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Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake

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Entangled Life

How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

Merlin Sheldrake

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: May 12, 2020

Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


A mind-bending journey into the hidden universe of fungi, “one of those rare books that can truly change the way you see the world around you” (Helen Macdonald, author of  H Is for Hawk ). “Dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing . . . a remarkable work by a remarkable writer, which succeeds in springing life into strangeness again.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of  Underland When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In Entangled Life , the brilliant young biologist Merlin Sheldrake shows us the world from a fungal point of view, providing an exhilarating change of perspective. Sheldrake’s vivid exploration takes us from yeast to psychedelics, to the fungi that range for miles underground and are the largest organisms on the planet, to those that link plants together in complex networks known as the “Wood Wide Web,”  to those that infiltrate and manipulate insect bodies with devastating precision. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Praise for Entangled Life “Fungi are everywhere, and Merlin Sheldrake is an ideal guide to their mysteries. He’s passionate, deeply knowledgeable, and a wonderful writer.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of  The Sixth Extinction “I was completely unprepared for Sheldrake’s book. It rolled me over like a tsunami, leaving the landscape rearranged but all the more beautiful.” —Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics and author of  A History of the Mind  and  Soul Dust “Sheldrake’s charm and curiosity make for a book that is delightful to read but also grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world and the often overlooked organisms within it.” — Ed Yong, author of  I Contain Multitudes

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Entangled Life – Merlin Sheldrake

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

Terms like “flight shame” might be new to many of us, but environmental activists have been waving their arms about the aviation industry’s ginormous carbon footprint for decades. And on Thursday, they triumphed in a fight over an airport expansion at London’s Heathrow Airport that’s been brewing for years.

In a historic decision, the United Kingdom’s Court of Appeal ruled that a controversial plan to build a third runway at Heathrow is illegal because it fails to take into account the country’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions under the landmark Paris Agreement. The U.K. government has said it will not appeal the court’s decision.

Heathrow is already one of the busiest airports in the world, and the expansion would have brought in about 700 more planes per day, undoubtedly leading to a boom in emissions. Plaintiffs argued this runs counter to the law the U.K. passed last June to align its climate policy with the Paris Agreement. That law requires the U.K. to bring its contribution to global warming down to net-zero by 2050 by vastly reducing its emissions and offsetting any remaining greenhouse gases through other solutions like tree planting and carbon capture technology.

The court’s decision is a big deal, and not just for the U.K. This is the first time a court has cited the Paris Agreement to strike down a major infrastructure project — or any project — and could have implications all over the world. As more and more countries, states, and cities enact their own climate policies, courts will inevitably be asked to adjudicate projects that expand the use of fossil fuels, which could be anything from airport expansions to new gas pipelines to highways.

We’ve gotten a taste of cases like this in the U.S., where we don’t even have national emissions targets. Last year a U.S. district court temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on public land in Wyoming because the Bureau of Land Management didn’t assess the emissions footprint of the projects. The decision was based on a requirement in the National Environmental Policy Act, a requirement which the Trump Administration is now trying to toss out. But in places like the European Union that remain members of the Paris Agreement, the Heathrow decision will only make challenges to emissions-increasing projects look stronger.

The ruling was also a major victory for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, plaintiffs in the suit that have been fighting the project for more than a decade. In 2007, activists clashed with police after setting up camp near Heathrow for a week of protests against a proposed expansion. In 2008, members of the activist group Plane Stupid climbed to the roof of Parliament and unfurled a banner that read “no 3rd runway at Heathrow.”

In 2009, the actress Emma Thompson helped activists buy a piece of land where the runway would have been built to delay its development. Then there was the custard incident, in which activist Leila Deen threw green custard onto then-Business Secretary Peter Mandelson as he was on his way into a “low-carbon summit.” Deen called it a “lighthearted way of making a very serious point” about what she called the government’s hypocritical policy on climate change, since Mandelson was a supporter of the third runway at Heathrow.

So does the ruling put an end to the protests? In a blog post about the decision, Greenpeace cautioned against celebrating too soon. While the government doesn’t plan to appeal, the company that owns the airport does. The government also has the option of pushing the project forward by submitting an amended plan that shows how a third runway could comply with the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.

But there doesn’t look to be much appetite for reviving the fight. When he was mayor of London, now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson railed against the proposed runway, saying he would lie down “in front of those bulldozers and stop the building, stop the construction.”

It would also be a bad look given that the U.K. is hosting the next Conference of the Parties, the U.N.’s annual climate change conference, in November.

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

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Signature in the Cell – Stephen C. Meyer

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Signature in the Cell

DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Stephen C. Meyer

Genre: Biology

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: June 23, 2009

Publisher: HarperOne

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


“Signature in the Cell is a defining work in the discussion of life’s origins and the question of whether life is a product of unthinking matter or of an intelligent mind. For those who disagree with ID, the powerful case Meyer presents cannot be ignored in any honest debate. For those who may be sympathetic to ID, on the fence, or merely curious, this book is an engaging, eye-opening, and often eye-popping read” — American Spectator Named one of the top books of 2009 by the Times Literary Supplement (London), this controversial and compelling book from Dr. Stephen C. Meyer presents a convincing new case for intelligent design (ID), based on revolutionary discoveries in science and DNA. Along the way, Meyer argues that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as expounded in The Origin of Species did not, in fact, refute ID. If you enjoyed Francis Collins’s The Language of God, you’ll find much to ponder—about evolution, DNA, and intelligent design—in Signature in the Cell.

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Signature in the Cell – Stephen C. Meyer

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Liquid Rules – Mark Miodownik

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Liquid Rules

The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives

Mark Miodownik

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Expected Publish Date: February 19, 2019

Publisher: HMH Books

Seller: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company


Sometimes explosive, often delicious, occasionally poisonous, but always interesting: the New York Times- bestselling author of Stuff Matters shows us the secret lives of liquids: the shadow counterpart of our solid “stuff.” We all know that without water we couldn’t survive, and that sometimes a cup of coffee or a glass of wine feels just as vital. But do we really understand how much we rely on liquids, or the destructive power they hold?   Set over the course of a flight from London to San Francisco, Liquid Rules offers readers a fascinating tour of these formless substances, told through the language of molecules, droplets, heartbeats, and ocean waves. Throughout the trip, we encounter fluids within the plane—from a seemingly ordinary cup of tea to a liquid crystal display screen—and without, in the volcanoes of Iceland, the frozen expanse of Greenland, and the marvelous California coastline. We come to see liquids as substances of wonder and fascination, and to understand their potential for death and destruction. Just as in Stuff Matters, Mark Miodownik’s unique brand of scientific storytelling brings liquids and their mysterious properties to life in a captivating new way.

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Liquid Rules – Mark Miodownik

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European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.

Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90 percent in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.

This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation.

The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15 degrees C (0.27 degrees F) in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found.

“The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team of Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin, and Simon Lewis.

The drop in temperature during this period is known as the “Little Ice Age,” a time when the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal, and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries.

The UCL researchers found that the European colonization of the Americas indirectly contributed to this colder period by causing the deaths of about 56 million people by 1600. The study attributes the deaths to factors including introduced disease, such as smallpox and measles, as well as warfare and societal collapse.

Researchers then calculated how much land indigenous people required and then subsequently fell into disuse, finding that around 55 million hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation.

The study sketches out a past where humans were influencing the climate long before the industrial revolution, where the use of fossil fuels for the manufacturing of goods, generation of electricity, and transportation has allowed tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere.

Widespread deforestation for agriculture and urban development has also spurred the release of greenhouse gases, causing the planet to warm by around 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) over the past century. Scientists have warned that the world has little over a decade to drastically reduce emissions or face increasingly severe storms, drought, heatwaves, coastal flooding, and food insecurity.

The revegetation of the Americas after European arrival aided declines of global carbon content in the air, dropping by around 7 to 10 parts of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere. This compares to the 3 ppm of carbon dioxide that humanity is currently adding to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels.

“There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaching and using tree-planting to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” study coauthor Chris Brierley told the BBC. “And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the great dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few parts per million.”

“This is useful,” he continued, “it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.”

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European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate

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The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

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The Ghost Map

The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

Steven Johnson

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 19, 2006

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: PENGUIN GROUP USA, INC.


A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure — garbage removal, clean water, sewers — necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and interconnectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.

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The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson

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To Explain the World – Steven Weinberg

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To Explain the World

The Discovery of Modern Science

Steven Weinberg

Genre: History

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: February 17, 2015

Publisher: Harper

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


A masterful commentary on the history of science from the Greeks to modern times, by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg—a thought-provoking and important book by one of the most distinguished scientists and intellectuals of our time. In this rich, irreverent, and compelling history, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg takes us across centuries from ancient Miletus to medieval Baghdad and Oxford, from Plato’s Academy and the Museum of Alexandria to the cathedral school of Chartres and the Royal Society of London. He shows that the scientists of ancient and medieval times not only did not understand what we understand about the world—they did not understand what there is to understand, or how to understand it. Yet over the centuries, through the struggle to solve such mysteries as the curious backward movement of the planets and the rise and fall of the tides, the modern discipline of science eventually emerged. Along the way, Weinberg examines historic clashes and collaborations between science and the competing spheres of religion, technology, poetry, mathematics, and philosophy. An illuminating exploration of the way we consider and analyze the world around us, To Explain the World is a sweeping, ambitious account of how difficult it was to discover the goals and methods of modern science, and the impact of this discovery on human knowledge and development.

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To Explain the World – Steven Weinberg

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Can Teddy Bears Help Fight Air Pollution in London?

When air pollution levels spike in London, new coughing teddy bears tweet at local politicians with a message about the dangers of dirty air.

Air pollution is becoming a massive global issue. Just take a look at this interactive map, and you’ll notice that a?worrisome amount of the world is in the yellow and red. The World Health Organization actually estimated that?unsafe levels of air pollution caused?seven million deaths globally?in 2012 alone. That is an astounding one out of every eight deaths for that year caused by dirty air.

The majority of the world’s most polluted cities lie in?growing?industrial nations, like India and China, but cities like London are starting to feel the devastating effects of air pollution. In fact, a lot of Londoners are gravely concerned.

“This is now a matter of life and death, and the government has one last chance to put it right,” said London’s mayor,?Sadiq Khan, last year.

Around 9,500 people die annually due to London’s poor air quality. That’s significantly more than the number of Londoners who?die?in car accidents.?What’s more,?there are?800+ schools in London that are regularly exposed to high levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air (from road traffic) that surpass the E.U.’s legal limits. Air pollution is a silent killer, and it has?grown into a health emergency.

And yet, London’s government has been slow to act. So?one company decided to start?making a blatant statement?with an animatronic teddy bear.

The bear is named Toxic Toby, and it is the brainchild of creatives at the advertising agency,?McCann London.?Toby gets strapped on the side of the road surrounded by flowers, reminiscent of?a memorial, but it’s not just a lifeless teddy bear?tied?to a post.

“The 3D-printed bear is fed real-time air quality data from a company called BreezoMeter,” Zoya Teirstein?writes?at Grist, “When pollution hits dangerous levels, Toby lifts his little paw and coughs.”

Yep, the bear coughs when the air quality is bad?very realistically (and heart-wrenchingly). It’s pretty hard to ignore as a passerby. And every time he coughs, he sends a nagging little tweet to local politicians with a message about the dangers of air pollution.

Raising awareness on the streets while pushing politicians to make change?it’s an ingenious way to make a difference. And who can ignore a sick teddy bear?

While the US has significantly better air quality than many other parts of the world, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned. Los Angeles ?is barely behind London?when it comes to terrible air. And if you live elsewhere, bad news?air pollution travels, thanks to wind. Air pollution is?everyone’s problem, no matter where you live.

Take action?by contacting your local government and demanding stronger anti-pollution action. Clean air is a human right. Maybe we need a few Toxic Tobys on our side of the Atlantic to get the message across.

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Can Teddy Bears Help Fight Air Pollution in London?

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The U.K. is tropically hot right now. 6 maps show why.

A dangerous heatwave is sweeping across Britain.

The temperature reached 95 degrees at London’s Heathrow Airport on Thursday, making it the hottest day so far this year. Friday is forecasted to be even hotter, and could be the hottest day in the island’s history.

This year’s heatwave began weeks ago, back in June, exacerbated by an absence of rainfall that has turned the countryside so brown it’s visible from space. It’s part of a worldwide rash of fires, floods, and other extreme weather in recent weeks that is putting climate change front and center.

On its current pace, this will be the hottest summer in British history. Across the U.K., where air conditioning is rare, hospital emergency rooms have seen record numbers of patients this week, and public health officials warned people to stay inside. Authorities in London banned the use of barbecue grills after an explosion in the number of large grass fires. Network Rail has slowed and canceled some trains to keep tracks from buckling under the heat.

Earlier this summer, the roof of a science museum in Glasgow actually melted during one particularly hot day.

This isn’t normal weather, although it’s happening with increasing frequency. This week marks one of only a handful of times in more than 350 years of recordkeeping that temperatures in England have climbed above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius).

This is a problem that’s only going to get worse. Within 20 or 30 years, if the world continues to ignore the problem of climate change, heatwaves like this week’s could happen nearly every year in the U.K., tripling heat-related deaths.

Summertime temperatures have sharply risen on every corner of the planet in recent decades, so what were once one-off excursions of dangerous temperatures a century ago are now nearly indistinguishable from the background influence of soaring levels of greenhouse gases.

That’s easy to see in the maps below. Decades ago, the bright red splotches of European heatwaves were starkly noticeable against the blue background of the rest of the planet. Lately, it’s hard to see where one heatwave ends and another one begins.

Peak daily temperature during past unusually hot summers in the U.K.:

August 1911

NASA GISS

36.7°C/98°F — an especially severe drought brought a long stretch of cloud-free skies to England, on par with the Nevada desert

August 1932

NASA GISS

35.6°C/96°F — children swam in London’s fountains to keep cool

July 1976

NASA GISS

35.9°C/96°F — currently the hottest summer in UK history

August 1990

NASA GISS

37.1°C/99°F — train service nationwide slowed as rails buckled

August 2003

NASA GISS

38.5°C/101°F — more than 30,000 people died across Europe

Summer 2018

NASA GISS

35°C/95°F — and poised to get hotter

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The U.K. is tropically hot right now. 6 maps show why.

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The Feather Thief – Kirk Wallace Johnson

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The Feather Thief
Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Kirk Wallace Johnson

Genre: Nature

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: April 24, 2018

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


“Fascinating from the first page to the last—you won’t be able to put it down.” — Southern Living A rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty for readers of The Stranger in the Woods , The Lost City of Z , and The Orchid Thief . On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them—and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

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The Feather Thief – Kirk Wallace Johnson

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