After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a tea monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. Becky Chambers' new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?

After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a tea monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. Becky Chambers' new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter?

An exquisite exploration of the power of flowers, placing them at the center of the story of how evolution created the world we know todayWe live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their world-changing power. Inspired by the most up-to-date scientific research, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less well-known flowers such as seagrasses, to show us what we've been missing. Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through radical genetic flexibility, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species, dependent on flowers for food and our habitats, as well as using flowers for beauty, scent, and culturally important rituals. Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and scientific expertise to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

A new theory of how the brain constructs emotions that could revolutionize psychology, health care, law enforcement, and our understanding of the human mind. Emotions feel automatic, like uncontrollable reactions to things we think and experience. Scientists have long supported this assumption by claiming that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology—ans this paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for us all. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose theory of emotion is driving a deeper understanding of the mind and brain, and shedding new light on what it means to be human. Her research overturns the widely held belief that emotions are housed in different parts of the brain and are universally expressed and recognized. Instead, she has shown that emotion is constructed in the moment, by core systems that interact across the whole brain, aided by a lifetime of learning. This new theory means that you play a much greater role in your emotional life than you ever thought. Its repercussions are already shaking the foundations not only of psychology but also of medicine, the legal system, child-rearing, meditation, and even airport security. Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease? How can you make your children more emotionally intelligent? How Emotions Are Made answers these questions and many more, revealing the latest research and intriguing practical applications of the new science of emotion, mind, and brain. 

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

When Ida, a Dutch climatologist, accepts an internship at a climate research institute in the Italian Alps, it means leaving her girlfriend Robin behind in Amsterdam. As she and her new colleagues prepare to demolish a decommissioned hydropower dam, Ida finds herself grappling with love, loneliness and her place in a society unwilling to confront global warming. An unflinchingly honest narrative of vulnerability, longing and introspection is disrupted by essays and poems, creating an incisive, witty and devastatingly smart portrait of how we live now. Distilling all our contemporary fears, Marsman examines what we must face head on if we - individuals, humanity, the world - are to survive. And she asks us: if we are to survive, what is our impetus? For what are we fighting? Startlingly unique, timely and ultimately deeply moving, The Opposite of a Person is a dazzling, cerebral tour-de-force, a poignant love story and an urgent, unforgettable call to arms.

Welcome to Charon's Crossing. The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through. When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead. And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead. But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days. Hilarious, haunting, and kind, "Under the Whispering Door" is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.

There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation. In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

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In Richard Mabey's characteristically lyrical and informative tone, The Cabaret of Plants explores plant species which have challenged our imaginations, awoken that cliched but real human emotion of wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty and belief. Picked from every walk of life, they encompass crops, weeds, medicines, religious gathering-places and a water lily named after a queen. Beginning with pagan cults and creation myths, the cultural significance of plants has burst upwards, sprouting into forms as diverse as the panacea (the cure-all plant ginseng, a single root of which can cost up to $10,000), Newton's apple, the African 'vegetable elephant' or boabab, whose swollen trunks store thousands of litres of water - and the mystical, night-flowering Amazonian cactus, the moonflower. From Ice Age artists, to the Romantic poets, via colonialism and the nineteenth century botanical mania of empire, Mabey concludes his magnum opus with the latest revelations of possible 'plant intelligence' in this extraordinary collection of encounters between plants and people.

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

There is a lifeform so strange and wondrous that it forces us to rethink how life works…Neither plant nor animal, it is found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. It can be microscopic, yet also accounts for the largest organisms ever recorded, living for millennia and weighing tens of thousands of tonnes. Its ability to digest rock enabled the first life on land, it can survive unprotected in space, and thrives amidst nuclear radiation. In this captivating adventure, Merlin Sheldrake explores the spectacular and neglected world of fungi: endlessly surprising organisms that sustain nearly all living systems. They can solve problems without a brain, stretching traditional definitions of ‘intelligence’, and can manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties, which have influenced societies since antiquity, have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. The ability of fungi to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet they live their lives largely out of sight, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into this hidden kingdom of life, and shows that fungi are key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

A spellbinding scientific and cultural study of snakes, the fascination and fear they inspire, and how surprising new science is indelibly changing our perception of these stunning and frightening creatures. For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have appeared in religious texts, mythology, poetry, and beyond. From the foundational deities of ancient Egypt to the reactions of squeamish schoolchildren today, it is a historically commonplace belief that snakes are devious, dangerous, and even evil. But where there is hatred and fear, there is also fascination and reverence. How is it that creatures so despised and sinister, so foreign of movement and ostensibly devoid of sociality and emotion, have fired the imaginations of poets, prophets, and painters across time and cultures? In SLITHER, science writer Stephen S. Hall presents a naturalistic, cultural, ecological, and scientific meditation on these loathed yet magnetic creatures. In each chapter, he explores a biological aspect of The Snake, such as their cold blooded metabolism and venomous nature, alongside their mythology, artistic depictions, and cultural veneration. In doing so, he explores not only what neurologically triggers our wary fascination with these limbless creatures, but also how the current generation of snake scientists is using cutting-edge technologies to discover new truths about these evolutionarily ancient creatures—truths that may ultimately affect and enhance human health.

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.