Other books that might interest you

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  After Meat - The Case for an...

  Karthik Sekar

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  Animals make for terrible technology. The technological use of animals--making food, drugs, clothing, and cosmetics out of animal material--will cease. A cow takes over one year to grow, "wastes" over ninety percent of what it's fed, and cannot be innovated much further. After Meat explains the fundamental limits of animal technology in terms of physics and biology. Replacement technology such as microbial fermentation will surpass those limits. Eventually, we’ll have food that is better in every way--in terms of taste, cost, nutrition, resource consumption, and ethics--because we won't use animals to produce it. 
  Along the way, After Meat leads us through a veritable forest of adjacent topics. We wade into evolution and reductivism, broach consciousness and the Multiverse, dive into economics and policy, bounce from weather prediction to the problem of hunger to the morality of eating plants. In sum, we ineluctably conclude that our future has little room for animal technology, and that future will be better for it. 

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  The UFO Experience - Evidence...

  J. Allen Hynek

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  Cited by the New York Review of Books as “the best brief for visitation,” this classic study presents an analysis of UFO reports and concludes that many sightings cannot be easily dismissed.   The case against UFOs and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) has not been put to rest. Although UFOs “officially” did not exist for decades according to the government, reports of sightings continue to be made, and the latest releases from the government and related hearings have surprised the world. While the scientific community has put UFOs out to pasture, the evidence used to dismiss them is rare and unscientific.   Dr. Hynek, a scientist himself, and the only government-paid ufologist in history, looks at the decisions made by officialdom in the early days of ufology and how these decisions have held us back—to the point that we are still naively talking about UFOs as we were in the 1950s. Has seventy years of research made no difference at all in our understanding?   Dr. Hynek proves that there is a conspiracy afoot to hide the facts and that there are many cases that still need to be explained by mainstream science—not dismissed with facile jokes and stupid logic. Citing specific cases, Hynek challenges those in the ivory tower by raising questions that have still not been answered and refuting mainstream arguments that have yet to be proven.

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  Tasting Colors - The Good Bad...

  Seeker

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  Listen in as Seeker dives in on the fascinating world of psychedelics. From hallucinations, the neurological condition Synesthesia, and the CIA’s secret LSD tests on unsuspecting civilians, to answering weird questions like why we snort things and what makes heroin so deadly. You’ll be seeing sounds and tasting colors by the end of this best of Seeker collection, available for the first time in audio.

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  My Paddle to the Sea - Eleven...

  John Lane

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  “In an age that values faster and faster travel, Lane’s river memoir affirms the great value of floating and observing.”—Booklist    Three months after a family vacation in Costa Rica ends in tragedy when two fellow rafters die on the flooded Rio Reventazón, John Lane sets out with friends from his own backyard in upcountry South Carolina to calm his nerves and to paddle to the sea. Like Huck Finn, Lane sees a river journey as a portal to change, but unlike Twain’s character, Lane isn’t escaping. He’s getting intimate with the river that flows right past his home in the Spartanburg suburbs. Lane’s three-­hundred-mile float trip takes him down the Broad River and into Lake Marion before continuing down the Santee River. Along the way, Lane recounts local history and spars with streamside literary presences such as Mind of the South author W. J. Cash; Henry Savage, author of the Rivers of America Series volume on the Santee; novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winner Julia Peterkin; early explorer John Lawson; and poet and outdoor writer Archibald Rutledge.   Lane ponders the sites of old cotton mills; abandoned locks, canals, and bridges; ghost towns fallen into decay a century before; Indian mounds; American Revolutionary and Civil War battle sites; nuclear power plants; and boat landings. Along the way he encounters a cast of characters Twain himself would envy—perplexed fishermen, catfish clean­ers, river rats, and a trio of drug-addled drifters on a lonely boat dock a day’s paddle from the sea. By the time Lane and his companions finally approach the ocean about forty miles north of Charleston, they have to fight the tide and set a furious pace. Through it all, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, Lane is reminded why life and rivers have always been wedded together.

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  Brain Wars - The Scientific...

  Mario Beauregard

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  The brain can be weighed, measured, scanned, dissected, and studied. The mind that we conceive to be generated by the brain, however, remains a mystery. It has no mass, no volume, and no shape, and it cannot be measured in space and time. Yet it is as real as neurons, neurotransmitters, and synaptic junctions. It is also very powerful.—from Brain WarsIs the brain "a computer made of meat," and human consciousness a simple product of electrical impulses? The idea that matter is all that exists has dominated science since the late nineteenth century and led to the long-standing scientific and popular understanding of the brain as simply a collection of neurons and neural activity. But for acclaimed neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., along with a rising number of colleagues and others, this materialist-based view clashes with what we feel and experience every day. In Brain Wars, Dr. Beauregard delivers a paradigm-shifting examination of the role of the brain and mind. Filled with engaging, surprising, and cutting-edge scientific accounts, this eye-opening book makes the increasingly indisputable case that our immaterial minds influence what happens in our brains, our bodies, and even beyond our bodies. Examining the hard science behind "unexplained" phenomena such as the placebo effect, self-healing, brain control, meditation, hypnosis, and near-death and mystical experiences, Dr. Beauregard reveals the mind's capabilities and explores new answers to age-old mind-body questions. Radically shifting our comprehension of the role of consciousness in the universe, Brain Wars forces us to consider the immense untapped power of the mind and explore the profound social, moral, and spiritual implications that this new understanding holds for our future.

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  The Earth - A Very Short...

  Martin Redfern

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  Around thirty years ago, two things happened that were to revolutionize the understanding of our home planet. First, geologists realized that the continents themselves were drifting across the surface of the globe and that oceans were being created and destroyed. Secondly, pictures of the entire planet were returned from space. Suddenly, the Earth began to be viewed as a single entity; a dynamic, interacting whole, controlled by complex processes we scarcely understood.This Introduction explores emerging geological research and explains how new advances in the understanding of plate tectonics, seismology, and satellite imagery have enabled us to begin to see the Earth as it actually is: dynamic and ever changing.

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