In this timely new approach to the debate, Tom Whipple travels far and wide - from a Home Counties swingers' party to a gay penguin sanctuary in Germany - and draws on the latest studies in behavioural science as well as fascinating explorations into anthropology to present a surprising tale of expectations and mismatches.If you are currently single, this book is about your place in the dating market - your successes, your failures and what they mean. If you are in a relationship, it is about why you chose the person you are with, why they chose you - and the circumstances in which either of you might put it all at risk and stray.In X and Why, Tom Whipple delves into the sexual subconscious to explain the inner workings of character and desire. It will change the way you see yourself and everyone around you.
The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
Robert M. Hazen - 2012
Hazen writes of how the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere—of rocks and living matter—has shaped our planet into the only one of its kind in the Solar System, if not the entire cosmos.With an astrobiologist’s imagination, a historian’s perspective, and a naturalist’s passion for the ground beneath our feet, Hazen explains how changes on an atomic level translate into dramatic shifts in Earth’s makeup over its 4.567 billion year existence. He calls upon a flurry of recent discoveries to portray our planet’s many iterations in vivid detail. Through his theory of “co-evolution,” we learn how reactions between organic molecules and rock crystals may have generated Earth’s first organisms, which in turn are responsible for more than two-thirds of the mineral varieties on the planet.The Story of Earth is also the story of the pioneering men and women behind the sciences. Readers will meet black-market meteorite hawkers of the Sahara Desert, the gun-toting Feds who guarded the Apollo missions’ lunar dust, and the World War II Navy officer whose super-pressurized “bomb”—recycled from military hardware—first simulated the molten rock of Earth’s mantle. As a mentor to a new generation of scientists, Hazen introduces the intrepid young explorers whose dispatches from Earth’s harshest landscapes will revolutionize geology.
Resurrecting the Shark: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil
Susan Ewing - 2017
This chance encounter in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County sparked Troll’s obsession with Helicoprion, a mysterious monster from deep time.In 2010, tattooed undergraduate student and returning Iraq War veteran Jesse Pruitt became seriously smitten with a Helicoprion fossil in a museum basement in Idaho. These two bizarre-shark disciples found each other, and an unconventional band of collaborators grew serendipitously around them, determined to solve the puzzle of the mysterious tooth whorl once and for all.Helicoprion was a Paleozoic chondrichthyan about the size of a modern great white shark, with a circular saw of teeth centered in its lower jaw—a feature unseen in the shark world before or since. For some ten million years, long before the Age of Dinosaurs, Helicoprion patrolled the shallow seas around the supercontinent Pangaea as the apex predator of its time.Just a few tumultuous years after Pruitt and Troll met, imagination, passion, scientific process, and state-of-the-art technology merged into an unstoppable force that reanimated the remarkable creature—and made important new discoveries.In this groundbreaking book, Susan Ewing reveals these revolutionary insights into what Helicoprion looked like and how the tooth whorl functioned—pushing this dazzling and awe-inspiring beast into the spotlight of modern science.
Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest
Kim Sterelny - 2001
Science has seen its fair share of punch-ups over the years, but one debate, in the field of biology, has become notorious for its intensity. Over the last twenty years, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould have engaged in a savage battle over evolution, which continues to rage even after Gould's death in 2002. Kim Sterelny moves beyond caricature to expose the real differences between the conceptions of evolution of these two leading scientists. He shows that the conflict extends beyond evolution to their very beliefs in science itself; and, in Gould?s case, to domains in which science plays no role at all.
James May's Magnificent Machines
James May - 2007
Throughout James May's Magnificent Machines, James May explores the iconic themes of the past hundred years: flight, space travel, television, mechanized war, medicine, computers, electronic music, skyscrapers, electronic espionage, and much more. But he also reveals the hidden story behind why some inventions like the zeppelin, the hovercraft, or the theremin struggled to make their mark. He examines the tipping points when technologies such as the car or the internet became unstoppable and gets up close to the nuts and bolt of remarkable inventions. Packed with surprising statistics and intriguing facts, this is the ideal book for anyone who wants to know how stuff works and why some stuff didn't make it.
Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes
Sue Hubbell - 2001
Focusing on four specific examples — corn, silkworms, domestic cats, and apples — she traces the histories of species that have been fundamentally altered over the centuries by the whims and needs of people.
Volcanoes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Major Eruptions
Jelle Zeilinga de Boer - 2001
Gases and dust particles ejected into the atmosphere changed weather patterns around the world, resulting in the infamous ''year without a summer'' in North America, food riots in Europe, and a widespread cholera epidemic. And the gloomy weather inspired Mary Shelley to write the gothic novel Frankenstein.This book tells the story of nine such epic volcanic events, explaining the related geology for the general reader and exploring the myriad ways in which the earth's volcanism has affected human history. Zeilinga de Boer and Sanders describe in depth how volcanic activity has had long-lasting effects on societies, cultures, and the environment. After introducing the origins and mechanisms of volcanism, the authors draw on ancient as well as modern accounts--from folklore to poetry and from philosophy to literature. Beginning with the Bronze Age eruption that caused the demise of Minoan Crete, the book tells the human and geological stories of eruptions of such volcanoes as Vesuvius, Krakatau, Mount Pel�e, and Tristan da Cunha. Along the way, it shows how volcanism shaped religion in Hawaii, permeated Icelandic mythology and literature, caused widespread population migrations, and spurred scientific discovery.From the prodigious eruption of Thera more than 3,600 years ago to the relative burp of Mount St. Helens in 1980, the results of volcanism attest to the enduring connections between geology and human destiny.
Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story
Lee Berger - 2017
A story of defiance and determination by a controversial scientist, this is Lee Berger's own take on finding Homo naledi, an all-new species on the human family tree and one of the greatest discoveries of the 21st century.In 2013, Berger, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, caught wind of a cache of bones in a hard-to-reach underground cave in South Africa. He put out a call around the world for petite collaborators--men and women small and adventurous enough to be able to squeeze through 8-inch tunnels to reach a sunless cave 40 feet underground. With this team of "underground astronauts," Berger made the discovery of a lifetime: hundreds of prehistoric bones, including entire skeletons of at least 15 individuals, all perhaps two million years old. Their features combined those of known prehominids like Lucy, the famous Australopithecus, with those more human than anything ever before seen in prehistoric remains. Berger's team had discovered an all new species, and they called it Homo naledi.The cave quickly proved to be the richest primitive hominid site ever discovered, full of implications that shake the very foundation of how we define what makes us human. Did this species come before, during, or after the emergence of Homo sapiens on our evolutionary tree? How did the cave come to contain nothing but the remains of these individuals? Did they bury their dead? If so, they must have had a level of self-knowledge, including an awareness of death. And yet those are the very characteristics used to define what makes us human. Did an equally advanced species inhabit Earth with us, or before us? Berger does not hesitate to address all these questions.Berger is a charming and controversial figure, and some colleagues question his interpretation of this and other finds. But in these pages, this charismatic and visionary paleontologist counters their arguments and tells his personal story: a rich and readable narrative about science, exploration, and what it means to be human.
The Particles of the Universe
Jeff Yee - 2012
Everything around us, including matter, is energy. A deep look into the mysteries of the subatomic world – the particles that make up the atom – provides answers to basic questions about how the universe works. To solve the future of mankind’s energy needs we need to understand the basic building blocks of the universe, including the atom and its parts. By exploring the subatomic world we’ll find more answers to our questions about time, forces like gravity and the matter that surrounds us. More importantly, we’ll find new ways to tap into the energy that exists around us to power our growing needs. In a new branch of particle physics, where tiny particles are thought of as energy waves, we find new answers that may help us in our quest to find alternative energy sources.
Deal Me in: Twenty of the World's Top Poker Players Share the Heartbreaking and Inspiring Stories of How They Turned Pro
Stephen John - 2009
Poker's biggest players, such as Phil Ivey (2009 WSOP Main Event Finalist), Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth, Doyle Brunson and Daniel Negreanu give first-person accounts of their personal journeys and the key moments in their rise to the top of the poker pantheon. These stories will teach, inspire and make you laugh. Deal Me In humanizes the larger-than-life personalities, allowing the reader to understand more about poker strategy through the trials and errors of the best players in the game. Each poker legend tells his or her own story in the book including: Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negreanu, Phil Ivey, Annie Duke, Johnny Chan, Chris Jesus Ferguson, Carlos Mortensen, Chau Giang, Jennifer Harman, Allen Cunningham, Howard Lederer, Erik Seidel, Chad Brown, David Devilfish Ulliott, Layne Flack, Scotty Nguyen, Annette Obrestad, Tom Dwan and the 2008 Main Event winner Peter Eastgate.
Big History: The Big Bang, Life On Earth, And The Rise Of Humanity
David Christian - 2008
David Christian, professor of history at San Diego State University, surveys the past at all possible scales, from conventional history, to the much larger scales of biology and geology, to the universal scales of cosmology.
A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor
Steven Bentley - 2014
is an American Board of Emergency Medicine certified ED doctor. His journey began in the mid-1970s, when he chose to pursue a career in medicine. In his youthful perspective, he came to regard doctors as the good guys, the ones who healed people and saved lives. He knew he’d be one of those good guys one day. Now, with a career spanning more than thirty years, he works as an emergency-room physician in North Carolina. In A License to Heal: Random Memories of an ER Doctor, Bentley describes the real world of emergency medicine from the viewpoint of a practicing physician. This memoir is filled with real-life stories of the ER, including life and death, triumph and tragedy. Meet a man named Solomon Darby, who spoke to long-dead relatives during his own near-death experience. Bentley also recalls the heartbreaking story of a young widow who desperately needed to understand and cope with the death of her husband. Amid the grief, there are also episodes of great humor and human comedy. In the dynamic world of emergency medicine, there is a great deal of pain, blood, and tragedy, but there is also hope, compassion, and excitement—for both the patients and the staff."