The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ by Monty Lyman What it is: a dermatologist's cross-disciplinary "circumnavigation of, and love letter to" human skin.
You'll learn: what makes skin waterproof, how to achieve a healthy glow without risking a sunburn, why we can't tickle ourselves, and much more.
Reviewers say: "Tantalizing tidbits of information abound" (Booklist) in this "illuminating and thought-provoking" (Kirkus Reviews) book. | |
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A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold through Our Genes
by Adam Rutherford; foreword by Siddhartha Mukherjee
What it's about: "Geneticists have suddenly become historians," observes author Adam Rutherford, citing discoveries that have transformed our understanding of human evolution.
Contains: the (roughly) 2 million year history of the Homo genus, an accessible primer on genomics, and a discussion of what DNA can (and can't) tell us about ourselves.
About the author: Geneticist and journalist Adam Rutherford is the author of Humanimal: How Homo Sapiens Became Nature's Most Paradoxical Creature.
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A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction
by Joel Greenberg
September 1, 2014 marks the centenary of the death of Martha, a passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) at the Cincinnati Zoo and the last of her kind. Once the most abundant bird species in North America, the passenger pigeon declined as European settlers arrived, according to naturalist Joel Greenberg. In A Feathered River Across the Sky, Greenberg describes how a combination of hunting (for food and sport) and habitat destruction (mass deforestation destroyed nesting grounds) caused pigeon populations to plummet precipitously -- from several billion individuals in 1860 to zero a mere half-century later when the species was officially declared extinct.
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Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World
by Brian Clegg
To what extent do numbers accurately reflect reality? Pretty well, if you're counting livestock. Less so if you're talking about black holes, which are "more the product of mathematics than of science" (that is, there is only indirect evidence for their existence.) In this thought-provoking book, science writer Brian Clegg, author of Ten Billion Tomorrows, examines the relationship between numbers and science, explaining why mathematical models, while increasingly powerful, can never fully account for the complexity of the physical universe.
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Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz What it is: an applied mathematician's surprisingly accessible guide to calculus, which outlines its basic concepts while recounting its history.
Food for thought: "If anything deserves to be called the secret of the universe, calculus is it."
You might also like: mathematician Amir Alexander's similarly engaging Infinitesimal, which also explores a world-changing concept. | |
Contact your librarian for more great books!
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