Cremonia Stg101 Gitar Sehpası Gitar Standı ( Bağlama İçin Uygundur ) EPub e-kitap Bir kitabı indir

Nicholas Burdick _icholas_urdick — Gran novela: de lo fantástico a lo íntimo, y de lo íntimo a lo fantástico. Muy bien narrada, con un derroche de imaginación.

Gencer Kurt gencerkurt8d67 — I thought I was a fairly educated consumer of food until I read this book. It made me want to get my doctorate in food science so that I could design the experiments the students ran in the book! Now I notice so many things, like the number of adjectives used to describe an entree on a menu, the size of portions, etc.

Noor Alsuwaidi nayoooyfa4e — How should I call this gem? a feast for my imagination? verbalized Animal Planet? David Attenborough's genius? Natalie Angier is such a charming, witty and imaginative writer that I both envy her and would probably kiss the ground she walks on if I was a guy. The way she anthropomorphizes these animal stories makes it a sheer delight to read and leaves me giggling for hours (how do I draw a smiley face here?). I learn so much random stuff about scorpions, bees, dolphins, hyenas, cockroaches, worms, swans, prairie voles that it’s probably an invaluable source of party jokes for the next 10 years of my life. I have to agree with her that given animal behaviours such as child rearing or ritualized mating, it’s hard to imagine that mammals or even insects don’t have any emotions or consciousness. Interestingly, many behaviours are distorted by human sentiment rather than based on any sort of reality. For example, humans probably put most birds to shame with their promiscuity because there is almost no such thing as loyalty and monogamy in the animal kingdom. And the debauchery is mostly sneakily committed by females. Barn swallows sneak off to mate with a male with longer and more symmetrical tail or a honeybee queen can have an orgy with up to 20 zealous drones nearby. So to win the battle, a male often retaliates by reducing his attention to her babies/ humiliating or increasing his fearsome manliness by growing massive testicles. And altruistic behaviours in many social species aren’t really that altruistic at all. Nonbreading adults have subplots of their own, viewing the season helping out with their relatives raise kids as some sort of internship in human term, so some day they will fly away and raise their own family with much more experience. Or they can turn some of the kids into their underlings to wage wars with other birds and protect their homes. And alas, now I can finally forgive the women in the UK study that preferred men with flash cars because rampant female shallowness or obsession with looks isn’t that bad at all, in fact it serves very reasonable evolutionary functions. Many birds choose their mates based on the shape of the tail because that gives an inkling of how hygienic he is (well actually I just made that up) or many parasites he’s bearing . Or stickleback fish choose their mates based on color, same reason. Frogs base their choice on the opera skill of the suitor. Scorpion flies put symmetrical wings on top of their list. All this ensures females their offspring can have better parasite resistance and healthy genes. The male-female relationship in Animalland has a wide spectrum of dominance. Deceptively cute dolphins or baboons turn out to be pretty gangsterish when it comes to raiding rival gangs to compete for females. They treat females pretty brutally as well, they chase her, bite her and terrorize her into submission. But female will power still wins occasionally. Dolphins set up their sisterhood network to protect themselves from male dominance. Beetles demand protein bribes from their mates or more extreme, female scorpions gobble their mate altogether as a postclimax snack. The chapter on parasites and sex is just WOWing. Parasites are probably one of the reasons why most species have sex, to develop resistance to them. Parasites are just cunning little gits that feed on other animals’ sanity. For instance, parasite worms can prompt a mouse to become hyperactive and scoot through the field like nuts and get eaten by a bird. The bird provides a safe haven for the parasite’s larvae. Other worms cause a mouse to become sluggish and get stalked down by some carnivorous beast, either way, the parasite wins. My favorite story is probably this one: “a liver fluke known as a lancet begins life as an egg laid in the intestines of a sheep. It and the other eggs are expelled when the sheep defecates and are then eaten by land snails that feed on sheep feces. Inside the snails the eggs hatch and develop into larvae, which are again voided by the host, this time wrapped in a slimy packet that ants find irresistible. Once ingested by ants, the lancet larvae divide and conquer, some moving into the ants intestines, where they develop into a new infectious stage, and a few invading the ant’s brain. These brain worms so disturb the ant that early in the morning and late in the evening, it climbs to the tip of a blade of grass just at the moment when sheep in be grazing. Safely inside the belly of a sheep, the larvae from the ant’s abdomen mature, mate, and lay eggs, starting the entire rococo cycle over again.” At this stage, if that doesn’t draw a wow on your mouth, you’re probably infested by parasites in your brain. Too many fascinating stories to quote here, like how she explains menstruation or relates all the random things to benefits to humans like learning worms’ nerve systems, female hyena’s excessive androgen level and infertility in humans, cheetah’s DNA diversity and adaptation. Now I can totally appreciate why helminthologists spend their lives studying worms, orthinologists birds, parasitologists parasites and blah-blah-blahlogists biology in general. And I must thank Natalie Angier for saving me the effort to dive in the tedious scary world of scientific journals, and describing nature so vividly and inspiringly. So definitely check out this book, amazing biology stories and an enchanting play with the English language.

Eunis Cool euniscool — This book starts off slow as all the separate stories are being introduced. Once you get past the introductions, this book is hard to put down. This is an awesome book!