How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
By: Philip Ball
4.28
Format: 552 pages, Hardcover
A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to en…
Want to Read $ 21.99"The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming—from conception to the grave."-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
"The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but then that creates a new this. It’s for this reason that life can only be understood as a dynamic process of becoming—from conception to the grave."-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
"I don’t anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive capabilities such as metabolism and replication. Those latter two attributes might be necessary, but they are means to an end: they’re not really what life is about."-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
"I don’t anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive capabilities such as metabolism and replication. Those latter two attributes might be necessary, but they are means to an end: they’re not really what life is about."-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
If you liked the nature plot in How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by Philip Ball , here is a list of 10 books like this:
1. The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life
By: Nick Lane
3.86
Format: 336 pages, Paperback
The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies and cities. Yet there's a black hole at th… read more
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2. Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
By: Robert M. Sapolsky
4.25
Format: 528 pages, Hardcover
One of our great behavioral scientists, the bestselling author of Behave, plumbs the depths of the … read more
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- biology
- nonfiction
- science
- audiobook
"I’m being diplomatic. Many readers will know of the “replication crisis"-Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
"Obviously, imposing these classifications on determinism, free will, and moral responsibility is wildly simplified. A key simplification is pretending that most people have clean “yes"-Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
"You cannot decide all the sensory stimuli in your environment, your hormone levels this morning, whether something traumatic happened to you in the past, the socioeconomic status of your parents, you…"-Robert M. Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
3. A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
By: Max Solomon Bennett
4.46
Format: 432 pages, Hardcover
Equal parts Sapiens , Behave, and Superintelligence , but wholly original in scope, A Brief History… read more
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- biology
- nonfiction
- science
4. Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
By: Tom Chivers
4.17
Format: 384 pages, Hardcover
A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from t… read more
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- nonfiction
- science
5. Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
By: Edmund Conway
4.52
Format: 512 pages, Hardcover
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed… read more
Want to ReadSimilar categories in Edmund Conway's Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- nonfiction
- science
"You can get anything you want from anywhere in the world at a bargain price, but don't [whatever you do] expect to understand how it was made or how it got to you."-Edmund Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
"Brothers and sisters,’ said the man. ‘I want to tell you this. The greatest thing on earth is to have the love of God in your heart, and the next greatest thing is to have electricity in your house.’…"-Edmund Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
"To say that concrete is everywhere is hardly an exaggeration. Despite the fact that we only began mass producing this mixture of sand, aggregates and cement just over a century ago, there are now mor…"-Edmund Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
"A few years ago some geologists sifted through the data [and] estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount …"-Edmund Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
6. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
4.28
Format: 473 pages, Hardcover
Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences and the 2023 Chautauq… read more
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- audiobook
- biology
- nonfiction
- nature
- science
7. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
By: Nick Lane
4.04
Format: 400 pages, Hardcover
What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been domina… read more
Want to Read $ 9.99Similar categories in Nick Lane's Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- science
- biography
- biology
- nonfiction
- nature
- audiobook
"Almost the only thing we know for sure about consciousness is that it is, so to speak, soluble in ether, chloroform and a variety of other solvents ..."-Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
"Core metabolism has changed little in part because it was never powered down in its four-billion-year history. The genes are custodians of this flame, but without the flame life is – dead."-Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
"Keen to progress the work on photosynthesis, Lawrence hired Melvin Calvin, a colleague from the Manhattan Project, immediately after the war. The story has it that on the day of the Japanese surrende…"-Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
"Putting terms aside, we’ll see that the ancient biosynthetic Krebs cycle was fixing CO2 a billion years before rubisco and the evolution of photosynthesis in the cyanobacterial ancestors of plant chl…"-Nick Lane, Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death
8. The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
By: Zoë Schlanger
4.37
Format: 304 pages, Hardcover
Award-winning environment and science reporter Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popu… read more
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- science
- biology
- nonfiction
- science nature
- nature
- audiobook
9. Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)
By: Salman Khan
3.74
Format: 272 pages, Hardcover
From the founder of Khan Academy, the first book written for general audiences on the AI revolution… read more
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- science
- nonfiction
- audiobook
10. The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works
By: Helen Czerski
4.23
Format: 446 pages, Hardcover
A scientist’s exploration of the "ocean engine"―the physics behind the ocean’s systems―and why it m… read more
Want to Read $ 15.44Similar categories in Helen Czerski's The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- science
- biology
- nonfiction
- science nature
- nature
- audiobook
11. Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
By: Lisa Kaltenegger
4.08
Format: 288 pages, Hardcover
Riveting and timely, a look at the research that is transforming our understanding of the cosmos in… read more
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- audiobook
- nonfiction
- science nature
- nature
- science
12. Hoe migratie echt werkt
By: Hein de Haas
4.43
Format: 520 pages, Paperback
Migratie-expert Hein de Haas vertelt het ware verhaal over migratie en de effecten ervan. Al jar… read more
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- science
- nonfiction
- audiobook
13. Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA
By: Neil Shubin
4.14
Format: 267 pages, Hardcover
In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, … read more
Want to Read $ 12.99Similar categories in Neil Shubin's Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- nature
- science
- biology
- nonfiction
- science nature
- genetics
- audiobook
14. Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality
By: Venki Ramakrishnan
4.08
Format: 320 pages, Hardcover
"Utterly fascinating." —Bill Bryson A groundbreaking exploration of the science of why and how we a… read more
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- audiobook
- biology
- nonfiction
- genetics
- science
15. The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes
By: Paul Halpern
3.65
Format: 320 pages, Hardcover
Our books, our movies—our imaginations—are obsessed with extra dimensions, alternate timelines, and… read more
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- science
- nonfiction
- audiobook
16. The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life
By: Alfonso Martinez Arias
4.05
Format: 383 pages, Kindle Edition
"An ingenious argument" (Kirkus) for a "novel thesis" (Publishers Weekly) that cells, not DNA, hold… read more
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- biology
- genetics
- nonfiction
- nature
- science
17. The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets
By: Thomas R. Cech
4.37
Format: 304 pages, Hardcover
A Nobel Prize–winning scientist reveals biology’s most transformative achievements in decades―a Dou… read more
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- biology
- nonfiction
- nature
- science
18. Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
By: Matt Strassler
4.34
Format: 384 pages, Hardcover
A theoretical physicist takes us on an awe-inspiring journey from relativity to the Higgs field, sh… read more
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- nonfiction
- nature
- science
19. How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
By: Philip Ball
4.28
Format: 552 pages, Hardcover
A cutting-edge new vision of biology that will revise our concept of what life itself is, how to en… read more
Want to Read $ 21.99Similar categories in Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- nature
- science
- biography
- biology
- academic
- nonfiction
- science nature
- genetics
- audiobook
"The growth and maintenance of living things like us is a delicate (but also robust) dance of cause and effect, cascading up and down the hierarchy of scales in space and time. This leads to that, but…"-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
"I don’t anticipate a consensus any time soon on the question of how to define life, but it seems to me that cognition provides a much better, more apt way to talk about it than invoking more passive …"-Philip Ball, How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
20. Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War
By: Raj Shah
4.15
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover
A riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon—the Defense Innovation Unit, also known… read more
Want to Read $ 12.99Similar categories in Raj Shah's Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War book and Philip Ball's How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
- science
- nonfiction
- audiobook
