Lifes Little Edge

Author : Carl Zimmer
Publisher : Pan Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1529069440
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life's Edge written by Carl Zimmer and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us?’ – Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world – from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses – the harder they find it to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus? Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts – whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead. Life’s Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation by one of the most celebrated science writers of our time. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It’s never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply – have they made life in the lab? Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr Frankenstein’s monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

Author : Andrew Boyd
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393318708
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life's Little Deconstruction Book written by Andrew Boyd and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1999 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like postmodernism itself, this tiny manual is a work of inspired piracy, melding cutting-edge cultural theory with the corporate and computer lingos that permeate our lives.

Author : Wilhelm Hauff
Publisher : Good Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 13812 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Horror Beyond Life's Edge: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales written by Wilhelm Hauff and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-11-19 with total page 13812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you ready to step over the edge? This grand horror collection contains the greatest supernatural mysteries, gothic novels, dark romances & macabre tales: Bram Stoker: Dracula The Squaw... John William Polidori: The Vampyre James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Rip Van Winkle Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado The Masque of the Red Death The Premature Burial Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental... H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House... Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Haunted House... Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel The Woman in White Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla... Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan... William Hope Hodgson: The Ghost Pirates The Night Land E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night... Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables... Thomas Hardy: What the Shepherd Saw The Grave by the Handpost Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho The Italian Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Rudyard Kipling: My Own True Ghost Story The City of Dreadful Night The Mark of the Beast... Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Dark Other Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian: The Man-Wolf... Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach... Pedro De Alarçon: The Nail Walter Hubbell: The Great Amherst Mystery Some Real American Ghosts Some Chinese Ghosts...

Author : Joan Halifax
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1250101344
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Standing at the Edge written by Joan Halifax and published by . This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This book is] an ... examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience"--Amazon.com.

Author : Carl Zimmer
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0684856239
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At the Water's Edge written by Carl Zimmer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-09-08 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everybody Out of the Pond At the Water's Edge will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to Homo sapiens today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

Author : Donna M. Dean
Publisher : AuthorHouse
ISBN 13 : 1410758192
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living on Life's Edge Without Going over It written by Donna M. Dean and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2003-10-06 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is true life experiences of Donna Dean. Her goal is to help people understand and develop a true meaning to life. This book is to encourage, enlighten, give hope and answers to lifes problems. She understands how to feel when problems come your way. She shares her love, compassion, and faith with you. Her heart is to teach you how you can develop Gods Heart. If you are at lifes edge and need to be blessed, this book is for you and your family. It will lift you up and give you hope. Your heart will be blessed as you read this book

Author : Thomas Hardy
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life's little ironies written by Thomas Hardy and published by . This book was released on 1905 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Carl Zimmer
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101984600
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book She Has Her Mother's Laugh written by Carl Zimmer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Finalist "Science book of the year"—The Guardian One of New York Times 100 Notable Books for 2018 One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2018 One of Kirkus's Best Books of 2018 One of Mental Floss's Best Books of 2018 One of Science Friday's Best Science Books of 2018 “Extraordinary”—New York Times Book Review "Magisterial"—The Atlantic "Engrossing"—Wired "Leading contender as the most outstanding nonfiction work of the year"—Minneapolis Star-Tribune Celebrated New York Times columnist and science writer Carl Zimmer presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. As the technology for studying genes became cheaper, millions of people ordered genetic tests to link themselves to missing parents, to distant ancestors, to ethnic identities... But, Zimmer writes, “Each of us carries an amalgam of fragments of DNA, stitched together from some of our many ancestors. Each piece has its own ancestry, traveling a different path back through human history. A particular fragment may sometimes be cause for worry, but most of our DNA influences who we are—our appearance, our height, our penchants—in inconceivably subtle ways.” Heredity isn’t just about genes that pass from parent to child. Heredity continues within our own bodies, as a single cell gives rise to trillions of cells that make up our bodies. We say we inherit genes from our ancestors—using a word that once referred to kingdoms and estates—but we inherit other things that matter as much or more to our lives, from microbes to technologies we use to make life more comfortable. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer’s lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it. Weaving historical and current scientific research, his own experience with his two daughters, and the kind of original reporting expected of one of the world’s best science journalists, Zimmer ultimately unpacks urgent bioethical quandaries arising from new biomedical technologies, but also long-standing presumptions about who we really are and what we can pass on to future generations.

Author : Patricia Daniels Cornwell
Publisher : Putnam Juvenile
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 76 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life's Little Fable written by Patricia Daniels Cornwell and published by Putnam Juvenile. This book was released on 1999 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the land of the pond there is no gravity and Jarrod, who has never fallen or felt heavy or learned to swim, wants to go into the pond, not knowing the grave danger that lurks there.

Author : Molly Peacock
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608196984
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Paper Garden written by Molly Peacock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-03-29 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Delany was seventy-two years old when she noticed a petal drop from a geranium. In a flash of inspiration, she picked up her scissors and cut out a paper replica of the petal, inventing the art of collage. It was the summer of 1772, in England. During the next ten years she completed nearly a thousand cut-paper botanicals (which she called mosaicks) so accurate that botanists still refer to them. Poet-biographer Molly Peacock uses close-ups of these brilliant collages in The Paper Garden to track the extraordinary life of Delany, friend of Swift, Handel, Hogarth, and even Queen Charlotte and King George III. How did this remarkable role model for late blooming manage it? After a disastrous teenage marriage to a drunken sixty-one-year-old squire, she took control of her own life, pursuing creative projects, spurning suitors, and gaining friends. At forty-three, she married Jonathan Swift's friend Dr. Patrick Delany, and lived in Ireland in a true expression of midlife love. But after twenty-five years and a terrible lawsuit, her husband died. Sent into a netherland of mourning, Mrs. Delany was rescued by her friend, the fabulously wealthy Duchess of Portland. The Duchess introduced Delany to the botanical adventurers of the day and a bonanza of exotic plants from Captain Cook's voyage, which became the inspiration for her art. Peacock herself first saw Mrs. Delany's work more than twenty years before she wrote The Paper Garden, but "like a book you know is too old for you," she put the thought of the old woman away. She went on to marry and cherish the happiness of her own midlife, in a parallel to Mrs. Delany, and by chance rediscovered the mosaicks decades later. This encounter confronted the poet with her own aging and gave her-and her readers-a blueprint for late-life flexibility, creativity, and change.