In 2000, Tom Zoellner purchased a diamond engagement ring and proposed. His girlfriend said "Yes" and then suddenly, walked out of his life and made Tom the owner of a used engagement ring. Instead of hitting the self-help shelves of his local bookstore, he hit the road travelling to diamond mines in Africa, Canada, India, Brazil, and Russia to discover the true worth of this s...(展开全部)

In 2000, Tom Zoellner purchased a diamond engagement ring and proposed. His girlfriend said, "yes" and then, suddenly, walked out of his life making Tom the owner of a used engagement ring. Instead of hitting the self-help shelves of his local bookstore, he hit the road travelling to diamond mines in Africa, Canada, India, Brazil and Russia to discover the true worth of this sh...(展开全部)

Elisabetta Lattanzio Illy was born in Trieste and received her degree in International Economics from Trieste University. She has been a journalist since 1999 and writes regularly for BMM (a quarterly magazine on culture and lifestyle), Monsieur, Spirito diVino, and I Viaggi del Sole (a monthly supplement of Il Sole 24 Ore).

A luminous guide to how the radical new science of counterfactuals can reveal the full scope of our universe There is a vast class of properties, which science has so far neglected, that relate not only to what is true - the actual - but to what could be true: the counterfactual. This is the science of can and can't. A pioneer in the field, Chiara Marletto explores the extraord...(展开全部)

For decades after identifying the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98% of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose. Yet recently researchers have discovered variations and modulations in this junk DNA that underwrite a numb...(展开全部)

For decades after the identification of the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98 percent of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose. But researchers have recently discovered variations and modulations in this junk DNA that ...(展开全部)

For decades, 98 per cent of our DNA was written off as 'junk' on the grounds that it did not code for proteins. From rare genetic diseases to Down's Syndrome, from viral infections to the ageing process, only now are the effects and the vital functions of these junk regions beginning to emerge. Scientists' rapidly growing knowledge of this often controversial field has already ...(展开全部)

In The Botany of Desire, Pollan explores the concept of co-evolution, specifically of humankind's evolutionary relationship with four plants — apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes — from the dual perspectives of humans and the plants. He uses case examples that fit the archetype of four basic human desires, demonstrating how each of these botanical species are selectively gr...(展开全部)

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankinds’s most basic yearnings — and by doing so made themselves indispens...(展开全部)