National Network for Equitable Library Service

How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? How can we come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we've never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it's also critical to our species' evolutionary success. In From Here to There, Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found? Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators and surveys the science of human navigation. Navigation skills are deeply embedded in our biology.

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time-the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build?

How can we accelerate the development of vaccines? How do we feed three billion people when twelve million died of hunger in 2019? Does synthetic biology hold the answer? With all the advances in science in the last century, why are there still so many infectious diseases? Why haven't we found cures for difficult cancers? Why hasn't any major progress been made in the treatment of mental illness? And how do we intend to stop, and not only that but reverse, global warming and the climate crisis?

Have you ever wondered how bridges don't fall down or how really old buildings stay standing up? Basic principles of architecture and engineering, including an introduction to bridges, locks, arches, columns, and skyscrapers, are explored in this newest engaging addition to the How Do series.The How Do series is a great introduction to various STEM topics, each written in a format that encourages audiences to ask questions and guess the answers before exploring the science behind them.

In a time when people believed flying was impossible, Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier proved that the sky wasn't the limit. When most thought horseback was the only way to race, Bertha and Karl Benz fired up their engines. From the invention of the bicycle and the passenger steam locomotive to the first liquid-fuel propelled rocket and industrial robot, inventors across the world have redefined travel. Informative and celebratory, this collective biography tells the story of the experiments, failures, and successes of visionaries who changed the way the world moves.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world.

From often amusing perceptions people have had through the ages about the world and the universe to the changing map of today, Davis shows how geography is really a great crossroad of many fields: biology, meteorology, astronomy, history, economics, and even politics. In this lively, entertaining, and endlessly fascinating presentation, you'll hear about the personalities that helped shape the world and learn the answers to questions that have vexed most of us since grade school.

What can music teach us about the brain? What can the brain teach us about music? And what can both teach us about ourselves?
 In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin (The World in Six Songs and The Organized Mind) explores the connection between music - its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals:

Shortlisted for the 2020 RBC Taylor Prize
From one of the world's most engaging science journalists, a groundbreaking and wonder-filled look at the hidden things that shape our lives in unexpected and sometimes dangerous ways.
Our naked eyes see only a thin sliver of reality.
We are blind in comparison to the X-rays that peer through skin, the mass spectrometers that detect the dead inside the living, or the high-tech surveillance systems that see with artificial intelligence.

Cette édition spécial 10ème anniversaire est une version qui a été mise à jour afin d'intégrer les découvertes scientifiques les plus récentes, très nombreuses depuis une dizaine d'années. « Biologie des croyances » est une œuvre révolutionnaire dans le domaine de la nouvelle biologie. Chercheur et ex-professeur d'une école de médecine, Bruce H. Lipton, Phd., présente ses expériences et celles d'autres scientifiques de pointe qui ont examiné en détail les mécanismes par lesquels les cellules reçoivent et traitent les informations.