検索キーワード： 科学・工学

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math. As mathematician Richard Elwes shows in Huge Numbers, this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien number like TREE(3). Safer not to try: even harnessing every particle in the universe, you wouldn’t come close.

You’ve heard of a murder of crows and a pride of lions—but what about a romp of otters? In this informative and entertaining book, animal behaviorist Heide Island takes readers on an odyssey through otterdom, focusing on a family, or “romp,” of river otters that live near her home in Puget Sound while also weaving in research about otters around the globe. Tracking an otter nicknamed Patches and her three pups, Island observes as they hunt, play, and try to survive the various dangers in their environment.

A rollicking history of the life and work of an unheralded genius: Dr. Solomon Snyder, whose experiments with mind-altering drugs helped change the way we think about the causes and treatments of schizophrenia. In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was...

Most of us are ageing prematurely because we’re eating too much of the wrong stuff. Unlike our leaner ancestors, the 21st century human is a junkie for sugar, artificially synthesised foods and convenience meals. Despite the rise of plant-based diets we remain overwhelmingly carnivorous and nutrient-deficient, putting our bodies under relentless stress at a cellular level. Our habits are driving an epidemic of obesity and chronic illness that is overwhelming our healthcare systems and causing an acute global crisis.

In this powerful, refreshing new look at the many ways prediction shapes our everyday lives, University of Oxford professor Carissa Véliz explains how putting too much stock in others’ predictions makes us vulnerable to charlatans, con artists, dubious technology, and self-deception. Examining a wide range of subjects both personal and societal, including medicine, climate, technology, society, and others, Véliz uncovers a number of insights.

Humans have long decorated their landscapes, but chalk hill figures are, almost uniquely, a feature of the English downland. This means they are sometimes seen as emblematic of Englishness, celebrated by poets, writers, artists and musicians. The book is a portrait of the places where these figures dominate, bringing in history, politics, literature, music, film and TV, but with a light touch. The Tattooed Hills isn’t a nostalgic elegy for England, instead it uses the figures as a lens through which to explore the land and delves into more troubling undercurrents.

Eco Revolution is a humanized and eye-opening journey through the past, present, and future of one of the most crucial topics of our time: Climate change. This book chronicles untold sustainability history, highlights the stories of unsung eco-warrior heroes, and shares solutions for a more sustainable and equitable world, as told through the lens of award-winning environmental activist Maya Penn’s unique and inspiring experience as a young black woman and member of Generation Z.

The universe gave rise to everything: stars and cells, minds and memories, purpose and pain. But it doesn’t care about us. It follows its own rules. And now, according to Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, we finally understand enough about those rules to ask the big questions like we mean it: Why do we exist? Are we alone? How did we get here? What comes next? And—perhaps most urgently—is there reason to hope?

We tend to think of Darwinian evolution as a process that plays out over generations. But our understanding of natural selection is itself evolving. Science writer Roxanne Khamsi reveals our bodies as active landscapes of evolution. Genetic mutations are constantly happening within your body—even as you read this. In this astonishing book, Khamsi shows how our bodies comprise cells that change over the course of a lifetime, mutating, competing, and evolving.

In 1959, at just twenty-six years old, the biologist George B. Schaller shrugged off warnings of mortal danger and set off for the Belgian Congo to do what his peers wouldn’t dare: conduct the first sustained field study of mountain gorillas by living alongside them. Boldly refusing arms and retinue, Schaller and his wife, Kay, established a home in the jungle and came to share the apes’ rhythms and rules.

Science writer Lorraine Boissoneault has been in pain for most of her adult life. Unable to control or make sense of her chronic illness diagnoses, she began describing the ebb and flow of her symptoms as “body weather.” At first an imaginative approach to coping with flare-ups, the phrase has become a waypoint in Lorraine’s explorations of the intimate relationship between our fragile bodies and the fragile world around us.

Antarctica is a land of extremes. It is the coldest, windiest and most inaccessible part of our planet—and now one of the places most affected by climate change. In this moving and personal narrative, conservation biologist Louise K. Blight recounts her summer studying Adélie penguins with one of the world’s great Antarctic scientists.

Writer and activist Ben Rawlence first began writing to his eldest daughter before she was born, expressing his fears at what it would mean to raise children in a rapidly changing world where the very concept of the future was in jeopardy. Climate change poses a fundamental challenge to parenting. What knowledge should we pass on? What future are we preparing our children for?

Join engineer Lucy Rogers in the timeless tradition of stargazers, cloud watchers, and dreamers – and let the skies inspire you. In Up, inventor and engineer Dr Lucy Rogers explores the beauty, science, and surprises of the world above. Join her on a marvelous adventure through a kite market in India, creep through the Borneo jungle to witness millions of bats pour out of a cave at dusk, venture to Tornado Alley to chase the raw power of storms, and journey to Mexico to stand in awe of a total solar eclipse.

The Dene in Canada’s Northwest Territories have lived alongside nature for many generations. From battling environmental racism on the front lines of historical environmental protests, to innovating sustainable resources, to living a balanced life through effective individual and collective governance, the Dene have long protected Mother Earth from destruction through their intricate knowledge systems, natural laws, and age-old principles.

While traditional drugs mostly help us manage the effects of disease, cell therapies promise genuine cures for a broad range of intractable ailments, from Alzheimer’s to heart damage to cancer. They could even reverse the effects of aging. For the first time in history, on an unprecedented scale, we possess the power to modify the biology that gives rise to disease, ultimately restoring individuals to a state of normalcy and reversing debilitating ailments. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb traces the scientific achievements that propelled progress in cell therapies.

All around us are ever-evolving strings of chain reactions, of bonds forged and broken, of connections made and unmade in less than the blink of an eye. In Chain Reaction , Professor Ijeoma Uchegbu dives into the chemistry that underpins our everyday existence.

One day, on a whim, Robert Moor set out to climb a tree near his home—unwittingly embarking on what would become a decade-long, globe-spanning adventure of intellectual and spiritual transformation. Pursuing the hidden wisdom of trees, he scales to the very top of a giant sequoia while filming a nature documentary with David Attenborough; he treks through swamps in Papua to reach a treehouse-dwelling tribe of hunter-gatherers; and he journeys to a remote research camp in Tanzania, where he spends a memorable night sleeping in a chimpanzee nest, seeking to understand our evolutionary history.

Delivered in his raw and unapologetic yet botanically accurate tone, Joey Santore—the unforgettable host of Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t—offers an often unsettling view of human-caused ecological destruction and its impact on the natural ecosystems our very lives depend on. The choices of modern civilization have led to a f***ed-up planet, scraped bare and covered in concrete and invasive species.

In her highly acclaimed debut, distinguished cosmologist and particle physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shed light on the entrenched injustices plaguing her field, while at the same time sharing with her audience her abiding sense of wonder at the cosmos from a Black feminist perspective. Now, in The Edge of Space-Time, she leans into that wonder, taking listeners on a mind-altering journey to the boundaries of the universe, inviting us to spend time at the edge of what we know about space-time and about ourselves.