Лучшие книги Дженнифер Акерман

На протяжении веков люди умаляли таланты своих пернатых собратьев, считая их «безмозглыми», движимыми только инстинктами и способными лишь на простейшие ментальные процессы. Сегодня наука показала: это не так. Птицы принимают сложные навигационные решения, поют на региональных диалектах и используют орудия труда. Они обманывают и манипулируют. Подслушивают. Целуются, чтобы утешить друг друга. Дарят подарки. Учат и учатся. Собираются у тела умершего собрата. И даже скорбят… И делают все это, имея крошечный мозг размером с грецкий орех! В книге «Эти гениальные птицы» автор исследует недавно открытые таланты пернатых. Путешествуя по…

Знаете ли вы, что происходит в вашем организме, когда вы просыпаетесь и засыпаете, едите, занимаетесь спортом? Даже если знаете, наверняка вас удивят многие открытия, сделанные учеными в последние десять лет. О них главным образом и рассказывает американская журналистка в своей научно-популярной книге.

For millennia, owls have captivated and intrigued us. Our fascination with these mysterious birds was first documented more than thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet Cave paintings in southern France. With their forward gaze and quiet flight, owls are often a symbol of wisdom, knowledge, and foresight. But what does an owl really know? And what do we really know about owls? Though our fascination goes back centuries, scientists have only recently begun to understand in deep detail the complex nature of these extraordinary birds. Some two hundred sixty species of owls exist today, and they reside on every continent except Antarctica, but they are far more difficult to find and study than other birds because they are cryptic, camouflaged, and mostly active in the dark of night.

Jennifer Ackerman illuminates the rich biology and natural history of these birds and reveals remarkable new scientific discoveries about their brains and behavior. She joins scientists in the field and explores how researchers are using modern technology and tools to learn how owls communicate, hunt, court, mate, raise their young, and move about from season to season. We now know that the hoots, squawks, and chitters of owls follow sophisticated and complex rules, allowing them to express not just their needs and desires but their individuality and identity. Owls duet. They migrate. They hoard their prey. Some live in underground burrows; some roost in large groups; some dine on black widows and scorpions.

Ackerman brings this research alive with her own personal field observations about owls and dives deep into why these birds beguile us. What an Owl Knows is an awe-inspiring exploration of owls across the globe and through human history, and a spellbinding account of their astonishing hunting skills, communication, and sensory prowess. By providing extraordinary new insights into the science of owls, What an Owl Knows pulls back the curtain on the nature of the world’s most enigmatic group of birds.

For a stretch of three years in the 1990s, I lived in the historic town of Lewes, Delaware, just a mile or two from Cape Henlopen, an enchanting scimitar of sand that curves into the Delaware Bay.

A radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds — how they live and how they think.

“There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” This is one scientist’s pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They’re also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own–deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.

Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of–well–birdness: A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they’ll stab their nestmates to death. Birds that give gifts and birds that steal, birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves, birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call–and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter.

Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It’s what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.

On average, we spend five years of our lives suffering from colds. Some are like mice, timid and annoying; others like dragons, accompanied by body aches and deep misery. Ah-Choo! explains just what a cold is, how it works, and whether it’s really possible to “fight one off.” Scientists call this the Golden Age of the Common Cold for good reason. Americans suffer up to a billion colds each year, resulting in 40 million days of missed work and school and 100 million doctor visits. Also, over the past decade we’ve learned much more about what cold viruses are, what they do to the human body, and how symptoms can be addressed. This ode to the odious cold sifts through the chatter about treatments—what works, what doesn’t, and what can’t hurt. It dispels myths, such as susceptibility to colds reflects a weakened immune system. And it tracks current research, including work at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, a world-renowned center of cold research studies, where the search for a cure continues.

Знаете ли вы, что происходит в вашем организме, когда вы просыпаетесь и засыпаете, едите, занимаетесь спортом? Даже если знаете, наверняка вас удивят многие открытия, сделанные учеными в последние десять лет. О них главным образом и рассказывает американская журналистка в своей научно-популярной книге.