検索キーワード： 制作 "Tantor Media" 生物科学

Of all the dietary and nutritional claims pitched to us, what can we believe? How does cinnamon affect your health? How splendid is Splenda? Should you buy farmed, wild, or canned food? What's fishy about fish-oil supplements? Will a diet of Twinkies and M&M's lead to weight loss? Water from a tap or from a plastic bottle - which should you choose, and which is better for the environment? Should you carry your groceries home in plastic or brown paper? We all have questions, and Dr. Joe Schwarcz has the answers, some of which will astonish you.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: Life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. In the 19th century, however, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything - and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit.

In this Very Short Introduction, Paul B. Wignall looks at the causes and nature of extinctions, past and present, and the factors that can make a species vulnerable. Summarizing what we know about all of the major and minor extinction events, he examines some of the greatest debates in modern science, such as the relative role of climate and humans in the death of the Pleistocene megafauna, including mammoths and giant ground sloths, and the roles that global warming, ocean acidification, and deforestation are playing in present-day extinctions. 

Beware! The sordid lives of plants behaving badly. A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. Amy Stewart, best-selling author of Flower Confidential, takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature's most appalling creations in an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.

For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years, scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story. In Beasts Before Us, paleontologist Elsa Panciroli charts the emergence of the mammal lineage, Synapsida, beginning at their murky split from the reptiles in the Carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago. They made the world theirs long before the rise of dinosaurs.

Physiology is the science of life, and sets out to understand how living things work and what makes them distinct from the non-living. It considers how our bodies are supplied with energy, how they maintain their internal parameters, the ways in which we gather and process information, the ways we take action, and the creation of new generations.

There are few stories more remarkable than the evolution of life on earth. Where did humans come from? Where did life come from? New fields of study, such as molecular biology and astrobiology, are shedding remarkable new light on the origin of life and the origin of sex. In this Very Short...

At a time when most people on Earth live in regions of acute light pollution, Craig Childs takes us on a journey to rediscover the awesome power of night itself. Seeking not the absence of light, but the presence of the universe, master storyteller Craig Childs sets out to bike from the blinding...

Ancient and carbon-rich, old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment. Their complex ecosystems clean the air, purify the water, cool the planet, and teem with life. In a time of climate catastrophe, old-growth and other natural forests face existential threats caused by...

Of the codified laws of nature, only one inscribes a direction to time: the dreaded second law of thermodynamics, which declares that the disorder of a closed system tends to increase as time passes. New shoes eventually scuff, our bodies weaken and die. Yet our senses tell us that miraculous order constantly emerges, too: children grow and learn; spontaneous patterns manifest in murmurations of starlings. Can it be true that the laws of our universe mandate only dissolution?

For millennia, human societies have viewed the ocean as a dumping ground for waste products of all kinds. The sources of marine pollution are extensive, including oil spills, sewage, fertilizers, pesticides, industrial wastes, heavy metals, ocean acidification, plastics, and even invasive...

Parker describes the discovery of tetrahydocannbinol (THC), the main psychoactive component of cannabis, and the further discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. She explains that the brain produces chemicals similar to THC, which act on the same receptors as THC, and shows that the endocannabinoid system is involved in all aspects of brain functioning.  

Ripple: An Intimate Exchange of Urgency and Hope Between an Ecologist and His Daughter is a narrative of letters written by an ecologist dad to his daughter upon her coming-of-age. Drawing upon his personal history, family anecdotes, and shared memories, Powers envisions a path for humanity's reintegration with nature, and a chance to save the life force that runs through all of us.

Have you ever wondered why we count sheep to get to sleep? Or where the phrase "red herring" comes from? Across British history, animals have been written about in poetry, painted in oils, and even recorded in law. Loved or feared, familiar or endangered, animals are everywhere to be seen. In this enchanting study, Karen R. Jones takes a journey through the history of ten animals to show the extraordinary story of "beastly" Britain.

Charles Darwin's foremost biographer, Janet Browne, delivers a vivid and accessible introduction to the book that permanently altered our understanding of what it is to be human. A sensation on its publication in 1859, The Origin of the Species profoundly shocked Victorian readers by calling into question the belief in a Creator with its description of evolution through natural selection. And Darwin's seminal work is nearly as controversial today.

The best-selling author of The Weather Makers returns to the subject of climate change with a thought-provoking and powerful argument for immediate global action and a wide range of innovative, deeply pragmatic ideas to help solve the crisis.

Humans are primates, much like chimps—or so we've been continually told. Yet recent discoveries show that our species has a different brain design, function, and chemistry; different eating, sleeping, mating, and rearing patterns; a different metabolism; and a different physiology than apes. Nor is our behavior much like theirs, and we don't even have the feet made for climbing trees that define the primate order. Could it be that conceiving of ourselves as primates isn't helping us understand what it is to be human?

Donald Worster looks back over 200,000 years of Homo sapiens to show how human nature, especially the drive for food and sex, has responded to environmental conditions throughout history. Examining how this process led from foraging to the agrarian revolution and then to a capitalist way of life, Worster brings us face to face with a third transformation of human society that is beginning to take shape in China: an ecological civilization.

Since the 1970s, the science of primatology has been dominated by women—a unique reversal, as men usually outnumber women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Today, one of those women is primatologist Keriann McGoogan, who has traveled to the far corners of the earth in search of wild primates. In Sisters of the Jungle, McGoogan combines stories about her own studies of howler monkeys (the loudest living primate) and lemurs (the most endangered group of animals on the planet) with those of the women who paved the way.

So Great Was the Slaughter reveals the untold story of Arkansas conservation pioneers who saved the state's game and fish populations. As Arkansas entered the twentieth century, the national demand for meat combined with the ability to ship millions of animals to hungry cities like New Orleans, Memphis, and Chicago had driven many species, including bison and passenger pigeons, to extinction in Arkansas. Many others, including deer, bear, turkey, quail, and fish, were in danger of disappearing.