Science Ecology

You are made of stardust. It is incredible, but true! Everything you can see, touch, and smell is made of stardust, too - mind-bogglingly tiny things called "atoms" that stick together in millions of different ways like a big Lego set. Science is all about understanding what these atoms do when they stick together. How can they move? What can they make? How did bits of stardust end up making a person?

Bees are like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and, for the most part, unseen. While we might overlook them, they lie at the heart of relationships that bind the human and natural worlds. In Buzz, the beloved Thor Hanson takes us on a journey that begins 125 million years ago, when a wasp first dared to feed pollen to its young. From honeybees and bumbles to lesser-known diggers, miners, leafcutters, and masons, bees have long been central to our harvests, our mythologies, and our very existence. They've given us sweetness and light, the beauty of flowers, and as much as a third of the foodstuffs we eat. And, alarmingly, they are at risk of disappearing.

It is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive. It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of all the world's water. Yet this is the first audiobook to tell the story of rain.

Once upon a time, a burnt-out Claire Dunn spent a year living off the grid in a wilderness survival program. Yet love and the possibilities of human connection drew her back to the city, where she soon found herself as overscheduled, addicted to her phone and lost in IKEA as everyone else. Given all the city offered - comfort, convenience, community and opportunity - she wanted to stay. But to do so, she'd have to learn how to rewild her own urban soul. Now, Claire swims in city rivers, forages in the suburbs and explores many other practices to connect to the world around her.

A seed falls from a plant. A mouse eats the seed. An owl eats the mouse. Each animal gets energy from its food. How does energy flow from one living thing to another? Let’s investigate food chains and food webs!

From increasingly severe storms to collapsing coral reefs to the displacement of Syrian citizens, in this audiobook we examine the effects of Earth’s changing climate on weather systems, ecosystems, and human habitability and what this means for our future.

Paul Falkowski looks "under the hood" of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built - and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.

In Monarchs and Milkweed, Anurag Agrawal presents a vivid investigation into how the monarch butterfly has evolved closely alongside the milkweed - a toxic plant named for the sticky white substance emitted when its leaves are damaged - and how this inextricable and intimate relationship has been like an arms race over the millennia, a battle of exploitation and defense between two fascinating species.

Birds are astonishingly intelligent creatures. According to revolutionary new research, some birds rival primates and even humans in their remarkable forms of intelligence. In The Genius of Birds, acclaimed author Jennifer Ackerman explores their newly discovered brilliance and how it came about. As she travels around the world to the most cutting-edge frontiers of research, Ackerman not only tells the story of the recently uncovered genius of birds but also delves deeply into the latest findings about the bird brain itself that are shifting our view of what it means to be intelligent.

We talk a lot about sheep: following the herd, counting sheep to fall asleep and looking out for wolves in sheep’s clothing. But, just like people, animals don’t always follow the pack. Some are affectionate while others butt heads; some follow the leader while some guide the whole flock home. With startling beauty and tenderness, Rosamund Young reveals the remarkable emotional and intellectual complexity of the animals she lives with on her family farm, and the story of her life’s work, with the intimacy of a personal diary.

"J'ai vécu la lecture d'Insoutenable Paradis comme un état des lieux à visage humain des attitudes paradoxales dans lesquelles nous plonge le monde actuel. Ce petit livre humble et solaire nous fait prendre conscience que le véritable remède ne peut venir que de chacun et chacune de nous. C'est bien l'écologie de l'âme qui sauvera notre humanité et, peut-être aussi, notre environnement." Abd Al Malik, artiste.

After a chance meeting in the pub, Roger Morgan-Grenville and his friend Duncan decide to take up beekeeping. Their enthusiasm matched only by their ignorance, they are pitched into an arcane world of unexpected challenges. Coping with many setbacks along the way, they manage to create a colony of beehives, finishing two years later with more honey than anyone knows what to do with. By standing back from their normal lives and working with the cycle of the seasons, they emerge with a new-found understanding of nature and a respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

If you learn about the scientific method, you learn that first we hypothesize about something we’ve experienced, and then we look for more of it. This works well enough—but what if you are interested in studying a heretofore unknown comet or supernova? That is the essential problem of the astronomer: the most important discoveries happen without notice! Indeed, as Chris Lintott argues in Accidental Astronomy, luck defines astronomy. Lintott explores the ways in which happenstance shapes how we investigate the sky.

Some animals live in water. Some animals live on land. The land that animals live on can be very different. What makes a place the right home for an animal? Let’s investigate habitats!

Roy was instrumental in returning the osprey, red kite and golden eagle to the British Isles, but the road to reintroduction isn’t an easy one. In what will surely be the seminal book on British reintroductions, Roy details the painstaking process of returning the Goldeneye to Scotland, one duckling at a time, the die-hard determination needed to make a dazzling success of the red kite reintroduction and the leap of faith we will all need to make to accept sharing our forests and skies with large carnivores again.

In The Sea Is Not Made of Water, Adam Nicolson explores the natural wonders of the intertidal and our long human relationship with it. The physics of the seas, the biology of anemone and limpet, the long history of the Earth, and the stories we tell of those who have lived here: all interconnect in this zone where the philosopher, scientist and poet can meet and find meaning.

Coal mining in the UK dates back to Roman times, but in the 21st century, has practically disappeared. In this history, Jeremy Paxman charts our vital relationship with coal and all the extraordinary change it has fuelled. Told through the stories of real people, Paxman travels the regions of the UK where communities were built around coal, to the industrial revolution, to the beginnings of time and coal’s geological formation, to the great tragedies such as Aberfan, and to the picket lines of the miners’ strike.

In the past 30 years, China has transformed from an impoverished country where peasants comprised the largest portion of the populace to an economic power with an expanding middle class and more megacities than anywhere else on Earth. This remarkable transformation has required, and will continue to demand, massive quantities of resources. Like every other major power in modern history, China is looking outward to find them.

The Reindeer Chronicles takes listeners on a global tour of Earth repair, with visits to unsung heroes who are pushing the boundaries of ecological restoration to show how even the world’s most wounded places can be revived. The book begins in China’s Loess Plateau, where a landmark project successfully restored a blighted region the size of Belgium, lifting millions of people out of poverty.

In the woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, sometime deep in our species’ past, something strange happened: a bird called out, not to warn others of human presence, but to call attention to herself. Having found a beehive, that bird—a honeyguide—sought human aid to break in. The behavior can seem almost miraculous: How would a bird come to think that people could help her? Isn’t life simply bloodier than that? As Rob Dunn argues in The Call of the Honeyguide, it isn’t.