The Curious Observer's Guide to Slime Molds of UC Santa Cruz and Beyond PDF Download

Author: Carrie Niblett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781547264599
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
In this self-described love letter to slime, naturalist, student and slime mold enthusiast Carrie Niblett provides background information, photographs, diagrams and 22 species descriptions of slime molds that can be found on the UC Santa Cruz campus and in terrestrial ecosystems around the globe. You can find slime molds occupying damp logs and creeping over leaf litter steps away from the classroom but until you picked up this book, these strange and beautiful organisms may have been hidden in plain sight. Let this guide be your companion as you take a peek into the curious world of slime molds.

Author: Carrie Niblett
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781725169425
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
In this self-described love letter to slime, naturalist, student and slime mold enthusiast Carrie Niblett provides background information, photographs, diagrams and 22 species descriptions of slime molds that can be found on the UC Santa Cruz campus and in terrestrial ecosystems around the globe. You can find slime molds occupying damp logs and creeping over leaf litter steps away from the classroom but until you picked up this book, these strange and beautiful organisms may have been hidden in plain sight. Let this guide be your companion as you take a peek into the curious world of slime molds.

Author: Kelly Brenner
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
ISBN: 1680515748
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Beautifully illustrated collection of naturalist projects anyone can do at home Features 20 projects with clear descriptions of materials and tools, plus a few bonus activities Includes step-by-step instructions with charming, informative illustrations Tips for troubleshooting and taking the project to the next level The Naturalist at Home emphasizes hands-on exploration with easy outdoor projects designed to help naturalists observe and study everything from invertebrates to mushrooms to mammals. Critically-acclaimed writer and naturalist Kelly Brenner developed these projects based on real techniques used by naturalists and scientists in the field. Easy to adapt, they are suitable for naturalists at all levels of experience and expertise. These projects bridge the gap between sophisticated science experiments and easy nature activities and between reading about nature and experiencing it in a real and tangible way. They are simple to carry out, and naturalists can repurpose items they have at home, find them at a thrift store, or purchase inexpensive tools and materials. Detailed descriptions of organisms, along with the author’s hand-drawn illustrations, help naturalists visualize what they may discover.

Author: Steven L. Stephenson
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 9780881924398
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book identifies all the species one is likely to encounter, with extensive information on their structural features, distribution, and ecological associations. Superbly illustrated, including keys, it is an introduction to their biology as well as a field guide. This book is only available through print on demand. All interior art is black and white.

Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892367857
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

Author: Jasper Sharp
Publisher: Alchimia
ISBN: 9781903254783
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This lavishly-illustrated companion to the feature documentary The Creeping Garden is a layperson's entry point into the strangely fascinating world of myxomycetes, or plasmodial slime moulds. Neither animal, plant nor fungi, these alien-looking single-celled organisms are all around us in the natural world, shifting in form throughout distinct phases in their life cycle, for the most part invisible to the naked eye, but strangely beautiful in their foraging or reproductive stages. They creep around forests and grasslands across the globe almost imperceptibly, with an agency all of their own that some have described as intelligent. Overlooked for years by natural historians and the general public at large, only recently have small groups of scientists, artists and visionaries begun to find within their intriguing behavioural patterns extraordinary metaphors that seem to belong to the world of science fiction, inspiring practical applications such as powerful computing devices, transport network designs, robot controllers and even music... The Creeping Garden takes a closer look at this mysterious life form and the diverse and curious array of research it has inspired. Providing an insight into the modus operandi of the film's makers and the perceptual world of the organism, it brings the reader into a unique and irrational encounter in which time and space are magnified and intelligence redefined.

Author: Susanne Wedlich
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1685890210
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A groundbreaking, witty, and eloquent exploration of slime that will leave you appreciating the nebulous and neglected sticky stuff that covers our world, inside and out. Slime. The very word seems to ooze oily menace, conjuring up a variety of unpleasant associations: mucous, toxins, reptiles, pollutants, and other unsavory viscous semi-liquid substances. Yet without slime, the natural world would be completely unrecognizable; in fact, life itself as we know it would be impossible In this deft and fascinating book, journalist Susanne Wedlich takes us on a tour of all things slimy, from the most unctuous of science fiction monsters to the biochemical compounds that are the very building blocks of life. Along the way she shows us what slime really means, and why slime is not something to fear, but rather something to ... embrace.

Author: Alan Sokal
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191623342
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy. Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. 'Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.' The book also includes a hugely illuminating annotated text of the Hoax itself, and a reflection on the furore it provoked.

Author: Merlin Sheldrake
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0525510338
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems. “Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of An Immense World ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday When we think of fungi, we likely think of mushrooms. But mushrooms are only fruiting bodies, analogous to apples on a tree. Most fungi live out of sight, yet make up a massively diverse kingdom of organisms that supports and sustains nearly all living systems. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel, and behave. In the first edition of this mind-bending book, Sheldrake introduced us to this mysterious but massively diverse kingdom of life. This exquisitely designed volume, abridged from the original, features more than one hundred full-color images that bring the spectacular variety, strangeness, and beauty of fungi to life as never before. Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They are metabolic masters, earth makers, and key players in most of life’s processes. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms—and our relationships with them—are changing our understanding of how life works. Winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Royal Society Science Book Prize, and the Guild of Food Writers Award • Shortlisted for the British Book Award • Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize

Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224153
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
Now on Netflix as a 4-part documentary series! “Pollan keeps you turning the pages . . . cleareyed and assured.” —New York Times A #1 New York Times Bestseller, New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018, and New York Times Notable Book A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.