TITLE:  Adapt: How Humans Are Tapping into Nature's Secrets to Design and Build a Better Future

TITLE:  Amina Khan

FORMAT:  Hardcover

ISBN-13:  9781250060402

____________________________

DESCRIPTION:

"Amina Khan believes that nature does it best. In Adapt, she presents fascinating examples of how nature effortlessly solves the problems that humans attempt to solve with decades worth of the latest and greatest technologies, time, and money. Humans are animals too, and animals are incredibly good at doing more with less.

If a fly’s eye can see without hundreds of fancy lenses, and termite mounds can stay cool in the desert without air conditioning, it stands to reason that nature can teach us a thing or two about sustainable technology and innovation. In Khan’s accessible voice, these complex concepts are made simple. There is so much we humans can learn from nature’s billions of years of productive and efficient evolutionary experience. This field is growing rapidly and everyone from architects to biologists to nano-technicians to engineers are paying attention. Results from the simplest tasks, creating velcro to mimic the sticking power of a burr, to the more complex like maximizing wind power by arranging farms to imitate schools of fish can make a difference and inspire future technological breakthroughs.

Adapt shares the weird and wonderful ways that nature has been working smarter and not harder, and how we can too to make billion dollar cross-industrial advances in the very near future."

_____________________________

REVIEW:

An interesting, but brief, popular overview of some new and/or improved technologies that resulted (or are in development) from studying nature (usually animals).  Topics include material science, mechanics of movement, architecture of systems, and sustainability.  Any scientific or engineering concepts that crop up are nicely and simply explained.  An easy and informative read, though I have come across some of the examples covered in other books.  Some diagrams/photographs/illustrations would really be useful in books like this.

This brick of a book purports to be an interdisciplinary explanation of human behavior, drawing from biology, psychology, and sociology, and everything from primate studies to well-known works in various fields. It’s big, at 717 pages of actual text followed by references; it’s broad; and as such it’s a little bit simplistic. Even at this size, there’s not quite room to develop all of the material. The first half or so of the book is more focused on the “hard” science, beginning with how neurons communicate with each other, and working its way up through hormones, genes, brain development through childhood and adulthood and how this is affected by trauma, and the evolution of species. The second half is more focused on psychology: us vs. them dichotomies, moral decisionmaking, the causes of violence, and whether the criminal justice system really makes sense when all human behavior is ultimately driven by biology. (Sapolsky argues no, but I’m not so sure. Where would we be as a species, or as individuals, if we all just shrugged our shoulders and gave in to ideas of biological determinism?)

I certainly learned a lot from this book, which contains a ton of information presented in a way that is understandable to a non-scientist – though I struggled a bit with some of the early chapters. It provides a strong synthesis and framework for understanding information from biology and social sciences. That said, on the subjects that I did know something about, it seemed a little simplified. Fair enough; entire books have been written on subjects that comprise a single chapter here. As other reviewers have suggested, Sapolsky perhaps accepts too many psychological studies uncritically, without discussing psychology’s replication crisis, in which dozens of famous studies, when run again using the exact same methods and parameters, failed to produce the same headline-worthy results. That said, in general Sapolsky seems to take a fair approach to his material, presenting and evaluating multiple viewpoints in areas that have generated controversy. His writing is readable given the subject matter, and there’s a goofy-professor personality behind it that occasionally shines through. I wouldn’t take everything here as gospel – and I suppose we never should, since new scientific discoveries regularly require us to reevaluate what we thought was true – but the book did leave me a little more educated than I was before.

These were all gotten as kindle freebies.

The best two are the one about Werewolves and the Catacombs because they offer the must in the terms of facts, and move beyond the general.

The other three aren't bad, but short, simple, and general.

@XpressoReads, @hotchoc84 (Charlotte), @TM_Franklin, #Adult, #Fantasy, #Romance, 4 out of 5 (very good)

A mysterious chest. 

A terrifying vision. 

Are their newfound powers enough to take down an unspeakable evil?

Chloe Blake’s campus rental has it all: a retro Victorian vibe, a beautiful picture window, and a perfect view of Ethan Reynolds—the guy who broke her heart and lives across the street. But when she sees disturbing visions of death slide across the panes, she’s convinced she’s glimpsed into Ethan’s future. She’ll stop at nothing to change fate and save him… even if it means everyone will think she’s crazy.

Wren Galloway has lost track of all the crummy cities she’s lived in. Plagued by nightmares, Wren wakes in a cold sweat with the vision of a nearby Victorian house still in her mind… and a strong urge to seek out the powerful talisman calling to her from its attic.

Drawn together by an ancient force, Chloe and Wren must work together to discover the house’s secrets and unlock their hidden powers to take down the shadowy specter that haunts their premonitions and leaves death in its wake.

Super Humans is the first book in The New Super Humans, an edge-of-your-seat contemporary fantasy series. If you like original magic systems, startling suspense, and fast-paced action, then you’ll love TM Franklin’s riveting thrill ride.

**Portions of this book were previously published in WINDOW and The Talisman Chronicles. It has been significantly re-written with substantial additional content.

A breakthrough discovery has been made by researchers on a brand-new shape named as Scutoids. Until last week, the medical as well as geometrical science was unaware of such a shape. It’s neither a cube nor a sphere but does resemble to them at some extent. While studying epithelial cells, researcher came up with a discovery of scutiod cells which build blocks of embryos that further form the linings of various organs, even of skin. The research has also explained why these cells are tightly packed, and has complex enclosed structures.

Let’s see how it looks like

Origin of life has always been a mystery to the man-kind, which further raised a query on how a single-cell turned out to be multi-celled organism. But to concern most is the shape acquired by cells while and after the division and packing process. An individual cell twists and turns in accordance to the shape of whole very efficiently. This packing challenge is a geometrical problem depending on the unknown factors which leads a cell to form designated shape. Javier Buceta, biophysicist at Lehigh University and one of the Scutoid’s discoverers briefed it as a prism with a zipper. As per reported to Nature Communications by research biologist, the cells were believed to be an almost replica of the shape of frusta, as in Roman Arch. But here, it was not the same case. The most concerning matter was to be presence of scutoids everywhere and in every living being. This scutoid shape has played crucial role in building blocks for the multi-cellular organisms. It’s sort of odd to say, but without this new shape the complex life might never have seen the light. Meanwhile, the name scutoid was coined by researchers due to its very much resemblance with the shape of scutellum in insects like beetles in the Cetoniidae sub-famiy.

Whereas, an entry at Wikipedia described the shape as a geometric solid between two parallel surfaces—‘the boundary of each surfaces is a polygon, and the vertices of the two end polygons are joined by either by a curve or a Y-shaped connection.’

Discovering Scutoids

During an embryonic stage, the tissues start to form into organs by constant folding and bending. At first, scientists believed that to remain tightly packed, they have to be in bottle-shaped i.e. column-shaped. Latter with the help of advanced computer simulations, scientists came to conclusion that the new shape is more complex than they have thought. Before getting into the geometry of shape by hand, they used a computer model to predict most efficient cell shape i.e. scutoids which perfectly connects with the fellow cells in curved as well as flat layers.

Obtained computerised image was unexpectedly quite different than it was assumed before. The results were clearly indicating that the shape should be slightly similar to the prism but with a bizarre triangular surface on one of the edges. This strange new shape shows the perfect fitting of cells with each other. In order to justify this, researchers closely studied fruit fly salivary glands and Zebrafish cells through computer imaging & microscopy, and results were astonishing. These cells were indeed shaped like the predicted ones. The new shape was unknown even to the mathematics, which clarified that the shape was a new discovery itself.

Scutoids discovery will help to comprehend the fundamentals of morphogenesis, developmental biology, and also, how tissue generation and regeneration processes actually works.

Read more info..