Steve Jones

Illuminating!' Professor Brian Cox'Every Steve Jones book is a masterclass in clear and captivating writing with tantalising detours into beguiling anecdotes. Here Comes the Sun is dense with ideas and stories and, like all his books, it will change the way you see the world around you' Robin Ince Our sun drives the weather, forms the landscape, feeds and fuels - but sometimes destroys - the creatures that live upon it, controls their patterns of activity, makes chemicals in the skin that cheer up those who bask in its rays, and for the ancients was the seat of divine authority. In Here Comes the Sun, Steve Jones shows how life on Earth is ruled by our nearest star.It is filled with unexpected connections; between the need to stay cool and man's ability to stand upright, between the power of memory and the onset of darkness, between the flow of solar energy through the plants and animals and of wealth through society, and between Joseph Goebbel's 1938 scheme to make Edinburgh the summer capital of a defeated Britain and the widening gap in the life expectancy of Scottish men compared to that of other European men brought on by thnat nation's cloudy climate. Its author charts some of his own research in places hot and cold across the globe on the genetic and evolutionary effects of sunlight on snails, fruit-flies and people and shows how what was once no more an eccentric specialism has grown to become a subject of wide scientific, social and political significance. Stunningly evocative, beautifully written and packed full of insight, Here Comes the Sun is Steve Jones's most personal book to date.

Our sun drives the weather, forms the landscape, feeds and fuels - but sometimes destroys - the creatures that live upon it, controls their patterns of activity, makes chemicals in the skin that cheer up those who bask in its rays, and for the ancients was the seat of divine authority. In Here Comes the Sun, Steve Jones shows how life on Earth is ruled by our nearest star. It is filled with unexpected connections; between the need to stay cool and man's ability to stand upright, between the power of memory and the onset of darkness, between the flow of solar energy through the plants and animals and of wealth through society, and between Joseph Goebbel's 1938 scheme to make Edinburgh the summer capital of a defeated Britain and the widening gap in the life expectancy of Scottish men compared to that of other European men brought on by thnat nation's cloudy climate.Its author charts some of his own research in places hot and cold across the globe on the genetic and evolutionary effects of sunlight on snails, fruit-flies and people and shows how what was once no more an eccentric specialism has grown to become a subject of wide scientific, social and political significance. Stunningly evocative, beautifully written and packed full of insight, Here Comes the Sun is Steve Jones's most personal book to date.

La sangre siempre ha mantenido unidas a las familias y a las naciones, el Antiguo Testamento fue el primer libro de genética y la idea de la herencia es tan poderosa que su estudio fue prohibido en la Union Sovietica durante treinta años. En la sangre muestra como la genetica esta incomodamente proxima a las cuestiones que se plantean la filosofia, la teologia e incluso la politica. En opinion de muchos, representa una amenaza para la autonomia humana: si todo esta programado en los genes ¿que margen queda para el libre albedrio? Si la sociedad no es mas que un mecanismo para garantizar la transmision de los genes, ¿como siguen siendo posibles el bien y el mal? Actualmente la genetica ejerce una singular fascinacion, a la par que se ha convertido en una fuente de confusiones. STEVE JONES pasa revista a estos temas fundamentales, antiguos problemas que ahora se reformulan en el lenguaje de la ciencia, los plantea de forma original e incluso les da respuesta.

Las memorias de Steve Jones, un mago de la guitarra que, con Sex Pistols, cambió la historia de la música. Coincidiendo con el 40 aniversario del nacimiento del punk, Steve Jones se ha decidido a contar su historia.Por primera vez, Steve escribe sobre la tristeza de no haber conocido nunca a su padre, el abandono y el abuso que sufrio por parte de su padrastro, y como su interes por la musica y la moda lo salvaron de pasar una vida marcada por los centros de prision preventiva y la carcel. Desde el Kings Road de los anos setenta, los años de Sex Pistols, el punk rock y la grabacion del album Never Mind the Bollocks, hasta su exilio voluntario en Nueva York y Los Angeles, donde batallo con el alcohol, la heroina y la adiccion al sexo.

Genetics is the newest of all sciences - nothing useful was known about inheritance until just over a century ago. Now genetics is exploding, and before long we will have the complete code, written in three thousand million letters of DNA, of what makes a human being. Introducing Genetics takes us from the early work of Mendel to the discovery of DNA, the human gene map and the treatment of inborn disease. No one can afford to be ignorant of genetics. This book is the perfect introduction.

Takes us from Mendel to the human gene map and the treatment if inborn disease, giving enough information to help us make the moral decisions that we will face.

The Origin of Species is the most famous book in science but its stature tends to obscure the genius of Charles Darwin''s other works. The Beagle voyage, too, occupied only five of the fifty years of his career. He spent only five weeks on the Galapagos and on his return never left Britain again. Darwin wrote six million words, in nineteen books and innumerable letters, on topics as different as dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion. Together, they laid the foundations of modern biology. In this beautifully written, witty and illuminating book, Steve Jones explores the domestic Darwin, the sage of Kent, and brings his work up to date. Great Britain was Charles Darwin''s other island, its countryside as much, or more, a place of discovery than had been the Galapagos. It traces the great naturalist''s second journey across its modest landscape: a voyage not of the body but of the mind.

· ¿Hay una explicación científica detrás de las famosasplagas de Egipto? ¿Y de la edad de Matusalén? ¿Y de tantosotros sucesos que tomamos por milagrosos?· La Biblia es sometida a examen con todo el rigor de laciencia, dejando aparte la fe, para separar la realidad del mito.· Con ilustraciones de William Blake que dan vida a latension entre las creencias y los hechos.·Un ensayo ameno para los amantes de la antropologia, lahistoria o la ciencia, sean creyentes o no.

Men, towards the end of the last millennium, felt a sudden tightening of the bowels with the news that the services of their sex had at last been dispensed with. Dolly the Sheep - conceived without male assistance - had arrived. Her birth reminded at least half the population of how precarious man''s position may be. What is the point of being a man? For a brief and essential instant he is a donor of DNA; but outside that glorious moment his role is hard to understand. This book is about science not society; about maleness not manhood. The condition is, in the end, a matter of biology, whatever limits that science may have in explaining the human condition. Today''s advances in medicine and in genetics mean at last we understand why men exist and why they are so frequent. We understand from hormones to hydraulics how man''s machinery works, why he dies so young and how his brain differs from that of the rest of mankind.

THE SINGLE HELIX is a miscellany of a hundred easy pieces about science. It brings to life a vast diversity of subjects, united under the banner of scientific truth - the universal solvent that brings clarity to almost all the mysteries of the world we live in. Scientists are trained to know ever more about even less but here Steve Jones sets out deliberately to explore subjects in which he is emphatically not an expert (although his favourite snail, the single Helix of his title, does poke in a tentacle here and there). His insatiable curiosity and enthusiasm as he sheds light on unexpected corners of knowledge combine to produce science writing at its very best. From chaos in the heavens to the fight against creationism, from optical illusions in tartan to the mathematics of elections and what rules the sex lives of cats THE SINGLE HELIX is a scientist''s look at sciences other than his own - and as a result its author has been forced to make the complicated simple enough for even a biologist to understand.

Rounds slammed the ground all around the Taliban He hit the earth face first vanishing into the foggy confusion of desert conflict The Apache s engines rumbled on as we orbited hoping to see immediate harsh hard proof that he was no longer a threat Billed as the ultimate fighting machine the AH 64 Apache attack helicopter is a US designed close support aircraft in service in the UK with the Army Air Corps AAC Apache at War is a senior British pilot s vivid and uncompromising account of flying this and other combat helicopters in action Tautly often graphically written here is a memoir of the author s service flying close support helicopters with the AAC from patrolling Bandit Country in Co Armagh Northern Ireland in the late 1990s to taking out Taliban fighters in Helmand Province Afghanistan in the mid to late 2000s with active service in the Balkans and Iraq along the way Besides combat flying Steve Jones was also a qualified instructor on the Apache and helped to teach the then Lieutenant H Wales Prince Harry to fly and fight the aircraft He tells of mentoring the hard living prince of equipping him with skills that would later bring out the best in him in Afghanistan offering insights into Harry the soldier and pilot far remov

Bob Bloomfield is, in the words of his best friend's wife, a 'selfish, arrogant a*sehole', who hasn't spent a great deal of time making friends in his 49 years on earth.But what if he could change? What if Bob could stop the very thing that has made him the man he is, the death of his younger brother, Tom in 1986.If he could save Tom, could he save himself?. . . And what if all it took was a phone call - to his childhood self?

-¿Hay una explicación científica detrás de las famosas plagas de Egipto? ¿Y de la edad de Matusalén? ¿Y de tantos otros sucesos que tomamos por milagrosos?-La Biblia es sometida a examen con todo el rigor de la ciencia, dejando aparte la fe, para separar la realidad del mito.-Con ilustraciones de William Blake que dan vida a la tension entre las creencias y los hechos.-Un ensayo ameno para los amantes de la antropologia, la historia o la ciencia, sean creyentes o no.

Prácticamente todos los aspectos de la vida social, cultural, económica y política pueden verse afectados por las nuevas tecnologías electrónicas. La sociedad virtual es una visión del impacto que tendrian estas tecnologias. ¿En que medida estan cambiandonos la vida realmente las nuevas tecnologias electronicas? ¿Se estan produciendo cambios elementales y significativos? ¿De verdad la sociedad va a llegar a ser "virtual”? La presente recopilacion proporciona un conjunto exhaustivo de estudios empiricos de la genesis y el uso de estas nuevas tecnologias, a traves de una amplia gama de areas de aplicacion. Ofrece una perspectiva nueva (el escepticismo analitico) para entender algunos resultados sorprendentemente contrarios a lo que intuiriamos para desarrollar una vision estimulantemente critica de muchas suposiciones que se dan por sentadas sobre el impacto de Internet en las instituciones y las relaciones sociales. Cada capitulo es un ejemplo de calidad de su propia perspectiva disciplinar, dirigida a un publico de ciencias sociales general. El mensaje en su conjunto, entendido con la debida prudencia y sensibilidad ironica, afirma que se deberia equilibrar una "sociedad virtual” inminente mediante una revaloracion de las conexiones entre lo que se considera '

La genética es la ciencia más nueva. No se sabía casi nada de la herencia hasta hace más de un siglo, y lo que descubrió Mendel por aquel entonces se utilizó para justificar la eugenesia y el racismo. En la actualidad, la genetica se encuentra en pleno auge y se ha descubierto la secuencia completa del ADN, que compone los 60.000 genes activos necesarios para formar un ser humano. Este libro nos conduce desde Mendel hasta el mapa del genoma humano y el tratamiento de las enfermedades hereditarias. Nos muestra como se descubrio el ADN y explica como algunos genes pueden actuar en su propio beneficio tanto como a favor de sus portadores. Nadie puede permitirse desconocer el funcionamiento de la genetica y, guste o no, algunos de nosotros nos veremos obligados a tomar decisiones eticas en las que intervenga esta ciencia. Este libro nos proporciona la informacion necesaria para hacerlo.

Sin los Sex Pistols no existiría el punk. Y sin Steve Jones no existirían los Sex Pistols. Él fue quien fundó Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols, la banda que posteriormente se convirtió en los Sex Pistols, con su compañero de clase Paul Cook, que inicialmente fue el lider del grupo. Coincidiendo con el medio siglo del nacimiento del punk, que celebra la inmensa influencia y la gran relevancia cultural que este movimiento tiene en la musica, la moda o las artes visuales todavia hoy en dia, Steve Jones se ha decidido por fin a contar su historia. Una historia que empieza en los barrios de Hammersmith y Sheperd?s Bush, en el oeste de Londres, donde un chico solitario y descuidado que vivia de pequeños hurtos descubrio el glam de David Bowie y Roxy Music, y se acabo convirtiendo en uno de los primeros punks callejeros que Malcolm McLaren y Vivienne Westwood acogieron. Por primera vez, Jones escribe sobre la tristeza de no haber conocido nunca a su padre, del abandono y el abuso que sufrio por parte de su padrastro, y como su interes por la musica y la moda lo salvaron de pasar una vida marcada por los centros de prision preventiva y la carcel. Desde el Kings Road de los años setenta, los años de Sex Pistols, el punk rock y la grabacion del album inmortal Never Mind the Bollocks, hasta su exilio voluntario en Nueva York y Los Angeles donde batallo con el alcohol, la heroina y la adiccion al sexo, este libro es el relato de un improbable mago de la guitarra que con los Sex Pistols cambio el rumbo de la musica para siempre.