A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY183 start with I start with I
An Intellectual History of Psychology, already a classic in its field, is now available in a concise new third edition. It presents psychological ideas as part of a greater web of thinking throughout history about the essentials of human nature, interwoven with ideas from philosophy, science, religion, art, literature, and politics.
Daniel N. Robinson demonstrates that from the dawn of rigorous and self-critical inquiry in ancient Greece, reflections about human nature have been inextricably linked to the cultures from which they arose, and each definable historical age has added its own character and tone to this long tradition. An Intellectual History of Psychology not only explores the most significant ideas about human nature from ancient to modern times, but also examines the broader social and scientific contexts in which these concepts were articulated and defended. Robinson treats each epoch, whether ancient Greece or Renaissance Florence or Enlightenment France, in its own terms, revealing the problems that dominated the age and engaged the energies of leading thinkers.
Robinson also explores the abiding tension between humanistic and scientific perspectives, assessing the most convincing positions on each side of the debate. Invaluable as a text for students and as a stimulating and insightful overview for scholars and practicing psychologists, this volume can be read either as a history of psychology in both its philosophical and aspiring scientific periods or as a concise history of Western philosophy’s concepts of human nature.
Interweaving entertaining narratives of his own on-the-ground experiences as a practicing restorationist with reflections about his scientific training and background, Cabin explores the relationship between science and practice in ecological restoration. He observes that because restoration can be complex and value-driven, its implementation often turns out to be as much interdisciplinary art as hard science.
One approach he advocates is what he calls "intelligent tinkering," after the work of Aldo Leopold. In this model, practitioners employ the same kind of careful but informal trial-and-error strategy followed by such groups as indigenous peoples and hobbyist mechanics. Cabin illustrates the power of intelligent tinkering using examples from his own work and other restoration projects.
The gap between science and practice is not unique to ecological restoration; it is a widespread problem across all fields of applied science. Written in a clear and engaging style, Intelligent Tinkering offers an insightful look at the underlying causes of the problem, along with invaluable suggestions for addressing it.
In The Intelligibility of Nature, Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since.
Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist.
Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike.
Natural microbial habitats include various interfaces--liquid-liquid, gas-liquid, solid-liquid, and solid-gas. An interface, the boundary between two phases, has physical and chemical properties that differ from those of either phase. Bacteria, yeasts, and algae often concentrate at interfaces, and the ability of microorganisms to exploit resources in their environment may be markedly affected by the nature of the available interfaces. Included within the realm of microbial activity at interfaces are such wide-ranging topics as predator-prey relations, tooth decay, gastrointestinal tract infections, mating contact, marine fouling, adsorptive bubble processes, oil degradation, rhizosphere associations, and bacterium-clay interactions.
In this book, bacteria are treated as living colloidal systems, and the behavior of microorganisms at interfaces is analyzed on the basis of this concept. Nonspecific physical and chemical forces acting on microorganisms at interfaces are described and related to biological factors determining the distribution of and interaction between microorganisms in both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The final chapter describes specific microbe-microbe, microbe-plant, and microbe-animal interfacial interactions.
Although laboratory studies of cultured microorganisms are essential in assessing their potential capabilities, an individual microbial species in a natural habitat is confronted by physical, chemical, and biological interactions rarely encountered under pure culture conditions. Interfaces are important aspects of microbial ecosystems, and this study of the influence of interfaces on natural habitats is an important and original contribution to microbial ecology.
In this collection of essays, fire historian Stephen J. Pyne explains the relevance of the Interior West to the national fire scene. This region offered the first scientific inquiry into landscape fire in the United States, including a map of Utah burns published in 1878 as part of John Wesley Powell’s Arid Lands report. Then its significance faded, and for most of the 20th century, the Interior West was the hole in the national donut of fire management. Recently the region has returned to prominence due to fires along its front ranges; invasive species, both exotics like cheatgrass and unleashed natives like mountain pine beetle; and fatality fires, notably at South Canyon in 1994.
The Interior West has long been passed over in national fire narratives. Here it reclaims its rightful place.
Included in this volume:
- A summary of 19th- and 20th-century fire history in the Interior West
- How this important region inspired U.S. studies of landscape fire
- Why the region disappeared from national fire management discussions
- How the expansion of invasive species and loss of native species has affected the region’s fire ecology
- The national significance of fire in the Interior West
Winner of a British Medical Association Book Award
A Brain Pickings Best Science Book of the Year
Early birds and night owls are born, not made. Sleep patterns may be the most obvious manifestation of the highly individualized biological clocks we inherit, but these clocks also regulate bodily functions from digestion to hormone levels to cognition. Living at odds with our internal timepieces, Till Roenneberg shows, can make us chronically sleep deprived and more likely to smoke, gain weight, feel depressed, fall ill, and fail geometry. By understanding and respecting our internal time, we can live better.
“Internal Time is a cautionary tale—actually a series of 24 tales, not coincidentally. Roenneberg ranges widely from the inner workings of biological rhythms to their social implications, illuminating each scientific tutorial with an anecdote inspired by clinical research...Written with grace and good humor, Internal Time is a serious work of science incorporating the latest research in chronobiology...[A] compelling volume.”
—A. Roger Ekirch, Wall Street Journal
“This is a fascinating introduction to an important topic, which will appeal to anyone who wishes to delve deep into the world of chronobiology, or simply wonders why they struggle to get a good night’s sleep.”
—Richard Wiseman, New Scientist
With the end of the Cold War, will the space race become a cooperative venture? This book, which tells the story of the European Space Agency, shows how such a cooperative enterprise has worked over the past three decades and how it might apply to future space science.
Linking fifteen European nations, the European Space Agency offers a working model of scientific, technological, and political cooperation on an international scale. Roger M. Bonnet and Vittorio Manno give us an insiders’ view of the agency—its beginnings as the European Space Research Organization, its development in the face of early difficulties, and its daily operations. Covering thirty years, this account traces the evolution of ESA’s programs, facilities, and capabilities and the establishment of its scientific, technological, industrial, and political policies and objectives. With an eye to future global space activities, the authors detail ESA’s relationships with its own member states and with other countries, particularly the United States. The history of cooperation between ESA and NASA as exemplified by two specific projects—Ulysses and the international space station—highlights the difficulties of associating different decision-making bodies and political systems.
Illustrated with pictures and diagrams, enlivened with anecdotes involving key world players in space science, this book provides a rich blend of factual information and personal recollection, history and interpretation. A timely contribution to the study of the politics of science and technology, it points the way to future international cooperation.
In an interesting turn, Nicholas Rescher writes on the interpretation of philosophical texts. Then Catherine Wilson and Andreas Blank explicate and critique Rescher’s theories through analysis of the mill passage from Leibniz’s Monadology.
As in the works of George Schaller and Cynthia Moss, Packer transports us to life in the field. He is addicted to this land—to the beauty of a male lion striding across the Serengeti plains, to the calls of a baboon troop through the rain forests of Gombe—and to understanding the animals that inhabit it. Through his vivid narration, we feel the dust and the bumps of the Arusha Road, smell the rosemary in the air at lunchtime on a Serengeti verandah, and hear the lyrics of the Grateful Dead playing off bootlegged tapes.
Into Africa also explores the social lives of the animals and the threats to their survival. Packer grapples with questions he has passionately tried to answer for more than two decades. Why do female lions raise their young in crèches? Why do male baboons move from troop to troop while male chimps band together? How can humans and animals continue to coexist in a world of diminishing resources? Immediate demands—logistical nightmares, political upheavals, physical exhaustion—yield to the larger inescapable issues of the interdependence of the land, the animals, and the people who inhabit it.
Working from the precept that "nature abhors a gradient," Into the Cool details how complex systems emerge, enlarge, and reproduce in a world tending toward disorder. From hurricanes here to life on other worlds, from human evolution to the systems humans have created, this pervasive pull toward equilibrium governs life at its molecular base and at its peak in the elaborate structures of living complex systems. Schneider and Sagan organize their argument in a highly accessible manner, moving from descriptions of the basic physics behind energy flow to the organization of complex systems to the role of energy in life to the final section, which applies their concept of energy flow to politics, economics, and even human health.
A book that needs to be grappled with by all those who wonder at the organizing principles of existence, Into the Cool will appeal to both humanists and scientists. If Charles Darwin shook the world by showing the common ancestry of all life, so Into the Cool has a similar power to disturb—and delight—by showing the common roots in energy flow of all complex, organized, and naturally functioning systems.
In An Introduction to Nuclear Astrophysics, author Richard Boyd includes basic nomenclature and information so that students from astronomy or physics can quickly orient themselves in the material. Subsequent chapters describe earthbound and space born instruments operating in service to nuclear astrophysics worldwide; background topics such as nuclear and neutrino physics, scattering formalism, and thermonuclear reaction rates; and information on galactic chemical evolution, solar nucleosynthesis, s- and r-processes, and gamma-ray bursts. Each chapter includes problem sets against which students may test their knowledge before moving ahead, and the author has included copious references intended to guide students to further study.
An Introduction to Nuclear Astrophysics is an essential textbook for undergraduate and graduate students in astronomy and astrophysics. It is also an invaluable overview of the subject for researchers in nuclear astrophysics and related fields.
Developed by ecologists and landscape architects, each of whom has been involved in restoration research and practice for many years, the focus of the book is on providing a framework that can be used to guide restoration decisions anywhere on the globe, both now and in the future. The text is organized around a restoration process that has been tested and revised by the authors in their restoration ecology courses taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison over the past thirty years.
Each chapter includes a series of "Food for Thought" questions that both help students review concepts and put them to work in solving conservation problems. The framework is designed to work with the uniqueness, uncertainty, messiness, and constraints inherent in any real-world restoration project.
Success in ecological restoration requires not only technical proficiency but also skill in the social, cultural, and political arenas. Introduction to Restoration Ecology can help students develop the skills they need to succeed in all of these areas and is a much-needed new resource.
In three volumes, historian Jole Shackelford delineates the history of the study of biological rhythms—now widely known as chronobiology—from antiquity into the twentieth century. Perhaps the most well-known biological rhythm is the circadian rhythm, tied to the cycles of day and night and often referred to as the “body clock.” But there are many other biological rhythms, and although scientists and the natural philosophers who preceded them have long known about them, only in the past thirty years have a handful of pioneering scientists begun to study such rhythms in plants and animals seriously. Tracing the intellectual and institutional development of biological rhythm studies, Shackelford offers a meaningful, evidence-based account of a field that today holds great promise for applications in agriculture, health care, and public health. Volume 1 follows early biological observations and research, chiefly on plants; volume 2 turns to animal and human rhythms and the disciplinary contexts for chronobiological investigation; and volume 3 focuses primarily on twentieth-century researchers who modeled biological clocks and sought them out, including three molecular biologists whose work in determining clock mechanisms earned them a Nobel Prize in 2017.
In three volumes, historian Jole Shackelford delineates the history of the study of biological rhythms—now widely known as chronobiology—from antiquity into the twentieth century. Perhaps the most well-known biological rhythm is the circadian rhythm, tied to the cycles of day and night and often referred to as the “body clock.” But there are many other biological rhythms, and although scientists and the natural philosophers who preceded them have long known about them, only in the past thirty years have a handful of pioneering scientists begun to study such rhythms in plants and animals seriously. Tracing the intellectual and institutional development of biological rhythm studies, Shackelford offers a meaningful, evidence-based account of a field that today holds great promise for applications in agriculture, health care, and public health. Volume 1 follows early biological observations and research, chiefly on plants; volume 2 turns to animal and human rhythms and the disciplinary contexts for chronobiological investigation; and volume 3 focuses primarily on twentieth-century researchers who modeled biological clocks and sought them out, including three molecular biologists whose work in determining clock mechanisms earned them a Nobel Prize in 2017.
In three volumes, historian Jole Shackelford delineates the history of the study of biological rhythms—now widely known as chronobiology—from antiquity into the twentieth century. Perhaps the most well-known biological rhythm is the circadian rhythm, tied to the cycles of day and night and often referred to as the “body clock.” But there are many other biological rhythms, and although scientists and the natural philosophers who preceded them have long known about them, only in the past thirty years have a handful of pioneering scientists begun to study such rhythms in plants and animals seriously. Tracing the intellectual and institutional development of biological rhythm studies, Shackelford offers a meaningful, evidence-based account of a field that today holds great promise for applications in agriculture, health care, and public health. Volume 1 follows early biological observations and research, chiefly on plants; volume 2 turns to animal and human rhythms and the disciplinary contexts for chronobiological investigation; and volume 3 focuses primarily on twentieth-century researchers who modeled biological clocks and sought them out, including three molecular biologists whose work in determining clock mechanisms earned them a Nobel Prize in 2017.
Authors Stokes and Smiley first explain the basic principles of tree-ring dating, then describe details of the process, step by step, from the time a sample is collected until it is incorporated into a master chronology.
The book focuses on coniferous evergreens of the Southwest, particularly piñons, because they have wide geographic distribution, constitute a large population, and show excellent growth response to certain controlling factors. The book is specifically concerned with the task of establishing a calendar date for a wood or charcoal specimen.
This concise but thorough explication of an important discipline will make dendrochonology more meaningful to students and professionals in archaeology, forestry, hydrology, and global change.
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe—descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished. Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were identified in 1856, scientists have been vexed by the question, why did modern humans survive while their closest known relatives went extinct?
“Shipman admits that scientists have yet to find genetic evidence that would prove her theory. Time will tell if she’s right. For now, read this book for an engagingly comprehensive overview of the rapidly evolving understanding of our own origins.”
—Toby Lester, Wall Street Journal
“Are humans the ultimate invasive species? So contends anthropologist Pat Shipman—and Neanderthals, she opines, were among our first victims. The relationship between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis is laid out cleanly, along with genetic and other evidence. Shipman posits provocatively that the deciding factor in the triumph of our ancestors was the domestication of wolves.”
—Daniel Cressey, Nature
Invasive alien species are among today's most daunting environmental threats, costing billions of dollars in economic damages and wreaking havoc on ecosystems around the world. In 1997, a consortium of scientific organizations including SCOPE, IUCN, and CABI developed the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP) with the explicit objective of providing new tools for understanding and coping with invasive alien species.
Invasive Alien Species is the final report of GISP's first phase of operation, 1997-2000, in which authorities from more than thirty countries worked to examine invasions as a worldwide environmental hazard. The book brings together the world's leading scientists and researchers involved with invasive alien species to offer a comprehensive summary and synthesis of the current state of knowledge on the subject.
Invasive alien species represent a critical threat to natural ecosystems and native biodiversity, as well as to human economic vitality and health. The knowledge gained to date in understanding and combating invasive alien species can form a useful basis on which to build strategies for controlling or minimizing the effects in the future. Invasive Alien Species is an essential reference for the international community of investigators concerned with biological invasions.
Invasive plants are a growing threat to ecosystems everywhere. Often originating in distant climes, they spread to woodlands, wetlands, prairies, roadsides, and backyards that lack the biological controls which kept these plant populations in check in their homelands.
Invasive Plants of the Upper Midwest includes more than 250 color photos that will help anyone identify problem trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, sedges, and herbaceous plants (including aquatic invaders). The text offers further details of plant identification; manual, mechanical, biological, and chemical control techniques; information and advice about herbicides; and suggestions for related ecological restoration and community education efforts. Also included are literature references, a glossary, a matrix of existing and potential invasive species in the Upper Midwest, an index with both scientific and common plant names, advice on state agencies to contact with invasive plant questions, and other helpful resources.
The information in this book has been carefully reviewed by staffs of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Bureau of Endangered Resources and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum and other invasive plant experts.
Invasive Species in a Changing World brings together leading scientists from around the world -- including Carla M. D'Antonio, Jeffrey McNeely, Robert Sutherst, David Richardson, and others -- to examine the invasive species phenomenon and to consider the mutual interactions between global change and invasives that are likely to occur over the next century. Invasive Species in a Changing World: offers a comprehensive look at the status of freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems in relation to invasives; examines physical factors that will influence the future success ofinvading species; considers the tools available to track changing patterns and movements; looks at human dimensions including human health effects, and effects on crops; describes the problem in different parts of the world.
Contributors focus on the proposition that global change will exacerbate the invasive species problem, and set forth the idea that invasives are themselves a global change element that need to be considered in global change scenarios.
Invasive Species in a Changing World provides readers with the background and knowledge they need to begin developing strategies to combat the invasive species problem, and is essential reading for anyone concerned with the impact of invasive species on ecosystem health and functioning.
Yet even though ecological research has led to public conversation and policy recommendations, those recommendations have frequently been ignored, and the efforts to counter invasive species have been largely unsuccessful. Recognizing the need to engage experts across the life, social, and legal sciences as well as the humanities, the editors of this volume have drawn together a wide variety of ecologists, historians, economists, legal scholars, policy makers, and communications scholars, to facilitate a dialogue among these disciplines and understand fully the invasive species phenomenon. Aided by case studies of well-known invasives such as the cane toad of Australia and the emerald ash borer, Asian carp, and sea lampreys that threaten US ecosystems, Invasive Species in a Globalized World offers strategies for developing and implementing anti-invasive policies designed to stop their introduction and spread, and to limit their effects.
Recent years have seen a steep rise in invasions of non-native species in virtually all major ecoregions on Earth. Along with this rise has come a realization that a rigorous scientific understanding of why, how, when, and where species are transported is the necessary foundation for managing biological invasions.
Invasive Species presents extensive information and new analyses on mechanisms of species transfer, or vectors, as the latest contribution from the Global Invasive Species Programme (GISP). Contributors assess invasion vectors and vector management in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems for major taxonomic groups in a variety of regions around the world. The book:
- examines invasion causes, routes, and vectors in space and time
- highlights current approaches and challenges to preventing new invasions, both from a geographic and taxonomic point of view
- explores strategies, benefits, and limitations of risk assessment
- offers a synthesis of many facets of vector science and management
- presents recommendations for action
Chapter authors review fungi, plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates, with geographic assessments covering New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and the United States.
Although the full extent and cumulative impact of nonnative species can only be approximated, biological invasions are clearly a potent force of global change, contributing to a wide range of deleterious effects including disease outbreaks, habitat alteration and loss, declines of native species, increased frequency of fires, and shifts in nutrient cycling. Vectors are the delivery mechanisms, resulting in recent increases in rates of new invasions. Invasive Species brings together in a single volume new information from leading scientists around the world on approaches to controlling and managing invasion vectors. This volume is a timely and essential reference for scientists, researchers, policymakers, and anyone concerned with understanding biological invasions and developing effective responses to them.
Blue jeans, MTV, Coca-Cola, and… ecology? We don't often think of conservation sciences as a U.S. export, but in the second half of the twentieth century an astounding array of scientists and ideas flowed out from the United States into the world, preaching the gospel of conservation-oriented ecology.
Inventing Global Ecology grapples with how we should understand the development of global ecology in the twentieth century—a science that is held responsible for, literally, saving the world. Is the spread of ecology throughout the globe a subtle form of cultural imperialism, as some claim? Or is it a manifestation of an increasingly globalized world, where ideas, people, and things move about with greater freedom than ever before?
Using India as the case study, Professor Michael Lewis considers the development of conservation policies and conservation sciences since the end of World War II and the role of United States scientists, ideas, and institutions in this process. Was India subject to a subtle form of Americanization, or did Indian ecologists develop their own agenda, their own science, and their own way of understanding (and saving) the natural world? Does nationality even matter when doing ecology?
This readable narrative will carry you through the first fifty years of independent India, from the meadows of the Himalayan Mountains to the rainforests of southern India, from Gandhi and Nehru to Project Tiger. Of equal interest to the general reader, to scientists, and to scholars of history and globalization, Inventing Global Ecology combines ethnographic fieldwork and oral history conducted in India and the United States, as well as traditional archival research.
Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)
Investing in Natural Capital presents the results of a workshop held following the second biannual conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics. It focuses on the relation of human development to natural capital, and the relation of natural capital to environmental processes.
Because we are capable of understanding our impact on the environment and the importance of managing it sustainably, humans play a special role in our ecosystem. The book emphasizes the essential connections between natural ecosystems and human socioeconomic systems, and the importance of insuring that both remain resilient. Specific chapters deal with methodology, case material, and policy questions, and offer a thorough exploration of this provocative and important alternative to conventional economics.
Why is the world orderly, and how does this order come to be? Human beings inhabit a multitude of apparently ordered systems—natural, social, political, economic, cognitive, and others—whose origins and purposes are often obscure. In the eighteenth century, older certainties about such orders, rooted in either divine providence or the mechanical operations of nature, began to fall away. In their place arose a new appreciation for the complexity of things, a new recognition of the world’s disorder and randomness, new doubts about simple relations of cause and effect—but with them also a new ability to imagine the world’s orders, whether natural or manmade, as self-organizing. If large systems are left to their own devices, eighteenth-century Europeans increasingly came to believe, order will emerge on its own without any need for external design or direction.
In Invisible Hands, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman trace the many appearances of the language of self-organization in the eighteenth-century West. Across an array of domains, including religion, society, philosophy, science, politics, economy, and law, they show how and why this way of thinking came into the public view, then grew in prominence and arrived at the threshold of the nineteenth century in versatile, multifarious, and often surprising forms. Offering a new synthesis of intellectual and cultural developments, Invisible Hands is a landmark contribution to the history of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century culture.
In this lively look at a timeless idea, Ball provides the first comprehensive history of our fascination with the unseen. This sweeping narrative moves from medieval spell books to the latest nanotechnology, from fairy tales to telecommunications, from camouflage to ghosts to the dawn of nuclear physics and the discovery of dark energy. Along the way, Invisible tells little-known stories about medieval priests who blamed their misdeeds on spirits; the Cock Lane ghost, which intrigued both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens; the attempts by Victorian scientist William Crookes to detect forces using tiny windmills; novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s belief that he was unseen when in his dressing gown; and military efforts to enlist magicians to hide tanks and ships during WWII. Bringing in such voices as Plato and Shakespeare, Ball provides not only a scientific history but a cultural one—showing how our simultaneous desire for and suspicion of the invisible has fueled invention and the imagination for centuries.
In this unusual and clever book, Ball shows that our fantasies about being unseen—and seeing the unseen—reveal surprising truths about who we are.
Iowa's rock record is the product of more than three billion years of geological processes. The state endured multiple episodes of continental glaciation during the Pleistocene Ice Age, and the last glacier retreated from Iowa a mere (geologically speaking) twelve thousand years ago. Prior to that, dozens of seas came and went, leaving behind limestone beds with rich fossil records. Lush coal swamps, salty lagoons, briny basins, enormous alluvial plains, ancient rifts, and rugged Precambrian mountain belts all left their mark. In Iowa's Geological Past, Wayne Anderson gives us an up-to-date and well-informed account of the state's vast geological history from the Precambrian through the end of the Great Ice Age.
Anderson takes us on a journey backward into time to explore Iowa's rock-and-sediment record. In the distant past, prehistoric Iowa was covered with shallow seas; coniferous forests flourished in areas beyond the continental glaciers; and a wide variety of animals existed, including mastodon, mammoth, musk ox, giant beaver, camel, and giant sloth.
The presence of humans can be traced back to the Paleo-Indian interval, 9,500 to 7,500 years ago. Iowa in Paleozoic time experienced numerous coastal plain and shallow marine environments. Early in the Precambrian, Iowa was part of ancient mountain belts in which granite and other rocks were formed well below the earth's surface.
The hills and valleys of the Hawkeye State are not everlasting when viewed from the perspective of geologic time. Overall, Iowa's geologic column records an extraordinary transformation over more than three billion years. Wayne Anderson's profusely illustrated volume provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of the state's remarkable geological past.
Alarmists argue that the United States urgently needs more and better-trained scientists to compete with the rest of the world. Their critics counter that, far from facing a shortage, we are producing a glut of young scientists with poor employment prospects. Both camps have issued reports in recent years that predict the looming decline of American science. Drawing on their extensive analysis of national data sets, Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald have welcome news to share: American science is in good health.
Is American Science in Decline? does reveal areas of concern, namely scientists’ low earnings, the increasing competition they face from Asia, and the declining number of doctorates who secure academic positions. But the authors argue that the values inherent in American culture make the country highly conducive to science for the foreseeable future. They do not see globalization as a threat but rather a potential benefit, since it promotes efficiency in science through knowledge-sharing. In an age when other countries are catching up, American science will inevitably become less dominant, even though it is not in decline relative to its own past. As technology continues to change the American economy, better-educated workers with a range of skills will be in demand. So as a matter of policy, the authors urge that science education not be detached from general education.
If you could pose one question to a dolphin, what would it be? And what might a dolphin ask you? For forty years, researcher and author Denise L. Herzing has investigated these and related questions of marine mammal communication. With the assistance of a friendly community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, Herzing studies two-way communication between different dolphin species and between humans and dolphins using a variety of cutting-edge experiments. But the dolphins are not the only ones talking, and in this wide-ranging and accessible book, Herzing explores the astonishing realities of interspecies communication, a skill that humans currently lack.
Is Anyone Listening? connects research on dolphin communication to findings from Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Dian Fossey on mountain gorillas, Cynthia Moss on African elephants, and others driving today’s exploration of possible animal languages. Although humans have long attempted to crack animal communication codes, only now do we have the advanced machine-learning tools to help. As Herzing reveals, researchers are finding fascinating hints of language in nonhuman species, including linguistic structures, vowel equivalents, and complex repeated sequences. By looking at the many ways animals use and manipulate signals, we see that we’ve only just begun to appreciate the diversity of animal intelligence and the complicated and subtle aspects of animal communication.
Considering dolphins and other nonhuman animals as colleagues instead of research subjects, Herzing asks us to meet animals as both speakers and listeners, as mutually curious beings, and to listen to what they are saying.
This book is a thought-provoking view of the progress of humankind in the last century. In spite of the pessimism that prevails in the media, people are better fed, better clothed, better housed, and better educated than at any previous time.
The facts within the book provide documentation for a positive outlook toward our nutrition and health, living standards and working conditions, political and economic freedoms, educational facilities, ability to communicate, ease of movement, increasing leisure, and, most important, our ability to get along with one another and with our Creator. The statistics, charts, and photographs that illustrate this book enhance the reassuring and uplifting view of the state of the world and where it is going.
“His analysis gives us a refreshing balance to the negative, sometimes cynical, views in the media that tend to portray the worst rather than the best in human civilization.” —Jimmy Carter
“After reading Sir John Templeton's latest book, I believe more than ever that we are living in the most exciting time in history. Despite the challenges we face, his demonstration of mankind's progress gives all of us great hopes and high expectations for our next century and the new millennium.” —Jack Kemp, former HUD secretary, director of Empower America
This edition of Isaac Newton’s Principia is the first edition that enables the reader to see at a glance the stages of evolution of the work from the completion of the manuscript draft of the first edition in 1685 to the publication of the third edition, authorized by Newton, in 1726.
A photographic reprint of this final version, the present edition exhibits on the same page the variant readings from the seven other texts. This design allows the reader to see all the changes that Newton introduced and to determine exactly how the last and definitive edition, published a few months before Newton’s death, grew from earlier versions.
A series of appendices provides additional material on the development of the Principia; the contributions of Roger Cotes and of Henry Pemberton; drafts of Newton’s preface to the third edition; a bibliography of the Principia, describing in detail the three substantive editions and all the known subsequent editions; an index of names mentioned in the third edition; and a complete table of contents of the third edition.
The second largest order of mammals, Chiroptera comprises more than one thousand species of bats. Because of their mobility, bats are often the only native mammals on isolated oceanic islands, where more than half of all bat species live. These island bats represent an evolutionarily distinctive and ecologically significant part of the earth’s biological diversity.
Island Bats is the first book to focus solely on the evolution, ecology, and conservation of bats living in the world’s island ecosystems. Among other topics, the contributors to this volume examine how the earth’s history has affected the evolution of island bats, investigate how bat populations are affected by volcanic eruptions and hurricanes, and explore the threat of extinction from human disturbance. Geographically diverse, the volume includes studies of the islands of the Caribbean, the Western Indian Ocean, Micronesia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and New Zealand.
With its wealth of information from long-term studies, Island Bats provides timely and valuable information about how this fauna has evolved and how it can be conserved.
Royle shows that despite the view of some islands as earthly paradises, they are often beset by severe limitations in both resources and opportunities. Detailing the population loss many islands have faced in recent years, he considers how islanders have developed their homes into tourist destinations in order to combat economic instability. He also explores their exotic, otherworldly beauty and the ways they have provided both refuge and inspiration for artists, such as Paul Gauguin in Tahiti and George Orwell on the Scottish island of Jura. Filled with illustrations, Islands is a compelling and comprehensive survey of the geographical and cultural aspects of island life.
The Renaissance was not just a rebirth of the mind. It was also a new dawn for the machine.
When we celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, we instinctively refer, above all, to its artistic and literary masterpieces. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the Italian peninsula was the stage of a no-less-impressive revival of technical knowledge and practice. In this rich and lavishly illustrated volume, Paolo Galluzzi guides readers through a singularly inventive period, capturing the fusion of artistry and engineering that spurred some of the Renaissance’s greatest technological breakthroughs.
Galluzzi traces the emergence of a new and important historical figure: the artist-engineer. In the medieval world, innovators remained anonymous. By the height of the fifteenth century, artist-engineers like Leonardo da Vinci were sought after by powerful patrons, generously remunerated, and exhibited in royal and noble courts. In an age that witnessed continuous wars, the robust expansion of trade and industry, and intense urbanization, these practitioners—with their multiple skills refined in the laboratory that was the Renaissance workshop—became catalysts for change. Renaissance masters were not only astoundingly creative but also championed a new concept of learning, characterized by observation, technical know-how, growing mathematical competence, and prowess at the draftsman’s table.
The Italian Renaissance of Machines enriches our appreciation for Taccola, Giovanni Fontana, and other masters of the quattrocento and reveals how da Vinci’s ambitious achievements paved the way for Galileo’s revolutionary mathematical science of mechanics.
“The greenhouse effect is us, and it is specifically us in the Western world.” This is one of the messages at the beginning of Anita Gordon and David Suzuki’s startling view of our future on Earth. More than any other time in history, the 1990s have marked a turning point for human civilization. Not only are we facing ecological disasters that will affect our ability to survive, but the crisis is forcing us to reexamine the entire value system that has governed our lives for the past two thousand years.
Gordon and Suzuki warn us of the transition we will need to make if we are to arrive safely in the next century. More than a book on the environment, this is a book about us as a species: our shortsightedness, our failure to read the warnings, our inability to grasp the significance of our actions-and the tough decisions we have to make in order to save ourselves.
The power of the book lies in the consensus of the many voices, those of scientists and other scholars, that speak through it. The components of our predicament—global warming, soil erosion, acid rain, species depletion, ozone damage, rainforest destruction, overpopulation—are quantified with authority. And never before has such a strong consensus been expressed in a single warning. The message we receive is that our actions are taking place in a political and economic world that demands radical change.
In an effort to counteract this blueprint for disaster, Gordon and Suzuki present a resounding rebuttal of technological optimism and the belief that continued economic growth is a prerequisite for environmental reform. The intellectual fog of sustainable development is incisively dispelled, and in its place the authors suggest practical contributions that individuals as well as governments can make toward creating a “conserver society.”
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ivory diptych sundials were widely used to determine the time by day or night. These elaborate portable sundials, which could be adjusted for different latitudes, incorporated various devices useful for merchants and others who traveled extensively in Europe. This catalog illustrates in detail Harvard's collection of eighty-three ivory diptych sundials, one of the largest holdings of these instruments in the world. The collection encompasses a comprehensive array of styles and designs from Nuremberg, Paris, and Dieppe, the major centers of their production, as well as from other parts of Europe.
This catalog is the fourth publication of Harvard University's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and the first to appear in twenty-two years. This collection, which was established in 1949 as a resource for the history of science and technology, has one of the three largest university holdings of its kind in the world. It comprises about 15,000 instruments covering a broad range of scientific disciplines dating from 1500 to the present. Illustrated catalogues of other parts of the collection are anticipated in the near future. These will include volumes on early telephones and phonographs, psychological instruments, and apparatus for teaching science in Colonial America.
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