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Dopamine Nation
by Anna Lembke
This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting… The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.
In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.
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Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe
by Jorge Cham
A physics professor and a popular online cartoonist use their signature brand of humor honed on their podcast “Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe” to provide short, accessible and lighthearted answers to questions about time, space, gravity, and wormholes.
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Snow: A Scientific and Cultural Exploration
by Giles Whittell
Brimming with interesting facts and surprising anecdotes, this scientific and cultural history opens our eyes to the wonders of one of natures most delicate, delightful, and deadly phenomena: SNOW! Perfect for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees and Rain. Go on an extraordinary journey across centuries and continents to experience the wonders of snow; from the prehistoric humans that trekked and even skied across it tens of thousands of years ago to the multi-billion-dollar industry behind our moving, making, and playing with snow. Blending accessible writing with fascinating science, Giles Whittell explores how snow dictates where we live, provides us with drinking water, and has influenced countless works of art and more. Whittell also uncovers compelling mysteries of this miraculous substance, such as why avalanches happen, how snow saved a British prime ministers life, where the legend of the yeti comes from, and the terrifying truth behind the opening ceremony of the 1960 winter Olympics. Filled with in-depth research and whip-smart prose, Snow is an eye-opening and charming book that illuminates one of the most magnificent wonders of nature.
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On Animals
by Susan Orlean
Examining animal-human relationships through captivating stories she has written over the course of her career, the author, in this book that is equal parts wonderful and profound, celebrates the cross-species connections that grace our collective existence.
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Islands of Abandonment
by Cal Flyn
An investigative journalist looks at places where nature is flourishing in the absence of humans, such as the irradiated grounds of Chernobyl and a vast forest of extinct and endangered species in the DMZ between North and South Korea.
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The Science of Can and Can't
by Chiara Marletto
A young British physicist presents a groundbreaking exploration of a radically different approach to physics, pondering how what is possible can give is a more complete and helpful picture of the physical world.
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Projections: A Story of Human Emotions
by Karl Deisseroth
An internationally acclaimed professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at Stanford, through case studies, tells the larger story of how we can understand the physical and biological origins of human emotion in the brain.
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It's Elemental: The Hidden Chemistry in Everything
by Kate Biberdorf
In this practical pop science book, a scientist dubbed “the Cooler Bill Nye” looks at how we experience chemistry every day, answering questions such as what makes dough rise and how coffee gives us an energy boost.
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Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is
by Gretel Ehrlich
The author of The Solace of Open Spaces present a meditative account of how the planet’s animals, elements and natural landforms have shaped her life and understanding of a world besieged by climate change.
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Life's Edge: Searching for What it Means to be Alive
by Carl Zimmer
The New York Times “Matter” columnist investigates the science community’s conflicting views on what it actually means to be alive as demonstrated by laboratory attempts to recreate life and the examples of particularly remarkable life forms.
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Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science
by Erika Engelhaupt
Blending humor and journalism, and featuring interviews with leading researchers, the author of National Geographic’s popular Gory Details blog investigates the gross, strange and morbid absurdities of our bodies and our universe.
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Under A White Sky
by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? That man should have dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop "super coral" that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
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Metazoa
by Peter Godfrey-Smith
The scuba-diver author of Other Minds blends philosophical reflections with the latest biological research in an investigation into the evolution of subjective awareness in animals that describes his remarkable encounters with undersea life.
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Molly
by Colin Butcher
A veteran of the Royal Navy and former police officer describes how he rescued a willful but unusually intelligent dog who became his partner in the United Kingdom Pet Detective Agency, which helps owners track down their lost pets.
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Cosmic Queries
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
A legendary astrophysicist offers a unique spin on the mysteries and curiosities of the cosmos, building on rich material from his beloved StarTalk podcast, while a renowned physicist takes on a big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia.
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World Wild Vet: Encounters in the Animal Kingdom
by Evan Antin
World renowned animal expert and host of Animal Planet’s Evan Goes Wild offers humorous stories and descriptions of dangerous encounters with some of the most exotic species on earth, including sharks, venomous snakes and crocodiles.
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Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality
by Frank Wilczek
The winner of the Nobel Prize for physics and author of The Lightness of Being explains 10 fundamental ideas that form humanity’s understand of the universe, from time and space to matter and energy.
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Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects
by Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
An enthusiastic, witty, and informative introduction to the world of insects explains why we—and the planet we inhabit—could not survive without them.
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Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
by Neil deGrasse Tyson
The notable host of StarTalk reveals just what people need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.
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The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last
by Azra Raza
A world-class oncologist and coeditor of the 3QuarksDaily website explores the medical, scientific, cultural and personal impact of cancer while outlining more beneficial alternatives to today’s high-cost, largely ineffective treatments. 50,000 first printing.
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The Nature of Life and Death: Every Body Leaves a Trace
by Patricia E. J Wiltshire
A leading forensic ecologist blends science writing with true-crime narrative in a tour of the lesser-known interface between crime and nature, drawing on her decades as a college professor and expert consultant for the UK police.
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Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes our Past
by Sarah H Parcak
The National Geographic Fellow and TED Prize winner tours the modern world of satellite-driven "space archaeology" and its role in significantly advancing human discoveries and understandings about the ancient world.
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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
by Kate Moore
Recounts the struggles of hundreds of women who were exposed to radium while working factory jobs during World War I, describing how they were mislead by their employers and became embroiled in a battle for workers' rights.
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs
by Stephen Brusatte
The "resident paleontologist" for BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs presents a narrative scientific history of the dinosaur eras that examines their origins, habitats, extinction and living legacy, chronicling nearly 200 million years of their evolution from small shadow dwellers through the emergences of prehistoric ancestors that became more than 10,000 modern bird species.
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