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Repackaged with a new afterword, this "valuable and entertaining" (New York Times Book Review) book explores how scientists are adapting nature's best ideas to solve tough 21st century problems. Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years, and adapt them for human use. The results are revolutionizing how materials are invented and how we compute, heal ourselves, repair the environment, and feed the world. Janine Benyus takes readers into the lab and in the field with maverick thinkers as they: discover miracle drugs by watching what chimps eat when they're sick; learn how to create by watching spiders weave fibers; harness energy by examining how a leaf converts sunlight into fuel in trillionths of a second; and many more examples. Composed of stories of vision and invention, personalities and pipe dreams, Biomimicry is must reading for anyone interested in the shape of our future.
Salomon de Caus was a pivotal figure in the dissemination of the design principles and motifs of the Italian Renaissance garden throughout Europe. By setting the record straight in this biography, Luke Morgan rewrites the received history of early seventeenth-century garden design.
This short textbook introduces students to the concept of describing natural systems using mathematical models. We highlight the variety of ways in which natural systems lend themselves to mathematical description and the importance of models in revealing fundamental processes. The process of science via the building, testing and use of models (theories) is described and forms the structure of the book. The book covers a broad range from the molecular to ecosystems and whole-Earth phenomena. Themes running through the chapters include scale (temporal and spatial), change (linear and nonlinear), emergent phenomena and uncertainty. Mathematical descriptions are kept to a minimum and we illustrate mechanisms and results in graphical form wherever possible. Essential mathematical details are described fully, with the use of boxes. The mathematics supports but does not lead the text.
Although everyone has goals, only some people successfully attain their respective goals on a regular basis. With this in mind, the author attempts to answer the question of why some people are more successful than others. He begins with the assumption that the key to personal success is effective decision-making, and then utilizes his own theory--The Self-Regulation Model--to explain the origin and nature of individual differences in decision-making competence. The author also summarizes a number of existing models of decision-making and risk-taking. This book has two primary goals: * to provide a comprehensive review of the developmental literature on the decision-making skills of children, adolescents, and adults, and * to propose a theoretical model of decision-making skill that offers a better description of this skill than prior accounts. Taken together, the literature review and theoretical model help the reader acquire a clear sense of the development of decision-making skills as well as reasons for the developmental differences that seem to emerge.
A comprehensive treatment of models and processes related to water fluxes for meteorologists, hydrologists and oceanographers.
Self-organized criticality, the spontaneous development of systems to a critical state, is the first general theory of complex systems with a firm mathematical basis. This theory describes how many seemingly desperate aspects of the world, from stock market crashes to mass extinctions, avalanches to solar flares, all share a set of simple, easily described properties. "...a'must read'...Bak writes with such ease and lucidity, and his ideas are so intriguing...essential reading for those interested in complex systems...it will reward a sufficiently skeptical reader." -NATURE "...presents the theory (self-organized criticality) in a form easily absorbed by the non-mathematically inclined reader." -BOSTON BOOK REVIEW "I picture Bak as a kind of scientific musketeer; flamboyant, touchy, full of swagger and ready to join every fray... His book is written with panache. The style is brisk, the content stimulating. I recommend it as a bracing experience." -NEW SCIENTIST
A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism "Reduce, reuse, recycle" urge environmentalists; in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, "cradle to grave" manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective; hence, "waste equals food" is the first principle the book sets forth. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as "biological nutrients" that safely re-enter the environment or as "technical nutrients" that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being "downcycled" into low-grade uses (as most "recyclables" now are). Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, William McDonough and Michael Braungart make an exciting and viable case for change.
This book is the result of an international research team pursuing the intuitive notion that the atomic nucleus should have structural properties. Starting with a few logical assumptions, they discovered that many properties of the atom and the nucleus can be explained rationally without resorting to quantum mechanics or the limiting dogmas about the nucleus that dominate current physics. Using feedback from known experimental data, they identified several organizational principles that nature appears to use for constructing the elements, sometimes in unexpected ways. There are two assumptions underlying the Structured Atom Model (SAM). First, by replacing the neutron with a proton–electron pair, an electrostatic attractive force is reintroduced into the nucleus. The electrons acting as “glue” between the protons. Second, that “spherical dense packing” gives the nucleus its fractal shape—one of several organizational drivers in the buildup of the nucleus; other drivers being recurring substructures called “endings” and “nuclets.” A SAM nucleus is constructed using these substructures in various combinations. The result is a new periodic table that hints at several missing elements most of which are suspected to be unstable, but probably not all. What emerges is nothing less than a new paradigm for thinking about the nucleus and physics. In SAM, several known nuclear phenomena follow directly from the structural configuration of the nucleus, including nuclear instability, radioactivity/radioactive decay, the asymmetrical breakup of fission products, and the various nuclear decay schemes. In addition, the team discovered an unrecognized store of energy that may very well be responsible for Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR).
Over the last two decades, spurred particularly by the decoding of the genome, neuroscience has advanced to become the primary basis of clinical psychiatry, even as environmental risk factors for mental disorders have been deemphasized. In this thoroughly revised, second edition of Nature and Nurture in Mental Disorders, the author argues that an overreliance on biology at the expense of environment has been detrimental to the field -- that, in fact, the "nature versus nurture" dichotomy is unnecessary. Instead, he posits a biopsychosocial model that acknowledges the role an individual's predisposing genetic factors, interacting with environmental stressors, play in the etiology of many mental disorders. The first several chapters of the book provide an overview of the theories that affect the study of genes, the environment, and their interaction, examining what the empirical evidence has revealed about each of these issues. Subsequent chapters apply the integrated model to a variety of disorders, reviewing the evidence on how genes and environment interact to shape disorders including: Depressive disorders PTSD Neurodevelopmental disorders Eating disorders Personality disorders By rejecting both biological and psychosocial reductionism in favor of an interactive model, Nature and Nurture in Mental Disorders offers practicing clinicians a path toward a more flexible, effective treatment model. And where controversy or debate still exist, an extensive reference list provided at the end of the book, updated for this edition to reflect the most current literature, encourages further study and exploration.