For as long as I can remember, I have passionately wanted to understand both the nature of the universe, what it is that is of most value in life, and how it is to be achieved. When a child, I wanted above all to understand the nature of the world around me; later, when a young adult, I suddenly discovered the fundamental significance of the question: What is of most value in life, and how is it to be achieved? I became a lecturer in Philosophy of Science at University College London, where I was able to devote myself to these issues.
I found this book just about the most dazzling and gripping book I had ever come across about science. It kept on opening up new vistas as I read on. Full of surprises and unexpected dramas, it cast a vivid light on a wide range of issues. I finished it breathless with admiration.
It is about photosynthesis, the process whereby plants “eat” sunlight to form oxygen and sugar from carbon dioxide and water. This process is basic to almost all life on Earth. The book is about the development of photosynthesis on Earth and also about the development of our scientific knowledge about it.
From acclaimed science journalist Oliver Morton comes Eating the Sun, a fascinating, lively, profound look at photosynthesis, nature's greatest miracle. From the physics, chemistry, and cellular biology that make photosynthesis possible, to the quirky and competitive scientists who first discovered the beautifully honed mechanisms of photosynthesis, to the modern energy crisis we face today, Eating the Sun offers a complete biography of the earth through the lens of this common but crucial process.
For more than four decades, Sandy Sheehy has been diving tropical coral reefs from the Caribbean to Australia. Starting when she was around five sitting in her pediatric dentist’s office where she noticed an aquarium stocked with colorful fish, her fascination with the underwater world has grown. Becoming a freelance journalist allowed her to call on experts and activists around the world to help her satisfy her curiosity and share what she learned.
In clear, evocative prose, Barnett describes the world of seashells and humans’ relationship to them. Her book was laced with “Who knew?” moments for me. For example, until recently people considered seashells a kind of rock, giving little thought to the creatures that built and inhabited them. Barnett explains the threat that rising carbon dioxide levels present to the formation and very existence of shells, but she never carps; and although she interjects some of her own experiences—and sense of wonder—she never lapses into making this book about her, rather than her subject.
Seashells have been the most coveted and collected of nature's creations for thousands of years. They were money before coins, jewellery before gems, art before canvas.
In The Sound of the Sea, Cynthia Barnett blends cultural history and environmental science to trace our long love affair with seashells and the hidden lives of the mollusks that make them. From the mysterious glow of giant clams to the surprising origin of Shell Oil as a family business importing exotic shells, the book is filled with unforgettable stories. As it explores the perfect symmetry of a Chambered Nautilus, the pink-glossed lip of…
Microbial ecologists once had the luxury of no one caring about their work. My colleagues and I had been busy showing that there are more microbes than stars in the Universe, that the genetic diversity of bacteria and viruses is mind-boggling, and that microbes run nearly all reactions in the carbon cycle and other cycles that underpin life on the planet. Then came the heat waves, wildfires, droughts and floods, and other unignorable signs of climate change. Now everyone should care about microbes to appreciate the whole story of greenhouse gases and to understand how the future of the biosphere depends on the response of the smallest organisms.
How can you not love a book that argues that, despite being mostly microbial, “the plankton form the bulk of the living fabric of the ocean, the web of life that is an integral part of the blue machine.”
Czerski’s prose is as vivid as describing other, larger parts of the blue machine, such as Greenland sharks, which live for hundreds of years, and whales whose earwax records the stress caused by global warming. Equally entertaining and captivating are her accounts of canoeing off Maui, fieldwork in the Arctic, and everyday life on an oceanographic ship.
Although the writing is always light and the metaphors evocative, Czerski makes several serious points about the ocean and climate change. If not for the ocean, atmospheric levels of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would be even higher and global warming worse.
All of Earth's oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials. In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes.
Through stories of history, culture, and animals, she explains how water temperature, salinity, gravity, and the movement of Earth's tectonic plates all interact in a complex dance, supporting life at the…
Jorge Daniel Taillant is a cryoactivist, a term he coined to describe someone that works to protect the cryosphere, ie. the Earth’s frozen environment. Founder of a globally prized non-profit protecting human rights and promoting environmental justice he helped get the world’s first glacier law passed in South America. He now devotes 100% of his time to tackling climate change in an emergency effort to slow global warming … and to protect glaciers.
As a climate activist and lover of glaciers and glaciation, I took a special interest in David Archer’s book, The Long Thaw. Archer takes us in and out of ice ages, explaining with surprisingly understandable prose just how ice ages are formed, their predictable cycles, why they’re important, and how with current climate change trends and impacts, we just may have missed the onramp to the next one. That could put us into a Hothouse Earth scenario not seen since the times of the dinosaurs. Archer masterfully brings science to the layperson. If we think that the year 2100 is a marker in the sand for climate change, think again. Archer reveals that the chilling (or heating) reality of climate change just might be forever.
The human impact on Earth's climate is often treated as a hundred-year issue lasting as far into the future as 2100, the year in which most climate projections cease. In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world's leading climatologists, reveals the hard truth that these changes in climate will be "locked in," essentially forever. If you think that global warming means slightly hotter weather and a modest rise in sea levels that will persist only so long as fossil fuels hold out (or until we decide to stop burning them), think again. In The Long Thaw, David Archer…
Home food production & self-sufficiency was Joann Grohman’s lifelong enthusiasm. With a young, hungry family of eight children, she started milking cows by hand and did so until she was almost 90 years old. She simply could not imagine life without a family cow, a remarkable animal that makes grass into nutritious milk and cream that can feed people, pigs, and chickens, as well as provide manure to grow vegetables. When asked if having a cow means feeling stuck on the farm, she countered that a cow supports a beautiful life that can be found in no other way.
This book was important to Mom's evolution of her thinking about cows. Originally, she emphasized the milk cow's importance as a kingpin of farm life (the original title of Keeping a Family Cow was The Cow Economy) and, of course, milk was a kingpin of family health.
After reading this book, she came to see cows as a critical center of the problem of carbon sequestration. The grass is our best way of capturing excess carbon in the atmosphere, but the sequestration process requires that the grass be grazed, fertilized with dung, and trampled. The last several years of her life were spent writing articles to alert people to the concept.
In Cows Save the Planet, journalist Judith D. Schwartz looks at soil as a crucible for our many overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises.
Schwartz reveals that for many of these problems-climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, droughts, floods, wildfires, rural poverty, malnutrition, and obesity-there are positive, alternative scenarios to the degradation and devastation we face. In each case, our ability to turn these crises into opportunities depends on how we treat the soil.
Drawing on the work of thinkers and doers, renegade scientists and institutional whistleblowers from around the world, Schwartz challenges much of the conventional thinking about global warming…
I don’t think I could have been anything else but an engineer. Following my father’s example, I have a love for moving metal things – both the physical/mathematical aspects and the practical aspects, that apprentices pick up. Engineering systems have personalities all their own – the noisy excitement of a racing motorcycle, the brooding, contented hum of a nuclear powerplant or the clanging and crashing of a steam locomotive in its overrun, literally with fire in its belly.
Here is a genuine Engineering Textbook. Thermodynamics was my favourite subject as an undergraduate and the only subject in which I excelled, coming first in class in my final year in Thermo, as we students called it. Thermodynamics deals with Heat as a form of energy and its uses in the creation of engines, turbines, rockets, and the like. Without it and its twin technology, electricity, the modern world could not exist. Before the Industrial Revolution, the only power sources were wind, water, animals, and men (as slaves). Then came the quantum leap of Steam and the world has never been the same.
This is an introduction to thermodynamics for engineering students. No previous knowledge is assumed. The book covers the first and second laws of thermodynamics and their consequences for engineers. Each topic is illustrated with worked examples and subjects are introduced in a logical order allowing the student to tackle increasingly complex problems as he reads. Problems and selected answers are included. The heart of engineering thermodynamics is the conversion of heat into work. Increasing demands for more efficient conversion, for example to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, are leading to the adoption of new thermodynamic cycles. However the principles of these…
