Other books that might interest you

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  Losing Earth - A Recent History

  Nathaniel Rich

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  By 1979, we knew nearly everything we understand today about climate change — including how to stop it. Over the next decade, a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists, led by two unlikely heroes, risked their careers in a desperate, escalating campaign to convince the world to act before it was too late. Losing Earth is their story and ours.The New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to Nathaniel Rich’s groundbreaking chronicle of that decade, which became an instant journalistic phenomenon — the subject of news coverage, editorials, and conversations all over the world. In its emphasis on the lives of the people who grappled with the great existential threat of our age, it made vivid the moral dimensions of our shared plight.Now expanded into audiobook form, Losing Earth tells the human story of climate change in even richer, more intimate terms. It reveals, in previously unreported detail, the birth of climate denialism and the genesis of the fossil-fuel industry’s coordinated effort to thwart climate policy through misinformation propaganda and political influence. The audiobook carries the story into the present day, wrestling with the long shadow of our past failures and asking crucial questions about how we make sense of our past, our future, and ourselves.Like John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, Losing Earth is the rarest of achievements: a riveting work of dramatic history that articulates a moral framework for understanding how we got here and how we must go forward.

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  Types of Rocket Propulsion and...

  Martin K Ettington

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  There is lots of interest these days in space exploration. After fifty years we are looking at going back to the Moon to build a base and early planning for a manned trip to Mars. After that, further exploration and settlement of the Solar System will be on the table. One of the main limiting factors for all of this space exploration are the types of rockets and rocket engines available to get there. Current rockets in usage are mainly chemical rockets with fairly low specific impulses. We will need a lot more powerful options to reach all of these destinations. This book is about the history of rocket engine development, what we are using today, and some options for the future. We also discuss some exciting thinking about how we could build interstellar and faster than light space propulsion for exploring the nearest stars too.

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  Maea te Toi Ora: Maori Health...

  Te Kani Kingi

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  In Maea te Toi Ora: Māori Health Transformations Māori clinicians and researchers explore the relationship between Māori culture and Māori mental health. The six contributing authors in the collection are Simon Bennett, Mason Durie, Hinemoa Elder, Te Kani Kingi, Mark Lawrence and Rees Tapsell and are all well-known in the mental health field. Each discusses aspects of Maori and indigenous health and the importance of culture to diagnosis, patient history, understanding causes, treatment and assessment of outcomes. Along with a discussion of current research into and knowledge about health and culture, the authors provide case studies from their own experiencesof working with Maori to restore well-being.

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  Better Never to Have Been - The...

  David Benatar

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  Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence. Thus, if they ever do reflect on whether they should bring others into existence—rather than having children without even thinking about whether they should—they presume that they do them no harm. Better Never to Have Been challenges these assumptions. David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence. Drawing on the relevant psychological literature, the author shows that there are a number of well-documented features of human psychology that explain why people systematically overestimate the quality of their lives and why they are thus resistant to the suggestion that they were seriously harmed by being brought into existence. The author then argues for the "anti-natal" view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about fetal moral status yield a "pro-death" view about abortion. Although counter-intuitive for many, that implication is defended, not least by showing that it solves many conundrums of moral theory about population.

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  The Voyage of Sorcerer II - The...

  J. Craig Venter, David Ewing Duncan

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  Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world's oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II, a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter traveled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within.In The Voyage of Sorcerer II, Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued—of plant-like bacteria that get their energy from the sun, proteins that metabolize vast amounts of hydrogen, and microbes whose genes shield them from ultraviolet light. The result was a massive library of millions of unknown genes, thousands of unseen protein families, and new lineages of bacteria that revealed the unimaginable complexity of life on earth. Yet despite this exquisite diversity, Venter encountered sobering reminders of how human activity is disturbing the delicate microbial ecosystem that nurtures life on earth. In the face of unprecedented climate change, Venter and Duncan show how we can harness the microbial genome to develop alternative sources of energy, food, and medicine that might ultimately avert our destruction.

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  The View from the Vue

  Larry Karp

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  “We called it THE VUE, and without a doubt, that was the most complimentary nickname Bellevue Hospital ever had.” So begins The View from the Vue, an “entertaining, colorful recall” (Publishers Weekly) of life a half-century ago at New York City’s medical court of last resort.   Between 1959 and 1965, Dr. Larry Karp served as medical student, intern, and resident physician at Bellevue. During these six years, he came to know and understand the people who wended their way through the dingy hallways and roach-infested subterranean passages, and inhabited the sparsely furnished wards of the fabulous hospital whose origins date back to 1811. It’s not surprising that Dr. Karp has never been able to forget The Vue. Writing in a style both human and humorous, he recalls some of the astonishingly funny and dramatic events he lived through, involving bizarre patients and grotesque working conditions. In the process, he gives us a clear picture of what it was like at Bellevue in the early sixties . . . for both doctors and patients.

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