FIREFLIES, HONEY AND SILK GILBERT WALDBAUER
The breadth of intriguing introspect into the curious world of insects will delight on several levels including the multitude of ways we utilize their industrious nature to benefit our lives.
The ink our ancestors wrote with, the beeswax in altar candles, the honey on our toast, the silk we wear. The labour of insects rewards our larder, linens and literary lifestyle yet the connection between product and production is not often acknowledged.
This enchanting book is a highly entertaining exploration of the myriad ways insects have enriched our lives–culturally, economically, and aesthetically.
Entomologist and writer Gilbert Waldbauer describes in loving, colorful detail how many of the valuable products insects have given us are made, how they were discovered, and how they have been used through time and across cultures.
Along the way, he takes us on a captivating ramble through many far-flung corners of history, mythology, poetry, literature, medicine, ecology, forensics, and more.
Enlivened with personal anecdotes from Waldbauer's distinguished career as an entomologist, the book also describes surprising everyday encounters we all experience that were made possible by insects.
From butterfly gardens and fly-fishing to insects as jewelry and sex pheromones, this is an eye-opening ode to the wonder of insects that illuminates our extraordinary and essential relationship with the natural world.
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BOOK DETAILS
Fireflies, Honey and Silk By Gilbert Waldbauer, University of California Press, Dec 2010
US $ 17.95 AU $ 29.95
HOW INTELLIGENCE HAPPENS JOHN DUNCAN
From Cambridge scientist John Duncan, How Intelligence Happens tells the story of one of the great scientific mysteries. Human intelligence seems infinite in its variety and power – it builds sprawling cities, plans a dinner party, takes us to the beginnings of time and the limits of the universe.
Yet intelligence is created in a brain much like the brains of other animals, with billions of nerve cells communicating in tiny electrical impulses. Can science hope to explain how brains build intelligence?
Can it illuminate the controversies of intelligence testing, the bizarre changes that follow brain damage, the link of human to animal intelligence?
For the general reader, How Intelligence Happens is the story of search for an answer. Investigations encompass a range of interactions that might otherwise explain intelligence or at the very least present a viable measure to examine it.
Such investigations include: a look at popular science, brain imaging, mind and brain discoveries, computers and brains to name a few.
How Intelligence Happens By John Duncan Yale University Press, Oct 2010, US $28 , AU $ 39.95
Nature In A Nutshell
KNOWLEDGE
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