Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Masao Ito advances a sophisticated new view of the cerebellum’s roles in brain function, explaining how its multiple neuronal machine modules enable humans to unconsciously master motor skills through practice, and suggesting how it may serve implicit thought and cognitive processes that manipulate knowledge—playing a surprising role in intuition, imagination, and hallucination.

From the Back Cover
A New Assessment of the Cerebellum’s Role in Brain Function by One of the Field’s Most Respected Researchers

In The Cerebellum, leading neuroscientist Masao Ito draws on current research to advance a detailed new view of the cerebellum’s multiple roles in brain function.

The cerebellum’s role in coordinating body movement control and facilitating motor skills learning has long been recognized. Ito presents new insights into how it accomplishes these tasks. He explains how the cerebellum assembles numerous neuronal machine modules, each providing implicit learning capabilities—and how these modules enable humans to unconsciously learn motor skills through practice by forming internal models that simulate the control system properties of body parts.

Ito shows how the cerebellum also serves higher brain functions, including implicit components of thought and cognitive processes that manipulate knowledge. In particular, he discusses evidence of the cerebellum’s role in complex mental actions—such as intuition, imagination, hallucination, and delusion—and in supporting the implicit self. Download Now »

Book Description

Bookbinding may well be a dying art in this digital age, but you can still learn how to do it yourself with this easy-to-follow ebook. In fact, you can reverse the course of evolution and convert this particular digital specimen into a durable, hand-stitched book that will last for generations. When you’re finished, this ebook will truly be “hands-on.”

O’Reilly Senior Editor Brian Sawyer takes you through the process with step-by-step instructions and scores of instructive photographs. All you need to bring to the table are a few simple materials—including magazines you’d like to preserve. Discover how simple, unmessy, fun, and satisfying binding books by hand can be.

• Print the pages of this ebook or remove the existing cover from a magazine
• Create signatures and prepare them for stitching
• Glue the spine
• Build and attach the cover boards
• Cover the exterior and interior of the cover boards

About the Author
Brian Sawyer is a Senior Editor for O’Reilly Media, where he manages the Missing Manuals division. He has also served as lead editor for the company’s popular Hacks series, editor for Head First and Make: Books titles, and contributing editor to Craft magazine. When not writing or editing about technology, he uses it to help train for marathons (see Chapter 4 of Best Android Apps). Download Now »

Book Description

Leading neuroscientist Samuel Barondes shares scientific frameworks and tools for improving your intuitions about people, and sizing them up more consciously, systematically, and successfully. He shows how to use the latest research about personality and character to get along better, choose great friends, decide whom to trust, and avoid narcissists and sociopaths.

From the Back Cover
“This pioneering book does for our mental life what the periodic table did for chemistry; it breaks the mind down into elementary constituents and their interactions–thereby transforming personality research into science. In addition to being a rich treasure-trove of insights into human nature, it can potentially enrich your relationships with people. Barondes has written a masterpiece.”
–V.S. Ramachandran, author of Phantoms in the Brain and The Tell-Tale Mind

“We’re a fantastically social species, constantly taking the measure of everyone’s personality. In this wise, enjoyable book, the esteemed biological psychiatrist Sam Barondes considers ways to build up this vital skill. The book is clear, entertaining, and educational, and will not only make you a more adept social primate, but a more self-reflective one as well.”
–Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology, Stanford University; author of A Primate’s Memoir and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers

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Book Description

The Logic of Chance offers a reappraisal and a new synthesis of theories, concepts, and hypotheses on the key aspects of the evolution of life on earth in light of comparative genomics and systems biology. The author presents many specific examples from systems and comparative genomic analysis to begin to build a new, much more detailed, complex, and realistic picture of evolution. The book examines a broad range of topics in evolutionary biology including  the inadequacy of natural selection and adaptation as the only or even the main mode of evolution; the key role of horizontal gene transfer in evolution and the consequent overhaul of the Tree of Life concept;  the central, underappreciated evolutionary importance of viruses; the origin of eukaryotes as a result of endosymbiosis; the concomitant origin of cells and viruses on the primordial earth; universal dependences between genomic and molecular-phenomic variables; and the evolving landscape of constraints that shape the evolution of genomes and molecular phenomes.

From the Back Cover
An Outline of a Fundamentally New Evolutionary Synthesis Reflecting Key Advances in Genomics, Systems Biology, and Biological PhysicsIn this ambitious book, Eugene V. Koonin illuminates the gamut of randomness and regularity that is at the heart of life.

Pointing the way beyond Modern Synthesis, Koonin brings together new data and concepts in an attempt to achieve a far deeper understanding of the interplay between chance and necessity that drives biological evolution. Download Now »

Book Description

James A. Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution. Shapiro demonstrates why traditional views of evolution are inadequate to explain the latest evidence, and presents a compelling alternative. His information- and systems-based approach integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and mobile genetic elements, and points toward an emerging synthesis of physical, information, and biological sciences.

From the Back Cover
“Shapiro has written a stimulating, innovative manuscript that surely Darwin would have liked.”
—Sidney Altman, Yale University; Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, 1989

“Based on a long and highly competent personal experience in science and his novel insights into biological functions, the author has reached views of biological evolution that can reveal to a wide, interested readership how the living world co-evolves with the environment through its intrinsic powers.”
—Werner Arber, Professor Emeritus, University of Basel, Switzerland; Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, 1978

“Professor Shapiro’s offering is the best book on basic modern biology I have ever seen. As far as I can tell, the book is a game changer.”
—Carl Woese, University of Illinois; discoverer of Archaea, the third realm of life; National Medal of Science 2000 Download Now »

Book Description

Leading medical genetics scholar Moyra Smith reviews current prospects and progress in medical genetics and genomics, arising from the growth of gene mapping and Human Genome sequencing. She addresses recent investigations into human origins, migrations, and diversity; psychiatric diseases; Alzheimer’s, Parkinsonism, and ALS; protein misfolding; gene-environment interactions; mRNA; epigenetics, and much more

From the Back Cover
An Up-to-Date Assessment of Recent Advances in Human Genetics, Human Variation,and Gene-Related Disease

In Investigating the Human Genome, leading medical genetics scholar Moyra Smith reviews current and recent work in genetics and genomics to assess progress in understanding human variation and the pathogenesis of common and rare diseases in which genetics plays a role.

Smith provides an exceptional overview of the most important biomedical progress arising from the greatly increased genetic information base generated by gene mapping and the sequencing of the complete Human Genome. She addresses diverse topics associated with human genetics and genomics, ranging from psychiatric and late-onset illness to early human history.

Coverage includes

• Genetic research on human origins, migrations, and population diversity
• Genome architecture and sequence variation in health and disease Download Now »