Publisher: IRENA
Renewable-based “green” hydrogen will be crucial to achieve net-zero emissions. This report offers guidelines on how to kickstart it at national and regional levels.
This volume deals with one of the most understudied aspects of everyday life in Russian society. Its main heroes are the providers of goods and services to whom people turn for healthcare instead of official medical institutions. A wide range of agents is described—from network marketing companies to 'folk' journals on health as well as healers, complementary medicine specialists, and religious organizations. Krasheninnikova’s book is based on rich empirical observations and avoids both positive and critical assessment of the analyzed phenomena. Her investigation pays particular attention to the legal, social, and economic status of informal healthcare providers. She demonstrates that these agents tend to flourish in bigger towns rather than in small settlements, where public healthcare is lacking. The study reveals the important role of institutions that are generally not related to alternative medicine, such as pharmacies, libraries, and church shops. The result is a vivid and thorough introduction to the world of self-medication and alternative healing in contemporary Russia. A special emphasis was made on the flexibility of boundaries between formal and informal healthcare due to the evolution of rules and regulations.Show book
A “concise and utterly enlightening” look at why we can’t wrap our minds around climate change (Publishers Weekly). Are we deranged? Award-winning essayist and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? The Great Derangement examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to current modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable; they are automatically consigned to genres like science fiction. In the writing of history, too, the crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications, but the carbon economy is a tangled story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action, and that limitation comes at great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time, and “makes the case that climate solutions can’t be left to scientists, technocrats, and politicians” (Los Angeles Review of Books). “Perhaps the most penetrating cultural critic of a new age defined by climate change and the strange, inadequate, and often self-deluding ways we process its transformations in our storytelling.”—New York Magazine “Resistance to the grim realities of climate change is so widespread that the crisis barely figures in literary fiction, notes writer Amitav Ghosh…The solution, he argues, lies in collective action as well as scientific and governmental involvement.”—NatureShow book
“A comprehensive and lively book about the people and events that transformed Antarctica into an international laboratory for science.”—Raimund E. Goerler, Chief Archivist/Byrd Polar Research Center of The Ohio State University In Deep Freeze, Dian Olson Belanger tells the story of the pioneers who built viable communities, made vital scientific discoveries, and established Antarctica as a continent dedicated to peace and the pursuit of science, decades after the first explorers planted flags in the ice. In the tense 1950s, even as the world was locked in the Cold War, U.S. scientists, maintained by the Navy’s Operation Deep Freeze, came together in Antarctica with counterparts from eleven other countries to participate in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On July 1, 1957, they began systematic, simultaneous scientific observations of the south-polar ice and atmosphere. Their collaborative success over eighteen months inspired the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which formalized their peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge. Still building on the achievements of the individuals and distrustful nations thrown together by the IGY from mutually wary military, scientific, and political cultures, science prospers today and peace endures. Belanger draws from interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official records to weave together the first thorough study of the dawn of Antarctica’s scientific age. Deep Freeze offers absorbing reading for those who have ventured onto Antarctic ice and those who dream of it, as well as historians, scientists, and policy makers. “[A] highly informative and readable narrative account of perhaps the single most striking international scientific endeavor of the twentieth century.” —The Polar Record “Deep Freeze, based on countless interviews and painstaking research, is a timely and gripping account.” —John C. Behrendt, author of Innocents on the IceShow book
Plants play a critical role in how we experience our environment. They create calming green spaces, provide oxygen for us to breathe, and nourish our senses. In The Nature of Plants, ecologist and nursery owner Craig Huegel demystifies the complex lives of plants and provides listeners with an extensive tour into their workings.Beginning with the importance of light, water, and soil, Huegel describes the process of photosynthesis and how best to position plants to receive optimal sunlight. He explains why plants suffer from overwatering, what essential elements plants need to flourish, and what important soil organisms reside with them. Listeners will understand the difference between friendly and hostile bacteria, fungi, and insects.Sections on plant structure and reproduction focus in detail on major plant organs—roots, stems, and leaves—and cover flowering, pollination, fruit development, and seed germination. Huegel even delves into the mysterious world of plant communication, exploring the messages conveyed to animals or other plants through chemical scents and hormones.Show book
Almir Narayamoga Suruí, the Amazonian tribal chieftain of the indigenous Suruí people, is a leader in the fight to save the rainforest not only for the preservation of his land and people, but for the Earth's and humanity's survival as well. Joining forces with such high-tech corporations as Apple and Google Earth, Suruí has become a guardian of his people and a global activist, despite death threats and million dollar bounties on his head. A recipient of the Global Citizen Award in 2012, Suruí has calculated the direct cost of the loss of our rainforests—"the lungs of the Earth"—in terms of the total amount of Co2 that their destruction would release into the atmosphere, and the monetary loss that this would entail, and by using this carbon deficit formula, has leased access to pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies who have joined him in the stewardship of these endangered lands, their flora, fauna, and people.Show book
Numbers are integral to our everyday lives and factor into almost everything we do. In this Very Short Introduction, Peter M. Higgins, a renowned popular-science writer, unravels the world of numbers, demonstrating its richness and providing an overview of all the number types that feature in modern science and mathematics. Indeed, Higgins paints a crystal-clear picture of the number world, showing how the modern number system matured over many centuries, and introducing key concepts such as integers, fractions, real and imaginary numbers, and complex numbers. Higgins sheds light on such fascinating topics as the series of primes, describing how primes are now used to encrypt confidential data on the internet. He also explores the infinite nature of number collections and explains how the so-called real numbers knit together to form the continuum of the number line.Written in the fashion of Higgins' highly popular science paperbacks, Numbers accurately explains the nature of numbers and how so-called complex numbers and number systems are used in calculations that arise in real problems.Show book
