Book cover of Diatoms to Dinosaurs: The Size And Scale Of Living Things

Book description

A mouse weighs about one ounce, has a heart rate of 700 beats per minute, a gestation period of 21 days, and lives for less than 3 years. A 5-ton elephant has a heart rate of 30 beats per minute, a 22 month gestation period, a slow metabolic rate and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Diatoms to Dinosaurs as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book is another of those books that made a huge impression on me as a student. It’s also one of the very few popular books that I have kept coming back to over and over throughout my professional career.

Scaling isn’t a natural subject for the popular science treatment, given that so much of the relevant scientific literature revolves around esoteric bickering over the values of exponents, but McGowan does a fantastic job of explaining the physical and physiological principles involved. More importantly, he shows the many ways that an organism’s size affects the way that it lives its…

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Book cover of These Blue Mountains

These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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Separating the true stories from the myths, The Duty of Memory provides a deeper understanding of the diverse motivations that drove ordinary people to join an underground network of French Resistants despite terrible odds and horrifying consequences.

This book takes the reader inside the true story of men and women…

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