The Science of the Earth: The Secrets of Our Planet Revealed (DK Secret World Encyclopedias)

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An Indigenous environmental scientist breaks down why Western conservationism isn’t working. Buy The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How It Shook Our World by David K. Randall A virtuosic debut from a gifted violinist searching for a new mode of artistic becoming. Buy Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science by Jessica Hernandez Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history. Buy The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, by Michio Kaku Oxford Academic includes over 40,000 academic ebooks from Oxford University Press and other university presses, including:

In An Immense World , science journalist Ed Yong dives into the vast variety of animal senses with a seemingly endless supply of awe-inspiring facts. As humans, we move through the world within our Umwelt—a term for subjective sensory experience Yong borrows from the Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. But every creature on Earth has its own Umwelt that we can scarcely imagine. Through interviews with scientists around the globe, Yong teases out the astonishing details of other animals’ perceptions, introducing us to their fantastic Umwelten. Scallops, for example, have up to 200 eyes with impressive resolution, but their brains are likely not complex enough to receive and process such crisp images. Some butterflies can perceive ultraviolet color patterns on their wings that distinguish them from other species. And hammerhead sharks have receptors that scan the seafloor for the electric fields emitted by hidden prey, “as one might use metal detectors,” Yong writes. But many creatures’ senses have been thrown off by human activity, he notes. For example, our visually centered society has erected artificial lights that disorient migrating birds and hatchling sea turtles.Did you know that bubbles of ancient air trapped inside the Antarctic ice core can reveal how Earth's climate has changed over time? Or that a piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide? Well, now you do! Learn all about our weird and wonderful planet with The Science of Earth. The core of the book features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speaks volumes about an aspect of Earth’s environments and how they work. Structured around an imaginary journey that takes the reader from the inner core to Earth’s surface (including both land and oceans) and up to the top of the atmosphere, whilst taking in environments such as grasslands, forests, and reefs, the coverage includes both living and inanimate realms! Perhaps no aspect of our anatomy is both more fascinating and misunderstood than the vagina—down to the very common usage of what that word means. A vagina isn’t the whole of a woman’s reproductive anatomy. Instead, the vagina is a muscular canal that’s part of many people’s reproductive systems, of varying genders, whether they were born with it or had it surgically constructed. Nuance exists in this territory that is so often overwhelmed by a tangle of science, myth and cultural perceptions, and journalist Rachel E. Gross has composed an enthralling, sensitive book that’s relevant to everyone no matter what your personal topography looks like. Note, some ebooks have restrictive access and usage terms, for example theycan only be read by one personat a time. The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. Ed Yong brings us into the unique sensory worlds of the animals that detect such elements. Buy Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross

This is an informative, visually arresting introduction to planet Earth. The core of the book features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speak volumes about an aspect of Earth's environments and how they work. For example, bubbles of ancient air trapped inside an Antarctic ice core reveal how Earth's climate has changed over time. A piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide.

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Explore the Earth’s natural riches with this beautiful book that brings every corner of the planet, from core to atmosphere, to life! This is an informative, visually arresting introduction to planet Earth. The core of The Science of the Earth features large, detailed photographs of single objects, many of them small enough to be held in the hand, that each speak volumes about an aspect of Earth's environments and how they work. For example, bubbles of ancient air trapped inside an Antarctic ice core reveal how Earth's climate has changed over time. A piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide.

Did you know that bubbles of ancient air trapped inside the Antarctic ice core can reveal how Earth’s climate has changed over time? Or that a piece of pumice thrown several miles into the air by a volcano helps to explain what happens when tectonic plates collide? Well, now you do! Learn all about our weird and wonderful planet with The Science of Earth. In the former camp was a man named Barnum Brown, who yearned to escape his humble origins in Kansas farm country. With sponsorship from curator Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, Brown scoured the hills of Wyoming and Montana with, as Randall puts it, “a magical ability to unearth a specimen, like someone who can sit down and complete a jigsaw puzzle without first needing to find the edges.” Brown’s unassuming diligence contrasts with Osborn’s rigid—and skewed—vision of the natural world: Osborn saw the history of the Earth as a kind of morality tale, in which good prevails over evil, intelligence trumps brute strength (witness the extinction of the dinosaurs), and people of Anglo-Saxon descent inevitably rose to the top. The Monster’s Bones deftly weaves paleontology and adventure—and shows how “objective” science can be shaped by the personalities and ideologies of its practitioners. Introducing The Science of Earth - an informative, visually arresting introduction to planet Earth. The story of the worldwide scientific quest to decipher the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, trace its source and create the vaccines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. Buy Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff

Our planet’s epic story possesses power, poetry and a lot of important details, so my five books span genres. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and John Grotzinger and Tom Jordan’s Understanding Earth are elegant, accessible textbooks written almost two centuries apart. Andy Knoll’s Life on a Young Planet and David Beerling’s The Emerald Planet celebrate the 4-billion-year co-evolution of Earth and life from the perspective of paleontology. Finally, John McPhee’s rhapsodic Annals of the Former World provides a poetic tribute to our dynamic home and the geologists who devote their lives to its study. The story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Buy Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson Deep time is the timescale of the geological events that have shaped our planet. Whilst so immense as to challenge human understanding, its evidence is nonetheless visible all around us. Buy Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, by Carl Zimmer Increasingly environmental scientists, palaeoceanographers and geologists are collecting quantitative records of environmental changes (time-series) from sediments, ice cores, cave calcite, corals and trees. This book explains how to analyse these records, using straightforward explanations and diagrams rather than formal mathematical derivations. All the main cyclostratigraphic methods are covered including spectral analysis, cross-spectral analysis, filtering, complex demodulation, wavelet and singular spectrum analysis. Practical problems of time-series analysis, including those of distortions of environmental signals during stratigraphic encoding, are considered in detail. Recent research into various types of tidal and climatic cycles is summarised. The book ends with an extensive reference section, and an appendix listing sources of computer algorithms. This book provides the ideal reference for all those using time-series analysis to study the nature and history of climatic and tidal cycles. It is suitable for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental science, palaeoceanography and geology. Suzanne Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life. The Joy of Sweat: The Strange Science of Perspiration, by Sarah Everts