Biology & Chemistry Audiobooks | Science & Technology

Roughly three million people in the United States have already been diagnosed with epilepsy and another 200,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. Worldwide, approximately one percent of the global population is diagnosed with epilepsy at some point in their lives. With the diagnosis come questions, concerns, and uncertainties from both the person diagnosed and their family. So, where to go? Navigating Life with Epilepsy provides accessible, comprehensive, and up-to-date information about epilepsy shared from the two decades of experience of epileptologist David Spencer, MD, FAAN. This book guides the listener through the initial diagnosis, offers explanations on current approaches to diagnostic testing, medications, treatment options, and life management for the patient, their family, and their caregiver. Patient's stories are peppered throughout to illustrate that you are not alone: like you, they must navigate the myriad psychosocial challenges associated with epilepsy, including everyday concerns like driving, work, and relationships. Navigating Life with Epilepsy is a perfect resource for both patients with epilepsy and the family members and friends who care for them.

David C. Spencer Md, David C. Spencer, M.D. (Author), Michael Butler Murray (Narrator)

Audiobook

Born of Ice and Fire: How Glaciers and Volcanoes (with a Pinch of Salt) Drove Animal Evolution

An exploration of how the Cryogenian Period, when our planet was covered in ice for millions of years, created today's remarkable biodiversity More than half a billion years ago, our world was completely covered by glaciers, a 'Snowball Earth' that persisted for millions of years. Incredibly, this unimaginable cold led to the remarkable diversification of life on earth known as the Cambrian explosion. With a geologist's eye and a knack for storytelling, Graham Shields explores when and how such inhospitable conditions enabled animals to evolve, radiate, and diversify into our earliest ancestors. This journey navigates the wild swings between hot and cold climates, oxygenation and asphyxiation, biological radiations and extinctions, asking how such instability relates to grander forces that brought our planet to its modern state. Shields guides listeners through evidence found in the Australian outback, Mongolia, Scotland, and other locales, revealing how geologists can trace glaciation, the atmosphere, oceans, mountain building, and more through the earth's rocks, providing a comprehensive theory of how life evolved and diversified.

Graham Shields (Author), Graham Mack (Narrator)

Audiobook

Consciousness: How Our Brains Turn Matter Into Meaning

What is the material basis of the thoughts that occur inside our heads? Where do imaginative, creative, or spiritual thoughts come from - can these really be the product of nerve impulses in the brain? And is the human mind radically different from that of other species, or is our uniqueness more superficial than real? In this audiobook, Oxford biologist John Parrington proposes a radical new theory of human consciousness, arguing that a qualitative leap in consciousness occurred during human evolution as language and tool use transformed our brains. Rejecting outdated views of the brain as a hard-wired circuit diagram, he draws on the latest insights from neuroscience to show that meaning is created within our heads through a dynamic interaction of oscillating brain waves. This new model of consciousness not only provides a material basis of our innermost thoughts but also explains why the mind can sometimes go wrong, causing deep mental distress.

John Parrington (Author), Nicholas Boulton, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Unity of Science: Exploring Our Universe, from the Big Bang to the Twenty-First Century

A journey guided by science that explores the universe, the earth, and the story of life For Irwin Shapiro, science starts with questions. This book provides a broad and entertaining survey of major scientific discoveries that have changed our views of nature and, in turn, spawned further questions. Shapiro, an award-winning scientist and beloved teacher, separates his inquiry into three parts: looking up at the universe; looking down at the earth and its fossils; and looking in at the story of life. His framework encourages listeners to view science as a detective story-to observe and question nature and natural phenomena, and to base all conclusions on scientific evidence. With his knowledgeable yet conversational approach, Shapiro offers an enjoyable way for the curious to learn about the foundations of a range of scientific topics: the motions of bodies in the cosmos, the history and structure of the earth, the evolution of organisms, and the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence.

Irwin Shapiro (Author), Christina Delaine (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human

Humans have long thought of their bodies and minds as separate spheres of existence. The body is physical—the source of aches and pains. But the mind is mental; it perceives, remembers, believes, feels, and imagines. Although modern science has largely eliminated this mind-body dualism, people still tend to imagine their minds as separate from their physical being. Even in research, the notion of the “self” as somehow distinct from the rest of the organism persists. Joseph LeDoux argues that we have hit an epistemological wall—that ideas like the self are increasingly barriers to discovery and understanding. He offers a new framework of who we are, theorizing four realms of existence—bodily, neural, cognitive, and conscious. The biological realm makes life possible. Hence, every living thing exists biologically. Animals, uniquely, supplement biological existence with a nervous system. This neural component enables them to control their bodies with speed and precision unseen in other forms of life. Some animals with nervous systems possess a cognitive realm, which allows the creation of internal representations of the world around them. These mental models are used to control a wide range of behaviors. Finally, the conscious realm allows its possessors to have inner experiences of, and thoughts about, the world. Together, LeDoux shows, these four realms make humans who and what we are. They cooperate continuously and underlie our capacity to live and experience ourselves as beings with a past, present, and future. The result, LeDoux explains, is not a self but an “ensemble of being” that subsumes our entire human existence, both as individuals and as a species.

Joseph E. Ledoux (Author), Graham Rowat (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Miracle of Our Universe: A New View of Consciousness, God, Science, and Reality

Without consciousness there is nothing. Have you ever wondered why and how the world around you came to exist, and whether there might be an afterlife experience awaiting you after our physical bodies die? Might there actually be a God and a heaven of some sort? The hypothesis presented in this book is that our seemingly physical universe of matter and energy is a virtual simulation which is thought into existence by a universal consciousness which we call God. A reason for a universal consciousness to do such a thing could be to experience and evolve itself through the free will actions of its offspring. This would entail thinking into existence a virtual universe so as to interact with such a universe and each other. Literally everything is consciousness in action, resulting in a gigantic cosmic simulation. We and other creatures are offspring of this God consciousness. The Miracle of Our Universe explores the forefront of science and spirituality research, including: Are near-death experiences real? What is the Zero-Point Field? What kind of being could God be? Is there some place that God could have come from? How does the Big Bang figure into this? Is there an afterlife and what could it be like? What is the purpose of life? Is consciousness all there is? Is the Universe a virtual reality? Why is Hell impossible?

Bernard Haisch, Marsha Sims (Author), Kyle Snyder (Narrator)

Audiobook

Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

This audiobook narrated by neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents an evolutionary case for the existence of free will Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency-or free will-is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose. Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice emerged from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell's argument has important implications-for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence. An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose and why this matters.

Kevin J. Mitchell (Author), Kevin J. Mitchell (Narrator)

Audiobook

Methuselah's Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives

Opossums in the wild don't make it to the age of three; our pet cats can live for a decade and a half; cicadas live for seventeen years. Whales, however, can live for two centuries and tubeworms for several millennia. Meanwhile, human life expectancy tops out around the mid-eighties, with some outliers living past 100 or even 110. Is there anything humans can learn from the exceptional longevity of some animals in the wild? In Methusaleh's Zoo, Steven Austad tells the stories of some extraordinary animals, considering why, for example, animal species that fly live longer than earthbound species and why animals found in the ocean live longest of all. Austad-the leading authority on longevity in animals-argues that the best way we will learn from these long-lived animals is by studying them in the wild. Accordingly, he proceeds habitat by habitat, examining animals that spend most of their lives in the air, comparing insects, birds, and bats; animals that live on, and under, the ground-from mole rats to elephants; and animals that live in the sea. Humans have dramatically increased their lifespan with only a limited increase in healthspan; we're more and more prone to diseases as we grow older. By contrast, these species have successfully avoided both environmental hazards and the depredations of aging. Can we be more like them?

Steven N. Austad (Author), Tristan Morris (Narrator)

Audiobook

[Spanish] - Testosterona (Testosterone)

El origen biológico de la masculinidad ha inspirado fascinación y controversia desde la antigüedad. Desde los eunucos de la antigua China, hasta el mercado de los «elixires» de juventud en la Europa del siglo XIX, el ser humano ha estado obsesionado con identificar y manipular lo que hoy conocemos como testosterona. Gracias al interés que sigue generando y a los métodos de la ciencia moderna, hoy disponemos de un rico corpus de investigación sobre sus efectos tanto en hombres como en mujeres. La ciencia es clara: la testosterona desempeña un papel clave en las relaciones, el sexo, la infancia, los roles parentales, el trabajo, el deporte, las transiciones de género, la violencia... A través de fascinantes historias personales y con un profundo conocimiento de los más recientes avances científicos en este terreno, Carole Hooven, bióloga evolutiva en la Universidad de Harvard, analiza con ingenio y rigor la poderosa influencia de esta hormona en las diferencias de sexo y el comportamiento humano, y nos invita a reflexionar sobre sus consecuencias.

Carole Hooven (Author), Carlos Moreno (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Brief History of Intelligence: Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of AI

A Brief History of Intelligence bridges the gap between AI and neuroscience by telling the evolutionary story of how the brain came to be. The entirety of the human brain’s 4-billion-year story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs, starting from the very first brains, all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from new sets of brain modifications, and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book, and they make up our itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to breakthroughs in AI. Indeed, there will be plenty of such surprises along the way. For instance: the innovation that enabled AI to beat humans in the game of Go – temporal difference reinforcement learning – was an innovation discovered by our fish ancestors over 500 million years ago. The solutions to many of the current mysteries in AI – such as ‘common sense’ – can be found in the tiny brain of a mouse. Where do emotions come from? Research suggests that they may have arisen simply as a solution to navigation in ancient worm brains. Unravelling this evolutionary story will reveal the hidden features of human intelligence and with them, just how your mind came to be.

Max Bennett (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

Audiobook

Making Sense of Cancer: From Its Evolutionary Origin to Its Societal Impact and the Ultimate Solutio

Embark on a captivating journey that will fundamentally change how you see cancer—and perhaps life itself. Cancer is more than a disease. It is an integral part of who we are—complex biological and cultural beings with a limited life span. You will be surprised, challenged, and even amused by this eloquent synthesis of knowledge. Firmly rooted in science and the principles of evolution, this book is a must-read if you aim to understand cancer. Jarle Breivik (MD, PhD, EdD) is a professor of medicine at the University of Oslo and a former Fulbright Scholar with a doctorate in education from the University of Pennsylvania. He is internationally recognized for his research on the evolutionary dynamics of cancer. His thought-provoking analyses represented in The New York Times, Scientific American, PNAS, EMBO Reports, and Wired Magazine, and have stimulated a profound debate about cancer, research, and biotechnology. In this book, Dr. Breivik brings it all together in a captivating story about humanity. *** “This remarkable book is not simply about cancer. It is a beautiful story about what it means to be human. It took me places I had never thought of and ended on a cliff hanger about the future of our civilization. I eagerly await the follow-up.” —RICHARD SMITH, former Editor-in-Chief, The BMJ (British Medical Journal) *** “This book grabbed me like a thriller! As a cancer patient, I have asked many questions. My father also had bladder cancer, and my brother died of leukemia. This book helped me understand and accept.” —ELIN SCHIVE, cancer survivor *** “With his panoramic view of cancer, Breivik’s brilliant writing and thought-provoking reflections will captivate both laypeople and researchers. A must-read that skillfully connects the life sciences in an illuminating manner.” —MANUEL PERUCHO, professor em., Sanford Burnham Prebys, and Institute of Predictive and Personalized Medicine of Cancer.

Jarle Breivik (Author), Jarle Breivik (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Synesthesia Experience: Tasting Words, Seeing Music, and Hearing Color

A violinist sees a scarlet form when he plays a certain note; a rock star sees waves of blue and green as he composes a ballad; an actress tastes cake when she utters the word 'table.' Described by some as a superpower this mingling of the senses is called 'synesthesia,' and the people who possess this amazing gift are called 'synesthetes.' What happens when a journalist turns her lens on a mystery happening in her own life? Maureen Seaberg did just that and lived for a year exploring her synesthesia. The wondrous brain trait is often described as blended senses, but for Maureen, synesthesia is not an idle 'brain tick' that can be explained away by science (although it does offer some important clues). It is a unique ability to tap into and reveal a greater creative universe and even the divine. Join her as she visits top neuroscientists, rock stars, violinists, other synesthetes, philosophers, savants, quantum physicists, and even Tibetan lamas in her journey toward the truth. Step into Maureen's shimmering alternate universe as she explores this fascinating subject, combining clear explanations of groundbreaking scientific research with an exploration of deeper understanding of our senses.

Maureen Seaberg (Author), Rachel Perry (Narrator)

Audiobook

Biology & Chemistry Audiobooks in Science & Technology