Other books that might interest you

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  At the Water's Edge - A Walk in...

  John Lister-Kaye

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  “This wonderful collection of wildlife encounters will make anyone want to pull on their boots and re-discover the world on our doorsteps.”—Kate Humble, TV host & author 
   
  For the last thirty years, naturalist John Lister-Kaye has taken the same circular walk from his home deep in a Scottish glen up to a small hill loch. Each day brings a new observation or an unexpected encounter—a fragile spider’s web, an osprey struggling to lift a trout from the water or a woodcock exquisitely camouflaged on her nest—and every day, on his return home, he records his thoughts in a journal. 
   
  Drawing on this lifetime of close observation, At The Water’s Edge encourages us to look again at the nature around us, to discover its wildness for ourselves and to respect and protect it. 
   
  “A delight.”—Country Life 
   
  “This is a quiet but rousing call to action for anyone who loves the natural world and wants to help preserve it.”—Sunday Telegraph 
   
  “I’d put it in the hands of anyone who ever enjoyed a day out in the fresh air, even those who don’t think they like the countryside: they’ve got to be seduced by this prose.”—BBC Radio Scotland 
   
  “Beautifully observed and rich in description, the book sounds too with an urgent voice, warning of what will be lost to us should we continue to take too little action to protect the natural world.”—Esther Woolfson, author of Field Notes from a Hidden City 
   
  “A thoughtful analyst of the evolutionary interplay between human being and animal.”—The Times

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  Practice the Pause - Jesus'...

  Caroline Oakes

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  These days, many of us live in a state of overreactive fight-or-flight response and chronic stress. The demands of modern life pull us in all directions and can often put the meaningful connections in our lives at risk—connections to our deepest selves, to others, and even to God.But there is good news. New developments in brain science have recently proven that an intentional practice of pausing for a few minutes of meditation, prayer, or other contemplative practice actually rewires our brain in ways that make us calmer, less reactive, and better able to see the bigger picture.In Practice the Pause, spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes offers easy-to-understand explanations of how this new brain science is confirming what every spiritual tradition has been telling us for millennia: by practicing the pause, we become more self-aware and better able to understand others. We become more "God aware." With a refreshing focus on the Eastern Christian understanding of Jesus as a master of wisdom, Oakes shines a spotlight on Jesus's own centering pause practice as a transformative path for personal and social change. We learn that even a seven-second pause practice can move us beyond the fight-or-flight responses of our ego in our daily lives and actually equip us to cultivate the common good in the world.

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  Quality infrastructure for smart...

  International Renewable Energy...

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  Market expansion for renewable mini-grids depends on establishing trustworthy quality infrastructure (QI). Smart technologies to integrate solar and wind power require international and national QI.

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  Little Book of Green Tips

  David Curnock

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  The Little Book of Green Tips is written by David Curnock and is a 96-page hardback book packed full of colour images. It is a useful guide to ways that consumers can improve their own carbon footprint by recycling and other useful tips to improve and adopt a more green lifestyle. With government targets aimed at reducing the amount of rubbish that we put into the earth this great Little Book is an easy resource to dip in and out of.

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  Handprints on Hubble - An...

  Kathryn Sullivan

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  The first American woman to walk in space recounts her experience as part of the team that launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of the universe. It has, among many other achievements, revealed thousands of galaxies in what seemed to be empty patches of sky; transformed our knowledge of black holes; found dwarf planets with moons orbiting other stars; and measured precisely how fast the universe is expanding. In Handprints on Hubble, retired astronaut Kathryn Sullivan describes her work on the NASA team that made all of this possible. Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, recounts how she and other astronauts, engineers, and scientists launched, rescued, repaired, and maintained Hubble, the most productive observatory ever built. 
   Along the way, Sullivan chronicles her early life as a "Sputnik Baby," her path to NASA through oceanography, and her initiation into the space program as one of "thirty-five new guys." (She was also one of the first six women to join NASA's storied astronaut corps.) She describes in vivid detail what liftoff feels like inside a spacecraft (it's like "being in an earthquake and a fighter jet at the same time"), shows us the view from a spacewalk, and recounts the temporary grounding of the shuttle program after the Challenger disaster. Sullivan explains that "maintainability" was designed into Hubble, and she describes the work of inventing the tools and processes that made on-orbit maintenance possible. Because in-flight repair and upgrade was part of the plan, NASA was able to fix a serious defect in Hubble's mirrors?leaving literal and metaphorical "handprints on Hubble."

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  Rethinking Consciousness - A...

  Michael S. A. Graziano

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  Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary.
   
  Then some animals evolved covert attention - a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory.
   
  Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it - a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness.
   
  In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.

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