Showing titles in Science & Engineering

We all have habits and behaviours that hold us back from reaching our fullest potential. In VISUALISE, the very first book of its kind on visualisation, Maya Raichoora shows you how to harness the power of visualisation and retrain your brain so you can take control of the way you think, feel and perform, once and for all.

Platypuses are mammals unlike any other on earth. They lay eggs, ooze milk through their skin, and can sense electricity. In this episode, we travel with a platypus as he moves through his nightly routine on the island of Tasmania. He uses electroreceptors to hunt underwater and does a synchronized swimming courtship ritual with his mate, who then digs a burrow 40 feet deep into the riverbank to nest.

Humpback whales are among the most intelligent animals on Earth. Some scientists believe they might even surpass humans in self-awareness, empathy, and communication skills. In this episode, we swim with a whale as he teams up with other humpbacks to use bubbles to catch fish, rescues a sea lion, and puts his own spin on melodies sung by whales across the Pacific Ocean. This is the world in its natural state, defined by seasons, routines, and cycles. By the time this whale is ready to close one eye and go to sleep, you will be too.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 million people every year.

Is consciousness a fundamental building block of the universe, like gravity? Can humans develop new senses through neuroscience? And can artificial intelligence ever truly replicate the subjective experience of being conscious? Join Annaka Harris as she calls on distinguished experts in science and philosophy to find answers to today’s most perplexing questions about our minds and the universe at large.

The Ideological Brain is essential in today’s polarized and polarizing world. To foster a more informed, resilient and freer society, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us and learn to spot rigid thinking in ourselves and others. We need to learn to avoid black-and-white thinking and embrace ambiguity. We need to recognize our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, this book will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

We are nothing but a pack of neurons, Francis Crick once said. Vladimir Miskovic and Steven Jay Lynn show that this way of thinking is both limited and an obstacle to understanding consciousness. In Dreaming Reality, Miskovic and Lynn connect the latest findings from neuroscience—which studies the brain from the outside in, as a purely physical object—to the insights of the world’s mystical traditions, which chart elaborate cartographies of the mind from inside out through experiences of meditation, prayer, and ecstasy.

Thanks to recent advances in AI, humans have entered a world where we are no longer the sole custodians of knowledge. A new wave of disarmingly human-like chatbots, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, appear to be able to talk and reason like us - and are beginning to transform everything we do. It is vital we understand how they work. Can AI ‘think’, 'know' and ‘understand’? What are its values? Whose biases is it perpetuating? Can it lie and if so, could we tell? Does their arrival threaten our very existence?

Ruskin Bond is most at home in his cosy room in Landour, a room with a window—from which he looks out on the world. A room where he writes his daily journal. In these leaves from his journal, written over the past two years, Ruskin describes his days in his unique way: from the joy of seeing a new flower bloom to the pain of a toothache that just can't be ignored. Outside, the seasons change. In his room, for Ruskin, every morning brings new thoughts, new observations.

Fennec foxes’ ears can be up to half as long as their bodies. They use them to track movement across the Sahara Desert, including under the sand. In this episode, we follow a fox as he meanders home to his family through the sand dunes as they slowly shift with the wind.

The Hidden Histories of Houseplants explores twenty of the world's most common houseplants. This book isn't just a dry exploration of historical cultivation; the narrative explores the plants' places in social history, science and culture, showcasing the most fascinating elements of each plant's story, be it the exploration as to why Monstera deliciosa have holes in their leaves, whether houseplants have the ability to count, or why Calathea leaves open during the day and close up at night.

Dung beetles might sound dirty, but the ancient Egyptians believed their god took the form of a dung beetle to roll the morning sun across the sky every day. In this episode, we roll with dung beetles around the world as they push their precious dung—often in balls many times larger than they are—over Florida pastures, Armenian highlands, and the vast South African savanna.

Ancient Aliens explores the controversial theory that extraterrestrials have visited Earth for millions of years. From the age of the dinosaurs to ancient Egypt, from early cave drawings to continued mass sightings in the US, each episode in this hit HISTORY series gives historic depth to the questions, speculations, provocative controversies, first-hand accounts and grounded theories surrounding this age-old debate. Did intelligent beings from outer space visit Earth thousands of years ago?

Combining fascinating tales of the peculiarities of memory as well as cutting-edge science, Dr Ranganath shows the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to guide our futures. Memory shapes how we experience the world, and it does that in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Dr Ranganath argues that we can use this knowledge to make better use of our flawed memories, whether in daily tasks like finding our keys or dealing with memory loss as we age.

There are rare moments in time when we make choices that irreversibly change the world, and our lives, forever. Today is one of those moments. Scientists, engineers and philosophers alike warn us that without a radical shift in our thinking, we are on track to be the last generation of pure humans that the world will know. Within a single generation we will devolve into a hybrid species of synthetic bodies, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and computer chips that limit our ability to think, to love, and to adapt to the conditions of the emerging world in a healthy way.

In Killed by a Traffic Engineer, civil engineering professor Wes Marshall shines a spotlight on how little science there is behind the way that our streets are engineered, which leaves safety as an afterthought. While traffic engineers are not trying to cause deliberate harm to anyone, he explains, they are guilty of creating a transportation system whose designs remain largely based on plausible, but unproven, conjecture.

In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization. Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life.

Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature's pharmacy to heal themselves. Doctors by Nature reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. In this visionary book, Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals could impact the practice of human medicine.

In Air-borne, Carl Zimmer, Baillie Gifford-shortlisted author of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh and science columnist for The New York Times, traces the history and pre-history of the young science of aerobiology, from Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microbes under his hand-made microscopes in the seventeenth century to Darwin’s revelation, while aboard the Beagle in the middle of the Atlantic, that this invisible life can soar across the planet – he found sixty-seven different North African species that had travelled thousands of miles from the Sahara.