Natural Science

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.

Here is the epic story of the centuries-long search to understand the tide: from Aristotle, said to have drowned himself when he failed to figure out the Greek tides, to the pioneering investigations into the role of the moon by Galileo and Newton to supercomputing in our own time.

Fascinated by the Earth's Natural Treasures? Dive into the vivid and diverse universe of rocks, crystals, and minerals. Whether you're a budding enthusiast or an aspiring expert, this comprehensive guide is your key to unlocking the secrets of the Earth's most captivating creations.

Nobody sees and understands woodland better than Ray Mears. With deep natural history knowledge and practical woodcraft skills, gained over a lifetime of learning from the world's last remaining indigenous peoples, Ray offers a different way to experience our wooded landscapes. He challenges the old concepts. He looks to our ancestors and shows how man's hand in shaping woodland is critical. We are not separate from nature, we just need to ensure that our interactions have a positive impact.

Part guide to the best practice in every aspect of working with this renewable energy source, part meditation on the human instinct for survival, this definitive handbook on the art of chopping, stacking and drying wood in the Scandinavian way has resonated across the world, with more than a million copies sold worldwide.

Among scientists who write, no one illuminates as well as Stephen Jay Gould does the wonderful workings of the natural world. Now in a new volume of collected essays—his sixth since Ever Since Darwin—Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestral generations. Along with way, he opens to us the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates.

Gay werewolves in Victorian London? Why yes, yes there are.

Biffy, newly minted Alpha of the London Pack, is not having a good Christmas. His Beta abandoned him, his werewolves object to his curtain choices, and someone keeps leaving babies on his doorstep.

Professor Randolph Lyall returns home to London after 20 years abroad, afraid of what he might find. With his pack in chaos and his Alpha in crisis, it will take all his Beta efficiency to set everything to rights. Perhaps, in the process, he may even determine how to mend his own heart.

In Material, Kary takes listeners along with him to visit some of the places where modern artisans are preserving, and in some cases passing on, the old craft skills. His vivid descriptions and eye for detail make this book a rich and delightful listen, and the natural and cultural history he imparts along the way provides an important context for understanding our own past and the roots of our industrial society. Personal, engaging, and filled with memorable people, landscapes, and scenes, Material is a rich celebration of what it means to imagine and create.

She's hidden her identity for years, all to keep her and her family safe, but running from supernatural beings comes at a cost. When her daughter unexpectedly dies, under mysterious circumstances, Katherine is left with more questions than answers and a sinking feeling that her past has come back to haunt her.

Tamed and Untamed - a collection of essays penned by two of the world's most celebrated animal writers, Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas - explores the minds, lives, and mysteries of animals as diverse as snails, house cats, hawks, sharks, dogs, lions, and even octopuses. Drawing on stories of animals both wild and domestic, the two authors, also best friends, created this book to put humans back into the animal world. The more we learn about what other animals think and do, they explain, the more we understand ourselves as animals, too."

From the creator of the Land of Elyon comes a riveting adventure set in an extraordinary satellite world—created as a refuge from a dying Earth—that begins to collapse and forever change the lives of its inhabitants.

Growing up in Alabama, Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents - her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father - and of the bittersweet moments that accompany a child’s transition to caregiver.

Natural Language Processing in Action is your guide to building machines that can read and interpret human language. In it, you'll use readily available Python packages to capture the meaning in text and react accordingly. The book expands traditional NLP approaches to include neural networks, modern deep learning algorithms, and generative techniques as you tackle real-world problems like extracting dates and names, composing text, and answering free-form questions.

David Haskell's award-winning The Forest Unseen won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees' connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants.

In The Marsh Builders, Sharon Levy delves into the intertwined histories of wetlands loss and water pollution. The book's springboard is the tale of a years-long citizen uprising in Humboldt County, California, which led to the creation of one of the first US wetlands designed to treat city sewage. The book explores the global roots of this local story: the cholera epidemics that plagued 19th-century Europe; the researchers who invented modern sewage treatment after bumbling across the insight that microbes break down pollutants in water; and more.

From foraging and hunting for food to (more recently) finding solace and peace in a beautiful vista, humans have long interacted with the natural world. Though a connection to nature runs deep in our DNA, however, people of the modern age are indoors almost 93 percent of the day. With that said, there is a growing evidence suggests that the natural world promotes mental and physical well-being, including stress relief, improved mood, and neurological benefits.

Several years ago, ecologist Lauren E. Oakes set out from California for Alaska's old-growth forests to hunt for a dying tree: the yellow-cedar. With climate change as the culprit, the death of this species meant loss for many Alaskans. Oakes and her research team wanted to chronicle how plants and people could cope with their rapidly changing world. Amidst the standing dead, she discovered the resiliency of forgotten forests, flourishing again in the wake of destruction, and a diverse community of people who persevered to create new relationships with the emerging environment.

In this accessible, absorbing overview, Mancuso considers how plants convince animals to transport them around the world, and how some plants need particular animals to spread; how they have been able to grow in places so inaccessible and inhospitable as to remain isolated; how they resisted the atomic bomb and the Chernobyl disaster; how they are able to bring life to sterile islands; how they can travel through the ages, as they sail around the world.

Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) by the Scottish philosopher David Hume examines whether one can rationally come to any conclusions about God's nature. Three philosophers, Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes, debate this question in a series of dialogues. While all three agree that a god exists, they hold different views on God's nature.

Let’s see, my hired hunter has decided I’m his mate, my twin sister is blaming me for her abduction, a crazy and dangerous supernatural is now after my magic, and I’m somehow supposed to keep running Practically Perfect despite the disaster that is my life. Sigh...I just can’t win, especially when the crazy supernatural comes looking for me and my hired hunter goes into full-blown territorial werewolf mode. Did I mention that I haven’t accepted his mating bond? Now, it’s getting real, especially when I learn that my hunter has kept a very dark secret from me....