In this Very Short Introduction, Prof Lord John Krebs provides a brief history of human food, from our remote ancestors 3 million years ago to the present day. By looking at the four great transitions in human food - cooking, agriculture, processing, and preservation - he considers a variety of questions, including why people like some kinds of foods and not others; how your senses contribute t…
Many children and adults experience considerable difficulty producing or understanding a spoken language despite having adequate hearing levels. Some of these persons may benefit from learning a full and genuine sign language, such as one of the sign languages used by members of a Deaf1 community. They may acquire a substantial vocabulary of signs and learn to combine them into complex s…
The International Space Station offers a valuable platform and environment for cell biology investigations, novel discoveries and innovation in a microgravity environment. Areas of opportunity include tissue culture studies, tissue engineering research using 3-D tissue models, biopharmaceutical production, host microbe interactions, host-toxicology interactions, and host-drug sensitivity and re…
In this 7th edition of his award-winning Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, John Storey has extensively revised the text throughout. As before, the book presents a clear and critical survey of competing theories of and various approaches to popular culture. Its breadth and theoretical unity, exemplified through popular culture, means that it can be flexibly and relevantly app…
For decades, researchers have used the fruit fly Drosophila to probe the combined effects of microgravity and other conditions of spaceflight with exposure to ionizing radiation. Drosophila melanogaster provides a well-characterized model organism that is both genetically complex and relatively modest in its habitat and life support requirements. Microgravity exposure, a unique biological chall…
The hoard that forms the focus for this book was discovered on farmland in the vicinity of the small Oxfordshire town of Watlington in October 2015. It consists of 203 coins, most of which were issued by the early-medieval kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia in the late 870s, and silver ingots and metalwork — some in the form of fragmented hack-silver and a single piece of hack-gold. The metalwork …
The Great Wall of China is a wonder of the world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists take the five-mile journey from Beijing to climb its battlements. While myriad photographs have made this extraordinary landmark familiar to millions more, its story remains mysterious and steeped in myth. In this riveting account, John Man travels the entire length of the Great Wall and across two m…
Assynt is well known for its complex geology and was the field laboratory of 19th-century geologists Benjamin Peach and John Horne, who pioneered geological mapping techniques and the modern understanding of processes of geological thrust, opening up new possibilities in the study of landscape formation and evolution. Some of the world’s oldest rocks are found in Assynt, gneis…
To tease out the evolution of institutions, organisations and transport requires a broad search of historical accounts written both in English and in Japanese. Published in English, there is scholarship rich in details of ancient and modern aspects of Japan, its politics and economy. Computer search engines and the website Academia allow access to data bases th…
This Very Short Introduction to Classics links a haunting temple on a lonely mountainside to the glory of ancient Greece and the grandeur of Rome, and to Classics within modern culture-from Jefferson and Byron to Asterix and Ben-Hur. We are all Classicists - we come into touch with the Classics daily: in our culture, politics, medicine, architecture, language, and literature. What are the tr…