検索キーワード： 生物科学

In the fall of 1980, Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology.

Making sense of sound is one of the hardest jobs we ask our brains to do. In Of Sound Mind, Nina Kraus examines the partnership of sound and brain, showing for the first time that the processing of sound drives many of the brain's core functions. Our hearing is always on - we can't close our ears the way we close our eyes - and yet we can ignore sounds that are unimportant. We don't just hear; we engage with sounds. Kraus explores what goes on in our brains when we hear a word - or a chord, or a meow, or a screech.

The discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and Linus Pauling. Howard Markel skillfully recreates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin - fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s - who becomes a focal point for Markel.

UNO DE LOS MEJORES LIBROS DE DIVULGACIÓN CIENTÍFICA DE TODOS LOS TIEMPOS. MÁS DE 120.000 EJEMPLARES VENDIDOS EN ESPAÑA. ¿Puede un solo libro convertirse en la perfecta introducción para adentrarse en disciplinas tan dispares como la astronomía, la geología, la física, la química y la biología? ¿Puede un trabajo de divulgación científica ofrecer razonamientos y datos precisos, y al mismo tiempo ser tremendamente entretenido?

While politicians, entrepreneurs, and even school children could tell you that sustainability is an important and nearly universal value, many of them, and many of us, may struggle to define the term, let alone trace its history. What is sustainability? Is it always about the environment? What science do we need to fully grasp what it requires? What does sustainability mean for business? How can governments plan for a sustainable future?

Enzymes are the astonishing tiny molecular machines that make life possible. Each one of these small proteins speeds up a single chemical reaction inside a living organism many millionfold. Working together, teams of enzymes carry out all the processes that collectively we recognize as life, from making DNA to digesting food. This Very Short Introduction explains the why and the how of speeding up these reactions - catalysis - before going on to reveal how we have evolved these catalysts of such extraordinary power and exquisite selectivity.

Listen in as Seeker dives in on the fascinating world of food. From diets and food poisoning to answering questions like how our bodies process food and what happens if you stop eating, you’ll be in a food coma by the end of this best of Seeker collection, available for the first time in audio!

In the beginning, Earth was an inhospitably alien place—in constant chemical flux, covered with churning seas, crafting its landscape through incessant volcanic eruptions. Amid all this tumult and disaster, life began. The earliest living things were no more than membranes stretched across microscopic gaps in rocks, where boiling hot jets of mineral-rich water gushed out from cracks in the ocean floor. In A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, Henry Gee zips through the last 4.6 billion years with infectious enthusiasm and intellectual rigor.

Speaking to experts in fields as diverse as oil production and ecology, and visiting the places that have escaped recent human activity to discover how they have adapted to life without us, Alan Weisman paints an intriguing picture of the future of Earth. Exploring key concerns of our time, this absorbing thought experiment reveals a powerful - and surprising - picture of our planet's future.

The Biology Book is packed with short, pithy explanations of more than 95 momentous ideas in science, from cell theory to evolution by natural selection. Themed chapters explore key areas of the life sciences including ecology, zoology and biotechnology, tracing the history of scientific thought and introducing the scientists who shaped the subject, such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. Coverage of topical issues such as cloning, neuroscience, human evolution and gene-editing brings the story right up to date.

AudioLearn's college-level courses presents microbiology. Developed by experienced professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this course is a great way to explore the subject of college-level microbiology. The audiobook is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you might expect to learn in a typical undergraduate microbiology course. The material is accurate, up-to-date, and broken down into bite-sized chapters. There are key takeaways following each chapter to drive home key points and quizzes to review commonly tested questions.

In The Brain in Context, the bioethicist Jonathan D. Moreno and the neuroscientist Jay Schulkin provide an accessible and thought-provoking account of the evolution of neuroscience and the neuroscience of evolution. They emphasize that the brain is not an isolated organ - it extends into every part of the body and every aspect of human life. Understanding the brain requires studying the environmental, biological, chemical, genetic, and social factors that continue to shape it.

Authors Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin trace the emergence of the concept of the environment following World War II, a period characterized by both hope for a new global order and fear of humans' capacity for almost limitless destruction. It was at this moment that a new idea and a new narrative about the planet-wide impact of people's behavior emerged, closely allied to anxieties for the future. With the rise of "the environment", the authors argue, came new expertise, making certain kinds of knowledge crucial to understanding the future of our planet.

“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles.

Could extinct species, like mammoths and passenger pigeons, be brought back to life? The science says yes. In How to Clone a Mammoth, Beth Shapiro, evolutionary biologist and pioneer in "ancient DNA" research, walks listeners through the astonishing and controversial process of de-extinction.

Today, taxonomy is viewed by many as an outdated field, one nearly irrelevant to the rest of science and of even less interest to the rest of the world. Now, as Carol Kaesuk Yoon reminds us in Naming Nature, taxonomy is critically important, because it turns out to be much more than mere science. It is also the latest incarnation of a long-unrecognized human practice that has gone on across the globe, in every culture, in every language since before time: the deeply human act of ordering and naming the living world.

At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.

How did the replication bomb we call "life" begin, and where in the world, or rather, in the universe, is it heading? Writing with characteristic wit and an ability to clarify complex phenomena (the New York Times described his style as "[T]he sort of science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius"), Richard Dawkins confronts this ancient mystery.

The number-one Sunday Times best seller. A fascinating explanation of how evolution works from best-selling author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins. Complete and unabridged and read by Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward. The river of Dawkins' title is a river of DNA, flowing through time from the beginning of life on Earth to the present and onwards.

Are we "noble in reason"? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a "kluge", a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind - think duct tape, not supercomputer - that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature.

Adored by children and adults alike, tyrannosaurus is the most famous dinosaur in the world, one that pops up again and again in pop culture, often battling other beasts such as King Kong, triceratops, or velociraptors in Jurassic Park. But despite the hype, tyrannosaurus and the other tyrannosaurs are fascinating animals in their own right and are among the best-studied of all dinosaurs.

Did you know women walk more, eat less, socialize more, meet more men, dance more, and flirt more when they're ovulating? Or that PMS may have evolved to get rid of boyfriends with unfit sperm? Behind the "fickle" differences in what women find sexy about men, or what they like to wear, there's a hidden adaptive intelligence shaped over eons. Rather than making women irrational - as the conventional and irredeemably sexist wisdom goes - the female hormonal cycle has been exquisitely fine-tuned to give women the advantages they needed to succeed in our ancestral environments, and perhaps also today.

Rachel Herz uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that affect food consumption. Why You Eat What You Eat mixes the social with the scientific to uncover how psychology, neurology, and physiology shape our relationship with food and how food alters the relationships we have with ourselves and with one another.

The book is an autobiographical account of five years in the childhood of naturalist Gerald Durrell. The book is divided into three sections, marking the three villas in which the family lived on the island. Apart from Gerald (the youngest) and Larry, the family comprised their widowed mother, the gun-mad Leslie, and diet-obsessed sister Margo together with Roger the dog.

The most important thing we can do for our children is to have conversations with them. Parent-child talk is a fundamental, critical factor in building grit, self-control, leadership skills, and generosity. This landmark account of a new scientific perspective by the founder and director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative, Professor Dana Suskind, describes what works and what doesn't. Discover how to create the best "language environments" for children by following the simple structure of the Three Ts: Tune In, Talk More, Take Turns.

Under the Sea Wind is a classic wilderness adventure to which all nature writing is compared. The hero of Under the Sea Wind is soon seen to be life itself, that quicksilver prize granted, for a brief time only, to the clever and the fortunate.

In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum - reviving Darwin's own views - thinks not.

We like to think of ourselves as exceptional beings, but are we really any more special than other animals? Humans are the slightest of twigs on a single family tree that encompasses four billion years, a lot of twists and turns and a billion species. All of those organisms are rooted in a single origin, with a common code that underwrites our existence. This paradox - that our biology is indistinct from all life, yet we consider ourselves to be special - lies at the heart of who we are.

De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal's landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal - and human - intelligence.

Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.