Dr. Michael Gershon has devoted his career to understanding the human bowel (the stomach, esophagus, small intestine, and colon). His 30 years of research have led to an extraordinary rediscovery: Nerve cells in the gut that act as a brain. This "second brain" can control our gut all by itself. Our two brains - the one in our head and the one in our bowel - must cooperate.

You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of them could be made without the essential component of emotion. It has long been held that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as is rational thinking.

Just over 125,000 years ago, humanity was going extinct until a dramatic shift occurred—Homo sapiens started tracking the tides in order to eat the nearby oysters. Before long, they’d pulled themselves back from the brink of extinction. The human brain, and its evolutionary journey, is unlike anything else in history. In A History of the Human Brain, Bret Stetka takes listeners through that far-reaching journey. He also tackles the question of where the brain will take us next, exploring the burgeoning con­cepts of epigenetics and new technologies like CRISPR.

Cheese puffs. Coffee. Sunscreen. Vapes. George Zaidan reveals what will kill you, what won’t, and why - explained with high-octane hilarity, hysterical hijinks, and other things that don’t begin with the letter H. Ingredients offers the perspective of a chemist on the stuff we eat, drink, inhale, and smear on ourselves. Apart from the burning question of whether you should eat that Cheeto, Zaidan explores a range of topics.

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

How do neurons turn into minds? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S. Gazzaniga puts the latest research in conversation with the history of human thinking about the mind, giving a big-picture view of what science has revealed about consciousness.

Victoria Stilwell, America's favorite no-nonsense trainer, has rehabilitated some of the world's most difficult dogs - and now she's revealing her scientifically proven behavioral training secrets for you to use at home. Victoria's all-new training guide shows how positive reinforcement is more effective than other methods: by changing the way your dog thinks, feels, and learns, you can actually encourage your dog to want to behave.

Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution? The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito. Driven by surprising insights and fast-paced storytelling, The Mosquito is the extraordinary untold story of the mosquito’s reign through human history.

Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually...English? Matt Siegel sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths”. Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths - and realities - of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world (vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities.

Aging - not cancer, not heart disease - is the underlying cause of most human death and suffering. The same cascade of biological changes that renders us wrinkled and gray also opens the door to dementia and disease. We work furiously to conquer each individual disease, but we never think to ask: Is aging itself necessary? Nature tells us it is not: There are tortoises and salamanders who are spry into old age and whose risk of dying is the same no matter how old they are.

Science is how we understand the world. Yet failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless—or, worse, badly misleading. Such errors have distorted our knowledge in fields as wide-ranging as medicine, physics, nutrition, education, genetics, economics, and the search for extraterrestrial life. As Science Fictions makes clear, the current system of research funding and publication not only fails to safeguard us from blunders but actively encourages bad science—with sometimes deadly consequences.

Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman explores these questions and more - from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang.

In this first-ever English translation of The Weather Detective, Peter Wohlleben uses his long experience and deep love of nature to help decipher the weather and our local environments in a completely new and compelling way. Analyzing the explanations for everyday questions and mysteries surrounding weather and natural phenomena, he delves into a new and intriguing world of scientific investigation.

Did you know that oatmeal actually isn't a healthy way to start the day? That milk doesn't build bones, and eggs aren't the devil? In Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, Dr. Hyman looks at every food group and explains what we've gotten wrong, revealing which foods nurture our health and which pose threats. He also explains food's crucial role in functional medicine and how food systems and policies affect our environmental and personal health.

Because of our highly processed diet, pesticides, and overuse of antibiotics, our guts are now missing so many of the good bacteria that we require to be healthy. As a result, many of us have lost control over our health, weight, mood, and even behavior. With cutting-edge research, Dr. Davis connects the dots between gut health and modern ailments such as SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), a silent and profound epidemic, which affects one out of three people and is responsible for an astounding range of human health conditions.

Most of us have heard of gluten - a protein found in wheat that causes widespread inflammation in the body. Americans spend billions of dollars on gluten-free diets in an effort to protect their health. But what if we’ve been missing the root of the problem? In The Plant Paradox, renowned cardiologist Dr. Steven Gundry reveals that gluten is just one variety of a common, and highly toxic, plant-based protein called lectin.

If a piece of individually wrapped cheese retains its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed our children? Former New York Times reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that takes her to research labs, food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening - and sometimes disturbing - account of what we're really eating.

Throughout the years, dental health has often been characterized as a reflection of our overall health, where bad oral health results from issues with other parts of our body. But what if we flipped the paradigm? What if we thought about dental health as the foundation for our physical health as a whole?

People often joke about "going with their gut" but the truth is that this part of your body exercises an astonishing degree of control over your mood, hunger, and general health. Written with the latest research on the microbiome - the alien bacteria that lives in our guts - The Clever Gut Diet also clearly explains what goes on inside your stomach and intestines every day. Discover up-to-the-date science on hunger hormones and learn how our "second brain" communicates with the rest of the body, shaping our appetite and immune system.

In an engaging tour of the science and history of cheese, Michael Tunick explores the art of cheese making, the science that lies underneath the deliciousness, and the history behind how humanity came up with one of its most varied and versatile of foods. Dr. Tunick spends his everyday deep within the halls of the science of cheese, as a researcher who creates new dairy products, primarily, cheeses.

In The Microbiome Solution, Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a preeminent gastroenterologist, explains how the standard Western diet and our super-sanitized lifestyles are starving our microbiomes, depleting the "good bugs" that are crucial for keeping us healthy, and encouraging overgrowth of exactly the wrong types of bacteria, which can leave us vulnerable to a host of autoimmune and chronic health conditions.

Millions of people suffer from autoimmunity whether they know it or not. The root cause of most weight gain, brain and mood problems, and fatigue, autoimmunity can take years - or even decades - for symptoms and a clear diagnosis to arise. Through years of research, Dr. Tom O'Bryan has discovered that autoimmunity is actually a spectrum, and many people experiencing general malaise are already on it.

Science is beginning to understand that our thinking has a deep and complicated relationship with our eating. Our thoughts before, during, and after eating profoundly impact our food choices, our digestive health, our brain health, and more. Yet most of us give very little thought to our food beyond taste and basic nutritional content.

Can urban farms reduce neighborhood crime? These may not sound like typical questions for a family physician to consider, but in Farmacology, Daphne Miller, MD, ventures out of her medical office and travels to seven innovative family farms around the country on a quest to discover the hidden connections between how we care for our bodies and how we grow our food. Miller also seeks out the perspectives of noted biomedical scientists and artfully weaves in their research, along with stories from her own practice. Farmacology offers a profound new approach to healing.

Recent cutting-edge research shows that human intestinal microbiota influences metabolism, appetite, energy, hormones, inflammation, and insulin resistance. Because gut microflora plays a central role in weight management, losing weight is much more than cutting calories, fat, or carbs. When the trillions of live bacteria in our digestive tract - the gut microbiome - are balanced, excess pounds melt away, and we feel revitalized.

With scientific research, her own chemistry background, and the traditional diets of our not-so-distant ancestors as her guides, Dee McCaffrey casts new light on an age-old wisdom: Eating foods in their closest-to-natural forms is the true path to sustained weight loss and, in fact, the remedy for almost any health problem.

In Mycophilia, accomplished food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone examines the role of fungi as exotic delicacy, curative, poison, and hallucinogen, and ultimately discovers that a greater understanding of fungi is key to facing many challenges of the 21st century.

Interesting anecdotes and engaging tales make science fun, meaningful, and accessible. Separating sense from nonsense and fact from myth, these essays cover everything from the ups of helium to the downs of drain cleaners and provide answers to numerous mysteries, such as why bug juice is used to color ice cream and how spies used secret inks. Mercury in teeth, arsenic in water, lead in the environment, and aspartame in food are discussed.

More than 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, according to an Institute of Medicine report released in 2011. For many, chronic pain is part of an autoimmune disease, but all too often doctors turn to the same solution: painkilling drugs. But all of this medication simply isn't helping. As Dr. Peter Osborne, the leading authority on gluten sensitivity and food allergies, has found, the real solution often lies in what you eat.

Does losing weight and staying healthy feel like a battle? Well, it's really a war. Your enemies are your own genes, backed by millions of years of evolution, and the only way to win is to outsmart them. From the renowned surgeon and founder of Gundry MD, this revolutionary book shares the health secrets other doctors won't tell you.