Biology & Chemistry Audiobooks | Science & Technology

*Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016* The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from bestselling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, that governs our form and function. The story of the gene begins in an obscure Augustinian abbey in Moravia in 1856 where a monk stumbles on the idea of a 'unit of heredity'. It intersects with Darwin's theory of evolution, and collides with the horrors of Nazi eugenics in the 1940s. The gene transforms post-war biology. It reorganizes our understanding of sexuality, temperament, choice and free will. This is a story driven by human ingenuity and obsessive minds - from Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin, and the thousands of scientists still working to understand the code of codes. This is an epic, moving history of a scientific idea coming to life, by the author of The Emperor of All Maladies. But woven through The Gene, like a red line, is also an intimate history - the story of Mukherjee's own family and its recurring pattern of mental illness, reminding us that genetics is vitally relevant to everyday lives. These concerns reverberate even more urgently today as we learn to "read" and "write" the human genome - unleashing the potential to change the fates and identities of our children. Majestic in its ambition, and unflinching in its honesty, The Gene gives us a definitive account of the fundamental unit of heredity - and a vision of both humanity's past and future.

Siddhartha Mukherjee (Author), Dennis Boutsikaris (Narrator)

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Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

Brian Fagan, Brian M. Fagan (Author), James Langton (Narrator)

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Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider: How Scientific Names Celebrate Adventurers, Hero

An engaging history of the surprising, poignant, and occasionally scandalous stories behind scientific names and their cultural significance. Ever since Carl Linnaeus's binomial system of scientific names was adopted in the eighteenth century, scientists have been eponymously naming organisms in ways that both honor and vilify their namesakes. This charming, informative, and accessible history examines the fascinating stories behind taxonomic nomenclature, from Linnaeus himself naming a small and unpleasant weed after a rival botanist to the recent influx of scientific names based on pop-culture icons-including David Bowie's spider, Frank Zappa's jellyfish, and Beyonce's fly. Exploring the naming process as an opportunity for scientists to express themselves in creative ways, Stephen B. Heard's fresh approach shows how scientific names function as a window into both the passions and foibles of the scientific community and as a more general indicator of the ways in which humans relate to, and impose order on, the natural world.

Stephen B. Heard Phd, Stephen B. Heard, Ph.D., Stephen B. Heard, Phd (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)

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Other Minds

In , Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to the first evolved nervous systems in ancient relatives of jellyfish, he explores the incredible evolutionary journey of the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous molluscs who would later abandon their shells to rise above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so - a journey completely independent from the route that mammals and birds would later take. But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually 'think for themselves'? By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind - and on our own.

Peter Godfrey-Smith (Author), Peter Noble (Narrator)

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The Emperor of All Maladies

A comprehensive history of cancer - one of the greatest enemies of medical progress - and an insight into its effects and potential cures, by a leading expert on the illness.In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousand years.The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer'. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee's own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

Siddhartha Mukherjee (Author), Stephen Hoye (Narrator)

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The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us H

In the compelling popular science tradition of Sapiens and Guns, Germs, and Steel, a groundbreaking and eye-opening exploration that applies evolutionary science to provide a new perspective on human psychology, revealing how major challenges from our past have shaped some of the most fundamental aspects of our being. The most fundamental aspects of our lives—from leadership and innovation to aggression and happiness—were permanently altered by the 'social leap' our ancestors made from the rainforest to the savannah. Their struggle to survive on the open grasslands required a shift from individualism to a new form of collectivism, which forever altered the way our mind works. It changed the way we fight and our proclivity to make peace, it changed the way we lead and the way we follow, it made us innovative but not inventive, it created a new kind of social intelligence, and it led to new sources of life satisfaction. In The Social Leap, William von Hippel lays out this revolutionary hypothesis, tracing human development through three critical evolutionary inflection points to explain how events in our distant past shape our lives today. From the mundane, such as why we exaggerate, to the surprising, such as why we believe our own lies and why fame and fortune are as likely to bring misery as happiness, the implications are far reaching and extraordinary. Blending anthropology, biology, history, and psychology with evolutionary science, The Social Leap is a fresh and provocative look at our species that provides new clues about who we are, what makes us happy, and how to use this knowledge to improve our lives.

William Von Hippel (Author), Michael David Axtell (Narrator)

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The Human Superorganism

The origin of asthma, autism, Alzheimer's, allergies, cancer, heart disease, obesity, and even some kinds of depression is now clear. Award-winning researcher on the microbiome, professor Rodney Dietert presents a new paradigm in human biology that has emerged in the midst of the ongoing global epidemic of noncommunicable diseases. The Human Superorganism makes a sweeping, paradigm-shifting argument. It demolishes two fundamental beliefs that have blinkered all medical thinking until very recently: 1) Humans are better off as pure organisms free of foreign microbes; and 2) the human genome is the key to future medical advances. The microorganisms that we have sought to eliminate have been there for centuries supporting our ancestors. They comprise as much as 90 percent of the cells in and on our bodies-a staggering percentage! More than a thousand species of them live inside us, on our skin, and on our very eyelashes. Yet we have now significantly reduced their power and in doing so have sparked an epidemic of noncommunicable diseases-which now account for 63 percent of all human deaths. Ultimately, this book is not just about microbes; it is about a different way to view humans. The story that Dietert tells of where the new biology comes from, how it works, and the ways in which it affects your life is fascinating, authoritative, and revolutionary. Dietert identifies foods that best serve you, the superorganism; not new fad foods but ancient foods that have made sense for millennia. He explains protective measures against unsafe chemicals and drugs. He offers an empowering self-care guide and the blueprint for a revolution in public health. We are not what we have been taught. Each of us is a superorganism. The best path to a healthy life is through recognizing that profound truth.

Phd Rodney Dietert, Rodney Dietert, Rodney Dietert PhD, Rodney Dietert, Ph.D. (Author), Jonathan Todd Ross (Narrator)

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Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology

Life is the most extraordinary phenomenon in the known universe; but how did it come to be? Even in an age of cloning and artificial biology, the remarkable truth remains: nobody has ever made anything living entirely out of dead material. Life remains the only way to make life. Are we still missing a vital ingredient in its creation? Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences. As they brilliantly demonstrate here, life lives on the quantum edge.

Jim Al-Khalili, Johnjoe McFadden, Johnjoe Mcfadden (Author), Pete Cross (Narrator)

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Reconnecting to the Source: The New Science of Spiritual Experience, How It Can Change You, and How

Reconnecting to the Source is a powerful new book on the science of spiritual experience by Dr. Ervin Laszlo. A well-known figure in the fields of new science, consciousness, and spirituality, Dr. Laszlo has inspired some of today's most important figures in science and philosophy. In Reconnecting to the Source he unpacks the science behind spiritual experience, investigating the ways in which we can access realms of experience beyond the everyday. It is in these moments, when our conscious minds are in contact or perhaps even overridden by our unconscious selves, that we can explore the depths of spiritual meaning. In addition to a foreword by Deepak Chopra, the book includes new, never before published contributions from a long list of well-known writers and public figures-including Jane Goodall, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Zhi-Gang Sha, Gregg Braden, and many more. Each contributor has written about a unique spiritual experience of their own, sharing moments in their lives that are outside of the boundaries of the usual and reflecting on the importance of these moments. This revolutionary and powerful book will challenge you to reconsider the boundaries of our own experience and change how we look at the world around us.

Ervin Laszlo (Author), Nigel Patterson (Narrator)

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The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

THE AUTISTIC BRAIN is the first book by Temple Grandin that will be neither a memoir nor a book on animals. As always, Temple's ability to cut through the jungle of information and make the science clear is evident on every page; her skills as a scientist and her original thinking offer some significant new insights into the understanding of autism. Temple Grandin teaches readers the science of the autistic brain, and with it the history and sociology of autism. By being autistic--by being able to look from the inside out and from the outside in--the author's insights are not just unique, they're groundbreaking. According to Temple, our understanding of autism has been perhaps fundamentally wrong for the past 70 years.

Richard Panek, Temple Speaker Grandin (Author), Andrea Gallo (Narrator)

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Practicing Forgiveness: How to Forgive, Reconcile, and Restore Relationships

Perhaps the world's leading expert on forgiveness research, Everett Worthington distills decades of wisdom into 15 life-changing lectures. The author or editor of more than 38 books on marriage, family, and forgiveness, Prof. Worthington received the Humanitarian Award from the Association for Spiritual, Ethical, and Religious Values in Counseling. Now you can learn to practice his groundbreaking REACH Forgiveness model through these 15 engaging lectures. At first glance, statements of forgiveness such as "Love your enemies" (Matthew 5:44) may seem paradoxical. But in recent decades, scientists have picked up where philosophers and theologians left off-confirming the many benefits that practicing forgiveness will bring you. Studies show that the consistent practice of forgiveness reaps rewards to your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. On a larger scale, forgiveness is a central pillar in promoting peace among groups, organizations, and societies. Drawing on his decades of experience in couples counseling and his prolific research on forgiveness, Prof. Worthington guides you in how to practice forgiveness. As Stephen Post, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University School of Medicine says, "Ev speaks from the heart and soul and mind with a special passion for what forgiveness brings to our lives. He has uplifted a generation." Through this masterful course, you will acquire the tools to think both philosophically and practically about forgiveness. You'll find that the scientific approach to forgiveness will indelibly enrich your life and relationships. This course is part of the Learn25 collection.

Everett Worthington (Author), Everett Worthington (Narrator)

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Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

Brought to you by Penguin. The myth-busting science behind our modern attitudes to exercise: what our bodies really need, why it matters, and its effects on health and wellbeing. In industrialized nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise. We are hardwired for moderate exertion throughout each day, not triathlons or treadmills. Drawing on over a decade of high-level scientific research and eye-opening insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman explains precisely how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance; and points the way towards more enjoyable and physically active living in the modern world. 'Endlessly fascinating and full of surprises. Easily one of my books of the year' BILL BRYSON 'Myth-busting, illuminating, brilliant - Lieberman will completely change the way you think about your body' Professor ALICE ROBERTS, presenter of Our Incredible Human Journey © Daniel Lieberman 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Daniel Lieberman (Author), Sean Runnette (Narrator)

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Biology & Chemistry Audiobooks in Science & Technology