Weird Nature

Weird Nature PDF Author: John Downer
Publisher: Willowdale, Ont. : Firefly Books
ISBN: 9781552975862
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The companion book to the six-part Discovery Channel series, Weird Nature is an astonishing exploration of nature's strangest behavior. The ingenuity of all kinds of animals is celebrated including the flying dragon or draco whose membrane wings resemble early designs for aircraft wings, spiny lobsters in Florida who form a "mass conga line" when moving to deeper waters and the Wallace tree frog whose large webbed hands and feet allow it to glide as far forward as it drops vertically. These animals and many more are featured in this revealing and often amusing look at nature. Chapters include: Fantastic feeding -- the many different ways nature finds food for fuel including worms that eat themselves. Devious defenses -- to avoid being eaten, animals have developed an array of defenses including porcupine fish that inflate into spiny balls and mantis shrimps with a punch that can knock a hole in glass. Marvelous motion -- ingenious ways of moving around including flattened snakes and flying fish. Extraordinary equipment -- tools for enhancing animal lives like the Mallee fowl that has a thermometer in its bill. Strange structures -- the bizarre assortment of animal created buildings like the palm leaf tents made by fruit bats and the Namib spider that builds a Stonehenge circle around its burrow. Weird and weirder -- social interactions including courtship and mating.

Weird Nature

Weird Nature PDF Author: John Downer
Publisher: Willowdale, Ont. : Firefly Books
ISBN: 9781552975862
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book

Book Description
The companion book to the six-part Discovery Channel series, Weird Nature is an astonishing exploration of nature's strangest behavior. The ingenuity of all kinds of animals is celebrated including the flying dragon or draco whose membrane wings resemble early designs for aircraft wings, spiny lobsters in Florida who form a "mass conga line" when moving to deeper waters and the Wallace tree frog whose large webbed hands and feet allow it to glide as far forward as it drops vertically. These animals and many more are featured in this revealing and often amusing look at nature. Chapters include: Fantastic feeding -- the many different ways nature finds food for fuel including worms that eat themselves. Devious defenses -- to avoid being eaten, animals have developed an array of defenses including porcupine fish that inflate into spiny balls and mantis shrimps with a punch that can knock a hole in glass. Marvelous motion -- ingenious ways of moving around including flattened snakes and flying fish. Extraordinary equipment -- tools for enhancing animal lives like the Mallee fowl that has a thermometer in its bill. Strange structures -- the bizarre assortment of animal created buildings like the palm leaf tents made by fruit bats and the Namib spider that builds a Stonehenge circle around its burrow. Weird and weirder -- social interactions including courtship and mating.

Weird Nature

Weird Nature PDF Author: Virginia Loh-Hagan
Publisher: Cherry Lake
ISBN: 1634729838
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Take a look at the world's weirdest nature stories--from fire rainbows to ghost trees. These stories are too strange to be made up! Written with a high interest level to appeal to a more mature audience and a lower level of complexity with clear visuals to help struggling readers along. Considerate text includes tons of fascinating information and wild facts that will hold the readers' interest, allowing for successful mastery and comprehension. A table of contents, glossary with simplified pronunciations, and index all enhance comprehension.

The WEIRDest People in the World

The WEIRDest People in the World PDF Author: Joseph Henrich
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710457
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020 A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020 A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world. Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Beyond Weird

Beyond Weird PDF Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022675510X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Since Niels Bohr said this many years ago, quantum mechanics has only been getting more shocking. We now realize that it’s not really telling us that “weird” things happen out of sight, on the tiniest level, in the atomic world: rather, everything is quantum. But if quantum mechanics is correct, what seems obvious and right in our everyday world is built on foundations that don’t seem obvious or right at all—or even possible. An exhilarating tour of the contemporary quantum landscape, Beyond Weird is a book about what quantum physics really means—and what it doesn’t. Science writer Philip Ball offers an up-to-date, accessible account of the quest to come to grips with the most fundamental theory of physical reality, and to explain how its counterintuitive principles underpin the world we experience. Over the past decade it has become clear that quantum physics is less a theory about particles and waves, uncertainty and fuzziness, than a theory about information and knowledge—about what can be known, and how we can know it. Discoveries and experiments over the past few decades have called into question the meanings and limits of space and time, cause and effect, and, ultimately, of knowledge itself. The quantum world Ball shows us isn’t a different world. It is our world, and if anything deserves to be called “weird,” it’s us.

Strange Natures

Strange Natures PDF Author: Nicole Seymour
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094875
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of "natural" categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937

A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937 PDF Author: Jonathan Newell
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786835460
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Offers a new critical perspective on the weird that combines two ways of looking at weird and cosmic horror. Mingling of nausea and knowledge, this book connects pulp horror with metaphysical insight, offering an innovative approach aesthetics and metaphysics. Combines recent speculative philosophy and affect theory.

DuneCraft Weird and Wacky Plantlife

DuneCraft Weird and Wacky Plantlife PDF Author: DuneCraft
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486793869
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
Explore the exotic plant life featured in the grow-it-yourself kits manufactured by DuneCraft. Full-page images to color and fascinating captions profile the moonflower, fly trap, money plant, and many others.

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Peculiar Pairs in Nature

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Peculiar Pairs in Nature PDF Author: Sami Bayly
Publisher: Lothian Children's Books
ISBN: 9780734420046
Category : Animal behavior
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED CBCA BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2022 - EVE POWNALL AWARD Come along for another fresh take on the animal kingdom from bestselling author and illustrator, Sami Bayly. Discover 60 of the most peculiar pairs in nature and learn how plant and animal species rely on each other for their survival. Whether it be a rare tick living in the fur of a pygmy possum, a stick insect feasting and hiding out amongst the Melaleuca or a handfish laying its eggs on a sea squirt, incredible natural relationships deserve to be explored and celebrated. Investigating all types of relationships, from symbiotic to parasitic, this is an eye-opening guide to the natural world. Many species steer clear of those who are different, but the animals and plants in this book have evolved to form relationships with some of the most unlikely partners, and they couldn't live without them. This gorgeous hardcover book is illustrated in exquisite detail by award-winning author and illustrator, Sami Bayly. The perfect companion to The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Ugly Animals and The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Dangerous Animals.

Unusual Creatures

Unusual Creatures PDF Author: Michael Hearst
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452104670
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 111

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Book Description
"Introduces the reader to a wealth of extraordinary life forms"-- P. [4] of cover.

Weird Animals

Weird Animals PDF Author: Steve Parker
Publisher: Gareth Stevens Publishing LLLP
ISBN: 1482449986
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42

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Book Description
What could a male Jackson’s chameleon need three horns for besides fighting? Actually, this odd-looking animal has horns to scare predators and attract females more than defense! Some animals’ bodies can lead readers to question the purpose of their weird features. This book has the answers they’re looking for! From how the echidna uses its spines to keep predators away to how the hornbill uses its large beak, the main content features some of nature’s most interesting bodies. Colorful, up-close photographs and concise fact boxes introduce readers to many kinds of animal habitats, behaviors, and life cycles.