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The wild life of our bodies : predators, parasites, and partners that shape who we are today / by Dunn, Rob.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-278) and index.pt. 1. Who we all used to be. The origins of humans and the control of nature -- pt. 2. Why we sometimes need worms and whether or not you should rewild your gut. When good bodies go bad (and why) ; The pronghorn principle and what our guts flee ; The dirty realities of what to do when you are sick and missing your worms -- pt. 3. What your appendix does and how it has changed. Several things the gut knows and the brain ignores ; I need my appendix (and so do my bacteria) -- pt. 4. How we tried to tame cows (and crops) but instead they tamed us, and why it made some of us fat. When cows and grass domesticated humans ; So who cares if your ancestors sucked milk from aurochsen? -- pt. 5. How predators left us scared, pathos-ridden and covered in goosebumps. We were hunted, which is why all of us are afraid some of the time and some of us are afraid all of the time ; From flight to fight ; Vermeij's law of evolutionary consequences and how snakes made the world ; Choosing who lives -- pt. 6. The pathogens that left us hairless and xenophobic. How lice and ticks (and their pathogens) made us naked and gave us skin cancer ; How the pathogens that made us naked also made us xenophobic, collectivist, and disgusted -- pt. 7. The future of human nature. The reluctant revolutionary of hope.1190L
Subjects: Microbial ecology.; Human body; Human ecology.; Human evolution.; Host-parasite relationships.; Mutualism (Biology); Predation (Biology);
Available copies: 11 / Total copies: 12
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The wild life of our bodies : predators, parasites, and partners that shape our evolution / by Dunn, Rob.;
Includes bibliographical references.1190L
Subjects: Microbial ecology.; Human ecology.; Human evolution.; Host-parasite relationships.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Every living thing : man's obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys / by Dunn, Rob.; Wilson, Edward O.(CARDINAL)138801;
Beginnings. What we all used to know -- Common names -- The invisible world -- Fogging (the tree of life). The apostles -- Finding everything -- Finding an ant-riding beetle -- Roots. Dividing the cell -- Grafting the tree of life -- Symbiotic cells on the seafloor -- Origin stories -- Other worlds. Looking out -- To squeeze life from a stone -- The wrong elephant? -- What remains." ... traces the history of human discovery, from the establishment of classification in the eighteenth century to today's attempts to find life in space"--
Subjects: Biology; Life sciences.; Science;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Delicious : the evolution of flavor and how it made us human / by Dunn, Rob,author.; Sanchez, Monica(Anthropologist),author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.Prologue: Eco-evolutionary gastronomy -- Tongue-tied -- The flavor-seekers -- A nose for flavor -- Culinary extinction -- Forbidden fruits -- On the origin of spices -- Cheesy horse and sour beer -- The art of cheese -- Dinner makes us human."A savory account of how the pursuit of delicious foods shaped human evolution."--
Subjects: Flavor.; Perception; Smell; Taste;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The hidden kingdom of fungi : exploring the microscopic world in our forests, homes, and bodies / by Seifert, Keith A.,author.; Dunn, Rob,writer of foreword.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."For readers of Entangled Life and The Hidden Life of Trees comes an illuminating account of the "invisible" fungi that share our world: from the air we breathe to the dust beneath our feet. The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi traces the intricate connections between fungi and all life on Earth to show how these remarkable microbes enrich our lives: from releasing the carbon in plants for the benefit of all organisms to transmitting information between trees, to producing life-changing medicine, to adding umami flavor and B vitamins to our food. Divided into sections, each one exploring an environment where fungi live, this enthralling, science-backed book ventures into our homes, bodies, farms, and forests to profile the fungi that inhabit these environments, most of them invisible to the naked eye. Along the way, the author, the esteemed career mycologist Keith Seifert, explains the latest research into where these fungi came from: how yeast, lichens, slimes, and molds evolved and adapted over millions of years. And he shows us that, surprisingly, fungi share almost a quarter of human genes. We may have more in common with yeast and slime than we think ... But not all fungi are good for us. In fact, fungal diseases lead to over 1 million deaths each year and more than a quarter of our food goes to waste. How can we strike a better balance with our microbial cousins, both for their sake and ours? The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi urges us to better understand our relationship with fungi--and to plan our future with them in mind--while revealing their world in all its beautiful complexity"--
Subjects: Fungi; Fungi.;
Available copies: 11 / Total copies: 13
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Never out of season : how having the food we want when we want it threatens our food supply and our future / by Dunn, Rob,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 265-310) and index.A banana in every bowl -- An island like ours -- The perfect pathological storm -- Escape is temporary -- My enemy's enemy is my friend -- Chocolate terrorism -- The meltdown of the chocolate ecosystem -- Prospecting for seeds -- the siege -- The grass eaters -- Henry Ford's jungle -- Why we need wild nature -- The Red Queen and the long game -- Fowler's ark -- Grains, guns, and desertification -- Preparing for the flood -- Epilogue: What do I do?Biologist Rob Dunn takes readers on a tour of our precarious dependence on ten species ranging from bananas to chickens--all of which are just a bug or a virus away from a collapse.
Subjects: Food crops.; Food consumption.; Food supply.;
Available copies: 6 / Total copies: 7
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Never home alone : from microbes to millipedes, camel crickets, and honeybees, the natural history of where we live / by Dunn, Rob,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.Prologue: homo indoorus -- Wonder -- The hot spring in the basement -- Seeing in the dark -- Absence as a disease -- Bathing in a stream of life -- The problem with abundance -- The far sighted ecologist -- What good is a camel cricket? -- The problem with cockroaches is us -- Look what the cat dragged in -- Gardening the bodies of babies -- The flavor of biodiversity.Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us--prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again.
Subjects: Biology; Natural history;
Available copies: 23 / Total copies: 26
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The call of the honeyguide : what science tells us about how to live well with the rest of life / by Dunn, Rob,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-330) and index.How rethinking our relationships with other species can help us reimagine the future of humankind. In the woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa, sometime deep in our species' past, something strange happened: a bird called out, not to warn others of human presence, but to call attention to herself. Having found a beehive, that bird-a honeyguide-sought human aid to break in. The behavior can seem almost miraculous: How would a bird come to think that people could help her? Isn't life simply bloodier than that? As Rob Dunn argues in The Call of the Honeyguide, it isn't. Nature is red in tooth and claw, but in equal measure, life works together. Cells host even smaller life, wrapped in a web of mutual interdependence. Ants might go to war, but they also tend fungi, aphids, and even trees. And we humans work not just with honeyguides but with yeast, crops, and pets. Ecologists call these beneficial relationships mutualisms. And they might be the most important forces in the evolution of life. We humans often act as though we are all alone, independent from the rest of life. As The Call of the Honeyguide shows, we are not. It is a call to action for a more beneficent, less lonely future.
Subjects: Human-animal relationships; Mutualism (Biology); Biology; Natural history;
Available copies: 6 / Total copies: 12
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The man who touched his own heart : true tales of science, surgery, and mystery / by Dunn, Rob,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-364) and index.The human heart -- The bar fight that precipitated the dawn of heart surgery -- The Prince of the Heart -- When art reinvented science -- Blood's orbit -- Seeing the thing that eats the heart -- The rhythm method -- Frankenstein's monsters -- Atomic cows -- Lighter than a feather -- Mending the broken heart -- War and fungus -- The perfect diet -- The beetle and the cigarette -- The book of broken hearts -- The evolution of broken hearts -- Sugarcoating heart disease -- Escaping the laws of nature -- The future science of the heart."The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries-which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived-to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion-effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most"--
Subjects: Cardiology; Heart; Heart; Heart;
Available copies: 13 / Total copies: 16
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A natural history of the future : what the laws of biology tell us about the destiny of the human species / by Dunn, Rob,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.Blindsided by life -- Urban Galapagos -- The inadvertent ark -- The last escape -- The human niche -- The intelligence of crows -- Embracing diversity to balance risk -- The law of inseparability -- Humpty Dumpty and the robotic sex bees -- Living with evolution -- Not the end of nature -- Conclusion: No longer among the living."Biologist Rob Dun grew up listening to stories of the Mississippi River, how it flooded his grandfather's town of Greenville, swallowing up the townsfolk and leaving behind a muddy wasteland. Years later, Dunn discovered the cause of the great deluge. The Army Corps of Engineers had tried to straighten the river, cutting off its meandering oxbows in order to allow for the easy passage of boats. They had tried to bend nature to their own design. But as Dunn argues in A Natural History of the Future, nature has its own set of rules, and no amount of human tampering can rewrite them. We might think that we can meet the challenges of global warming by manipulating nature with our technology--and even that we can live without non-human life--but as Dunn shows, we can't. We not only rely on the natural world for food, but we need its microbes to carry out the most basic bodily functions. The rules of life, Dunn explains, are all-encompassing, governing where species are likely to abound, the inevitable arms race between humans and our predators, and even our own ignorance about nature. Collectively, these rules shed light on the future of life and our destiny, revealing where our visions for cities, roads, schools, and society at large run afoul of nature's inescapable dictates. The future we have been planning is one in which we try to hold back life. As Dunn argues, we cannot: Surviving or reversing climate change and other ecological catastrophes isn't just a question of reducing our carbon footprint with clean technologies or protecting ecosystems. It's not about "fixes." It's about working with nature, and so learning to live by the rules that entails. Drawing on topics as diverse as how microbes acquired during birth affect our health and what species might inhabit the crust of the Earth, Dunn reveals the surprising complexities of the natural world and the interconnectedness of life itself. Along the way, he offers plenty of simple lessons in how we can, individually and collectively, through environmental policy, make the lifestyle changes necessary to ensure our own species' survival. At once hopeful and practical, A Natural History of the Future offers a vision of our future in which humans and the natural world coexist symbiotically"--
Subjects: Nature; Human ecology.; Environmental sociology.; Ecological forecasting.; Environmental policy.;
Available copies: 10 / Total copies: 11
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