検索キーワード： 制作 "Brilliance Audio" 科学・工学

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.

In this newly collected anthology of spiels-on-wheels, O'Rourke celebrates cars and berates car haters, and chronicles America's relationship with automobiles from love for a powerful chariot of freedom to tolerance of an oversized household appliance with an extra-long extension cord.

In this revelatory work, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson shows how food affects our moral selves, our health, and the environment. It raises questions to make us conscious of the decisions behind every bite we take: What effect does eating animals have on our land, water, even global warming? What are the results of farming practices - debeaking chickens and separating calves from their mothers - on animals and humans? How does the health of animals affect the health of our planet and our bodies?

Ivory's Ghosts is the first comprehensive, contemporary look at the world's most treasured organic material, ivory. Using a wide range of historical and firsthand reportage, John Frederick Walker tells the astonishing and sometimes savage story of ivory's enormous impact on both human history and that of its most important source: the majestic African elephant.

In Why Sh-t Happens, esteemed scientist Peter J. Bentley tackles the realm of everyday disaster through a highly empirical approach informed by wit and humor. Bentley brilliantly explores accident on a molecular level, arming you with an essential understanding of what went wrong and explaining how to prevent future bouts of misfortune.

The Well-Dressed Ape, aka Homo sapiens, is a strange mammal. It thinks of itself as complex, intelligent, and in every way superior to other animals - but is it, really? With wit, humility, and penetrating insight, science journalist Hannah Holmes casts the inquisitive eye of a trained researcher and reporter on...herself. And not just on herself, but on our whole species - what Shakespeare called "the paragon of animals."

Blood carries life, yet the sight of it makes people faint. It is a waste product and a commodity pricier than oil. It can save lives and transmit deadly infections. Each one of us has roughly nine pints of it, yet many don’t even know their own blood type. And for all its ubiquitousness, the few tablespoons of blood discharged by 800 million women are still regarded as taboo: menstruation is perhaps the single most demonized biological event.

Today, we know more about mental health than ever before, but traditional medicine still mistakes subtle signs of trauma for stress, anxiety, or chronic disease—sometimes even retraumatizing patients with outdated and misguided methods. Treatment plans that focus on the mind are only addressing the downstream effects. Likewise, common medical approaches to manage symptoms fail to explore root causes and promote genuine recovery.

A defense technology expert and military leader reveals the future of robotic warfare, and illuminates the path to navigate the approaching storm of global change.

Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy seed, a mold spore, a foxglove leaf, a magic-mushroom cap, a marijuana bud, or an apple seed, and we find a bevy of strange chemicals. We use these to greet our days (caffeine), titillate our tongues (capsaicin), recover from surgery (opioids), cure infections (penicillin), mend our hearts (digoxin), bend our minds (psilocybin), calm our nerves (CBD), and even kill our enemies (cyanide). But why do plants and fungi produce such chemicals? And how did we come to use and abuse some of them?

Could humans unknowingly be a part of a larger superorganism—one with its own motivations and goals, one that is alive, and conscious, and has the power to shape the future of our species? This is the fascinating theory from author and futurist Byron Reese, who calls this human superorganism “Agora.” In We Are Agora, Reese starts by asking the question, “What is life and how did it form?” From there, he looks at how multicellular life came about, how consciousness emerged, and how other superorganisms in nature have formed.

Dopamine, “the molecule of more,” makes it easy to get stuck in a cycle of never being truly satisfied. It promises happiness, but can never deliver. That part is up to us. A more fulfilling life begins with training your brain to overcome the dopamine chase—and it’s easier than you think.

In Strange Survivors, biologist Oné R. Pagán takes us on a tour of the improbable, the ingenious, and the just plain bizarre ways that creatures fight for life. Inside this funny, fascinating field guide to nature’s most colorful characters, you’ll meet killer snails, social bacteria, and an animal with toxic elbows. But Strange Survivors is more than a collection of curiosities—it is a love letter to science and an argument for the continuing relevance of this evolutionary battle as we face the threat of resistant bacteria and the need for novel medical therapies.

From Plato to Westworld, these questions have fascinated and befuddled philosophers, artists, and scientists for centuries. In The Forgetting Machine, neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga explains how the mechanics of memory illuminates these discussions, with implications for everything from understanding Alzheimer's disease to the technology of Artificial Intelligence.

The Cell: Inside the Microscopic World that Determines Our Health, Our Consciousness, and Our Future is a fascinating story of the incredible complexity and dynamism inside the cell and of the fantastic advancements in our understanding of this microscopic world.