Science

A memory-impaired time traveller attempts to correct a tragic mistake he made in 1977 when, panicked, he abandoned his brother on a frozen lake in Baltimore.

A pictorial study of New Zealand bats, the only native terrestrial mammals found in New Zealand. Bringing to light their uniqueness, hardships faced and the important roles they play in New Zealand's ecosystems. Dedicated to the hardworking group of keen individuals and organisat...ions that are endeavouring to save our bats from extinction.
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Cats Work Like This gives a rare insight into the workings of cats' elusive minds, gleaned from the authors' two generations of watching their cats work. Learn what cats do while you sleep, what their eyes can tell you, and more in a scientific and emotional exploration of these ...puzzling creatures.
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At the scale of atoms and molecules, things quite often like to stick together. But these tiny interactions don't just matter at the nanoscale; taken together, they produce some important larger-scale forces friction, for example. This force keeps our cars on the road, trains on ...the tracks and our feet on the ground; similarly, anything moving through water or air encounters drag, a force caused by the viscous nature of fluids. In other words, there's a lot of stickiness going on, all the time. But what do we actually know about the physics of stickiness? What's really going on? How has nature evolved to make use of it, and what technological advances has it enabled the human race to create? In Sticky, physicist Laurie Winkless brings the amazing world of surface science to the popular science market for the fist time. Using her characteristic fun and relaxed tone, she introduces readers to the glues, adhesives and textures that rule and improve stickiness to give plants and animals an advantage, as well as uncovering the physics behind our sense of touch. Sticky also shows how our understanding of slipperiness opened the door to high-speed flight and space travel, and asks why friction and other surface interactions can cause machinery to literally grind to a halt. This is fundamentally a materials science book, but it touches on topics as broad as medicine, robotics and geology. And, as we'll discover, there are still many great mysteries. By exploring the tiniest of interactions, Laurie Winkless shows how civilisation owes a great deal to our knowledge of the science of stickiness.
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For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeb...er and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself. Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.
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