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One of the greatest experimental scientists of all time, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) developed the first electric motor, electric generator, and dynamo - essentially creating the science of electrochemistry. This book, the result of six lectures he delivered to young students at London's Royal Institution, concerns another form of energy - candlelight. Faraday titled the lectures "The Chemical History of a Candle," choosing the subject because,...
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"Evolution is one of the most powerful and important ideas ever developed in the history of science. Every question it raises leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself. It is also the most meaningful creation story that humans have ever found."-Bill Nye
Sparked by a controversial debate in February 2014, Bill Nye has set off on an energetic campaign to spread awareness...
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Get the Summary of Stephen C. Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Beginning in the late 19th century, many intellectuals began to insist that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic belief-that science and belief in God are "at war." Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer challenges this view by examining three scientific discoveries...
4) Pierre Poivre and the Networking Naturalists: Pioneering Environmentalists of the Eighteenth Century
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Although climate change is seen as a very 21st-century concern, back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists around the world in places as far apart as Mauritius in the Indian ocean and St Vincent in the Caribbean were becoming aware of what they referred to as desiccation, the drying of the land and absence of rainfall due to the cutting down of large swathes of forest trees.
This book traces the connections between those naturalists,...
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Get the Summary of Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg's A Crack in Creation in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR-a revolutionary...
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Get the Summary of David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book.
Original book introduction: An "epoch-defining book" (The Guardian) and "this generation's Silent Spring" (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it-the ways that warming promises to transform global...
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On March 10, 2013, 6 houses were lost, 7 condemned and 24 were declared to be in imminent danger on Plum Island in northern Massachusetts. But, it was only the latest skirmish in an ongoing battle between man and nature on this fragile barrier beach.
Plum Island takes readers to the core of the earth to see how Plum Island's sands were first formed in the metamorphic forge of the earth's interior. It will then follow these minerals as they erode...
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Get the Summary of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book.
Original book introduction: Did you know that:
• Every atom in your body has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to being you?
• If you are an average-sized kid, you have enough potential energy inside you to explode with the force of several...
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Get the Summary of Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book.
Original book introduction: Stephen Hawking was the most renowned scientist since Einstein, known both for his groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology and for his mischievous sense of humor. He educated millions of readers about the origins of the universe and the nature of black holes, and inspired millions...
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Get the Summary of Franck Wilczek's's Fundamentals in 20-minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: In Fundamentals, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek offers the reader a simple yet profound exploration of reality based on the deep revelations of modern science. With clarity and an infectious sense of joy, he guides us through the essential concepts that form our understanding of what the world is and how...
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Get the Summary of Avi Loeb's Extraterrestrial in the Room in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary and not the original book. Original book introduction: In Extraterrestrial, Loeb takes readers inside the thrilling story of the first interstellar visitor, to be spotted in our solar system. He outlines his controversial theory and its profound implications: for science, for religion, and for the future of our species and our planet. A mind-bending...
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Get the Summary of Bill Gate's How to Avoid a Climate Disaster in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental...
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Arguably the best available introduction to constructivism, a research paradigm that has dominated the history of science for the past forty years, Making Natural Knowledge reflects on the importance of this theory, tells the history of its rise to prominence, and traces its most important tensions.
Viewing scientific knowledge as a product of human culture, Jan Golinski challenges the traditional trajectory of the history of science as steady and...
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Get the Summary of Donella H. Meadows's Thinking in Systems in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Thinking in Systems, is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute's Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into...
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A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century.
This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the problems that it raised but did not resolve. The Plurality of Worlds...
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Nature on the brink? Maybe not. With so much bad news in the world, we forget how much environmental progress has been made. In a narrative that reaches from Native American tribal practices to public health and commercial hunting, Wild at Heart shows how western attitudes towards nature have changed dramatically in the last five hundred years.
The Chinook gave thanks for King Salmon's gifts. The Puritans saw Nature as a frightening wilderness, full...
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A paleontologist shows what life was like on our planet long before the early humans emerged through words and illustrations.
Paleontologist Dr. Mark P. Witton draws on the latest twenty-first century discoveries to re-create the appearances and lifestyles of extinct, fascinating species, the environments they inhabited, and the challenges they faced living on an ever-changing planet. A worthy successor to Charles Knight's beloved 1946 classic, Life...
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In this sweeping history of more than 3,000 years, beginning with Ancient Egypt, scientist Marcus Byrne and writer, Helen Lunn capture the diversity of dung beetles and their unique behaviour patterns. Dung beetles' fortunes have followed the shifts from a world dominated by a religion that symbolically incorporated them into some of its key concepts of rebirth, to a world in which science has largely separated itself from religion and alchemy. With...
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