Helen Plum Library

"A renowned biochemist's illuminating inquiry into the Krebs cycle and the origins of life. What brings the Earth to life, and our own lives to an end? For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer,...

The author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can't walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers?...

"The notion of a living world is one of humanity's oldest beliefs. Though scorned by scientists in the sixties and seventies, the facts supporting this concept have now become tenets of modern Earth system science, a relatively young field that studies the living and nonliving components of the planet as an integrated whole. Life did not evolve passively in response to its environment, as scientists have long assumed. Instead, it evolved with Earth,...

Key biological terms are defined in a way that all readers can understand in this book that explains the essential concepts of life processes and how living and nonliving things relate to each other. The basics of feeding, respiration, waste, and reproduction, among other important activities that sustain living things, are explained in clear, simple language, with colorful photographs to illustrate them. Non-living things are defined and described,...

In this video lesson, Paul Andersen describes pieces of evidence that Charles Darwin used to support the idea of evolution and his process of natural selection. He begins with the following evidence used in the Origin of Species: artificial selection, biogeography, fossils, and homologies. He finishes with a discussion of DNA and how it can be used to unravel the evolution of life on our planet.--Publisher.

"WHICH CAME FIRST? The chicken or the egg? Simple die-cuts magically present transformation-- from seed to flower, tadpole to frog, caterpillar to butterfly."-- Publisher's website

After surviving horrific conditions in the Maze, Thomas is entrapped, along with nineteen other boys, in a scientific experiment designed to observe their responses and gather data believed to be essential for the survival of the human race. The group has two weeks to cross through the Scorch -- the most burned-out section of the world. And the observers will continuously adjust the variables and stack the odds against them

In this video lesson, Paul Andersen discusses the specifics of phylogenetics. The evolutionary relationships of organisms are discovered through both morphological and molecular data. A specific type of phylogenetic tree, the cladogram, is also covered.--Publisher.

Charles Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. In what is known today as the "Cambrian explosion," 530 million years ago many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin's Doubt Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life -- a mystery that has intensified, not only because...