For millions, the Galápagos Islands represent nature at its most unspoiled, an inviolate place famed for its rare flora and fauna. But soon today’s 30,000 human residents could surpass 50,000. Add invasive species, floods of tourists, and unresolved conflicts between Ecuadorian laws and local concerns, and it’s easy to see why the Galápagos were recently added to UNESCO’s World Heritage in Danger list. Each chapter in this provocative, perceptive book focuses on a specific person or group with a stake in the Galápagos’ natural resources—from tour companies whose activities are often illegal and not always green, to creationist guides who lead tours with no mention of evolution, from fishermen up in arms over lobster quotas, to modern-day pirates who poach endangered marine species. Bassett presents a perspective as readable as it is sensible. Told with wit, passion, and grace, the Galápagos story serves as a miniature model of Earth itself, a perfect example of how an environment can be destroyed-- and what is being done to preserve these islands before it's too late.

    The text covers the neuroanatomy that medical and other healthcare students need, with expanded coverage of neurophysiology and inclusion of clinical content providing real-life application of neuroanatomy and neurophysiologic concepts to clinical neurologic disorders. Its readability and enhanced full-color illustrations make it a favorite among both students and faculty.Provides a single-author approach for a more consistent, readable text.Contains summary statement headings to help you find what you're looking for within the text.Provides an outline introducing each chapter to help students organize and stay focused as they learn.Includes appealing four-color, computerized three-dimensional images of the brain and brain structures fully integrated with the text.Complements an Electronic Image Bank that is also available separately.Includes more coverage of neurobiology and neurophysiology.Gives more clinical content, including many images depicting neurologic disorders.Features an expanded section on higher cortical function.Features an expanded section on learning and memory.Contains a new chapter on the development, maintenance, and repair of neural connections-an explosive area of research in neuroscience.Supplies a glossary of key terms.Replaces many of the older figures with new, computer-generated illustrations.

    When the first underwater “habitat” called Sealab was tested in the early 1960s, conventional dives had strict depth limits and lasted for only minutes, not the hours and even days that the visionaries behind Sealab wanted to achieve—for purposes of exploration, scientific research, and to recover submarines and aircraft that had sunk along the continental shelf. The unlikely father of Sealab, George Bond, was a colorful former country doctor who joined the Navy later in life and became obsessed with these unanswered questions: How long can a diver stay underwater? How deep can a diver go?Sealab never received the attention it deserved, yet the program inspired explorers like Jacques Cousteau, broke age-old depth barriers, and revolutionized deep-sea diving by demonstrating that living on the seabed was not science fiction. Today divers on commercial oil rigs and Navy divers engaged in classified missions rely on methods pioneered during Sealab.Sealab is a true story of heroism and discovery: men unafraid to test the limits of physical endurance to conquer a hostile undersea frontier. It is also a story of frustration and a government unwilling to take the same risks underwater that it did in space.Ben Hellwarth, a veteran journalist, interviewed many surviving participants from the three Sealab experiments and conducted extensive documentary research to write the first comprehensive account of one of the most important and least known experiments in US history.

    Google Hacking teaches people how to get the most out of this revolutionary search engine. Not only will this book teach readers how Google works, but it will also empower them with the necessary skills to make their everyday searches easier, more efficient, and more productive. Google Hacking also demonstrates how Google can be used for negative means. It's immense searching power, means that everyone, including cyber criminals, can feasibly access confidential data, such as company presentations, budgets, blueprints, even credit card numbers, with just the click of a mouse. Using numerous examples, case studies, and screenshots, this book explains the art of ethical Google Hacking -- it not only teaches readers how Google works, but it provides them with the knowledge they need to protect their data and systems from getting Google Hacked. This is the only book you need to maximize (and protect yourself) from Google searches!

    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.

    A true tale of beauty and obsession, smugglers and scientists, and nature’s most enigmatic creature.

    In the intervening period, many species of early ape and human have lived and died out, leaving behind the fossilized remains that have helped to make the detailed picture of our evolution revealed here.This exciting, up-to-the-minute account is divided into three accessible sections. "In Search of Our Ancestors" examines the contexts in which fossilized remains have been found and the techniques used to study them. "The Fossil Evidence" traces in detail the evolution of apes and humans, from Proconsul to the australopithecines, and Homo erectus to the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. The latest fossil finds at major new sites such as Dmanisi in Georgia and Gran Dolina in Spain are appraised, and new advances in genetic studies, including the extraction of DNA from extinct human species, are evaluated. "Interpreting the Evidence" reconstructs and explains the evolution of human behavior, describing the development of tool use, the flourishing of the earliest artists, and the spread of modern humans to all corners of the world. The book is superbly illustrated with hundreds of photographs, diagrams, and specially commissioned reconstruction drawings by the artist John Sibbick.

    Today we can see a recreation of the making of the Laetoli footprints at the American Museum of Natural History, in a stunning diorama which depicts two of our human forebears walking side by side through a snowy landscape of volcanic ash. But how do we know what these three-million-year-old relatives looked like? How have we reconstructed the eons-long journey from our first ancient steps to where we stand today? In short, how do we know what we think we know about human evolution? In The Fossil Trail, Ian Tattersall, the head of the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us on a sweeping tour of the study of human evolution, offering a colorful history of fossil discoveries and a revealing insider's look at how these finds have been interpreted--and misinterpreted--through time. All the major figures and discoveries are here. We meet Lamarck and Cuvier and Darwin (we learn that Darwin's theory of evolution, though a bombshell, was very congenial to a Victorian ethos of progress), right up to modern theorists such as Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Tattersall describes Dubois's work in Java, the many discoveries in South Africa by pioneers such as Raymond Dart and Robert Broom, Louis and Mary Leakey's work at Olduvai Gorge, Don Johanson's famous discovery of Lucy (a 3.4 million-year-old female hominid, some 40% complete), and the more recent discovery of the Turkana Boy, even more complete than Lucy, and remarkably similar to modern human skeletons. He discusses the many techniques available to analyze finds, from fluorine analysis (developed in the 1950s, it exposed Piltdown as a hoax) and radiocarbon dating to such modern techniques as electron spin resonance and the analysis of human mitochondrial DNA. He gives us a succinct picture of what we presently think our family tree looks like, with at least three genera and perhaps a dozen species through time (though he warns that this greatly underestimates the actual diversity of hominids over the past two million or so years). And he paints a vivid, insider's portrait of paleoanthropology, the dogged work in the broiling sun, searching for a tooth, or a fractured corner of bone, amid stone litter and shadows, with no guarantee of ever finding anything. And perhaps most important, Tattersall looks at all these great researchers and discoveries within the context of their social and scientific milleu, to reveal the insidious ways that the received wisdom can shape how we interpret fossil findings, that what we expect to find colors our understanding of what we do find. Refreshingly opinionated and vividly narrated, The Fossil Trail is the only book available to general readers that offers a full history of our study of human evolution. A fascinating story with intriguing turns along the way, this well-illustrated volume is essential reading for anyone curious about our human origins.

    Honeybees Make Honey; Mason Bees Make Food.

    

    After a brief tale of her own introduction to the paranormal, the author shares funny, poignant, and insightful words straight from the spirit people themselves. Together, the living and the dead seek forgiveness, solve family mysteries, find closure, settle scores, and come together for birthdays, anniversaries, and graduations. Quoting directly from her readings and séances, Priscilla reports the spirit perspective on mental illness, suicide, religion, and even the afterlife itself. For those readers interested in developing their own spirit communication skills, the last section of the book offers meditations and exercises used by the author herself, both personally and with her students. "It Will All Make Sense When You’re Dead" is chock-full of simple and entertaining wisdom, showing us how to live for today, with light hearts and kindness.

    While detailing this evolution, Humphries introduces us to synanthropy: The concept that animals can become dependent on humans without ceasing to be wild; they can adapt to the cityscape as if it were a field or a forest.Superdove simultaneously explores the pigeon's cultural transformation, from its life in the dovecotes of ancient Egypt to its service in the trenches of World War I, to its feats within the pigeon-racing societies of today. While the dove is traditionally recognized as a symbol of peace, the pigeon has long inspired a different sort of fetishistic devotion from breeders, eaters, and artists—and from those who recognized and exploited the pigeon's astounding abilities. Because of their fecundity, pigeons were symbols of fertility associated with Aphrodite, while their keen ability to find their way home made them ideal messengers and even pilots.Their usefulness largely forgotten, today's pigeons have become as ubiquitous and reviled as rats. But Superdove reveals something more surprising: By using pigeons for our own purposes, we humans have changed their evolution. And in doing so, we have helped make pigeons the ideal city dwellers they are today. In the tradition of Rats, the book that made its namesake rodents famous, Superdove is the fascinating story of the pigeon's journey from the wild to the city—the home they'll never leave.

    

    Nancy Butcher has gathered together some of the most unusual natural cures that have been proven effective today, and even throws in some unbelievable and-thankfully-abandoned therapies from times past.Filled with case histories of unique illnesses, historic documentation of strange medical practices, and the author's own insightful commentary, this book explains not only how to cure headaches, sleep better, and improve your sex life, but also that people with Cotard's syndrome actually believe they are dead.

    Liz Thorpe, second in command at New York's renowned Murray's Cheese, has used her notes and conversations from hundreds of tastings spanning nearly a decade to fashion this odyssey through the wonders of American cheese. Offering more than eighty profiles of the best, the most representative, and the most important cheesemakers, Thorpe chronicles American cheesemaking from the brave foodie hobbyists of twenty years ago (who put artisanal cheese on the map) to the carefully cultivated milkers and makers of today.Thorpe travels to the nation's cheese farms and factories, four-star kitchens and farmers' markets, bringing you along for the journey. In her quest to explore cheesemaking, she high-lights the country's greatest cheeses and concludes that today's cheesemakers can help provide more nourishing and sensible food for all Americans.Steve Jenkins, author of the celebrated Cheese Primer, calls this "the best book about cheese you'll ever read." The Cheese Chronicles is a cultural history of an industry that has found breakout success and achieved equal footing with its European cousins.