Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Superlative: The Biology of Extremes
    Unavailable
    Superlative: The Biology of Extremes
    Unavailable
    Superlative: The Biology of Extremes
    Ebook487 pages5 hours

    Superlative: The Biology of Extremes

    By MATTHEW D. LAPLANTE

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    2019 Foreword Indie Silver Award Winner for Science

    Welcome to the biggest, fastest, deadliest science book you'll ever read.

    The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms.

    For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.

    As it turns out, there’s a lot of value in paying close attention to the “oddballs” nature has to offer.

    Go for a swim with a ghost shark, the slowest-evolving creature known to humankind, which is teaching us new ways to think about immunity. Get to know the axolotl, which has the longest-known genome and may hold the secret to cellular regeneration. Learn about Monorhaphis chuni, the oldest discovered animal, which is providing insights into the connection between our terrestrial and aquatic worlds.  

    Superlative is the story of extreme evolution, and what we can learn from it about ourselves, our planet, and the cosmos. It's a tale of crazy-fast cheetahs and super-strong beetles, of microbacteria and enormous plants, of whip-smart dolphins and killer snakes.

    This book will inspire you to change the way you think about the world and your relationship to everything in it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBenBella Books
    Release dateApr 30, 2019
    ISBN9781948836210
    Author

    MATTHEW D. LAPLANTE

    Matthew D. LaPlante is an associate professor of journalism at Utah State University, where he teaches news reporting, narrative non-fiction writing and crisis reporting. He has reported from more than a dozen nations, including Iraq, Cuba, Ethiopia and El Salvador, and his work has appeared in Washington Post, Los Angeles Daily News, CNN.com, and numerous other publications. He is the coauthor of two books on the intersection of scientific discovery and society, Inheritance with Sharon Moalem and Longevity Plan with John Day, and is currently working with Harvard geneticist David Sinclair on a book about anti-aging research. Superlative is his first solo book.

    Related to Superlative

    Related ebooks

    Biology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      If Bugs Are Sentient, Should We Eat Them?

      Apr 27, 2017

      Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is a restaurant specializing in insects. Stepping inside on a cool June evening in 2014, my friend Stephen Wood and I were immersed in the colors and smells of Oaxaca, Mexi

      12 min read

    • Article

      From the Bottom of the Sea to the Operating Table: How Coral Revolutionized Human Bone Repair.: How coral revolutionized human bone repair.

      Jan 5, 2017

      Corals are marine magicians. As colonies of the tiny ocean organisms grow, they transform the calcium that circulates in seawater into enormous limestone reefs. These reefs—which can extend for more than 1,000 miles and provide homes for crabs, eels,

      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Veteran Scientists Tell Us What Most Surprised Them: Fifty years ago, who knew we’d learn to clone genes and find water on Mars?

      Sep 24, 2015

      Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Aug 17, 2022

      Animals narrate every story in Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House, September 2022). A blue whale searches for his beloved; a starving polar bear hunts a seal among melting Arctic ice. Across the book, an

      3 min read

    • Article

      By the Light of the Moon, the Poles of the Earth: The Remarkable Ways Animals Get Around.: The remarkable ways animals get around.

      Jul 11, 2013

      Back in January, science news was abuzz with reports that the lowly dung-beetle—shellacked trundler of balled-up excreta, stuck with one of nature’s least glamorous jobs—used a majestic method to find its way around: the Milky Way. The critters had a

      10 min read

    • Article

      Edward O.wilson

      Jul 1, 2020

      Edward O.wilson
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Queer Ecology of the Colombian Civil War: Meet the transgendered ecologist helping her country move past years of conflict.

      Dec 8, 2016

      The former Luis Guillermo Baptiste began her transformation into Brigitte in the mid 1990s, when she was part of a cadre of scientists helping to establish the Bogota-based Humboldt Institute, a hybrid public-private biodiversity research foundation.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Root Problem

      Sep 1, 2022

      The Root Problem
      22 min read

    • Article

      Bird’s Eye View

      Dec 19, 2022

      Bird’s Eye View
      1 min read

    • Article

      Why Your Cat Doesn’t Have a Sweet Tooth: Moles don’t see, whales can’t smell, and snakes can’t hear a thing.

      Aug 14, 2014

      Humans are a self-centered lot. We take our senses for granted and generally assume that other creatures possess the same ones we do—sight, hearing, smell, taste, or more complex perceptions such as the ability to tell apart the seasons. But just lik

      5 min read

    • Article

      Mini But Mighty: How Microbes Make The World

      Nov 15, 2019

      A pair of studies published this week expand our understanding of the ocean’s tiniest organisms, underscoring the vital role of the mighty microbe.

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Bog’s Life

      May 15, 2019

      A Bog’s Life
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Hidden Power Laws of Ecosystems: As nature scales, complexity gives way to universal law.

      Oct 29, 2015

      Here’s how to cause a ruckus: Ask a bunch of naturalists to simplify the world. We usually think in terms of a web of complicated interactions among animals, plants, microbes, earth, wind, and fire—what Darwin called “the entangled bank.” Reducing th

      6 min read

    • Article

      Evergreen Ferns

      Oct 12, 2021

      Evergreen Ferns
      4 min read

    • Article

      Sanctuary

      Sep 2, 2022

      Sanctuary
      17 min read

    Reviews for Superlative

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words