Brian Skyrms presents a fascinating exploration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses a variety of tools – theories of signaling games, information, evolution, and learning – to investigate how meaning and communication develop. He shows how signaling games themselves evolve, and introduces a new model of learning with invention. The juxtaposition of atomic signals leads to complex signals, as the natural product of gradual process. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life. Information is transmitted, but it is also processed in various ways. That is how we think – signals run around a very complicated signaling network. Signaling is a key ingredient in the evolution of teamwork, in the human but also in the animal world, even in micro-organisms. Communication and co-ordination of action are different aspects of the flow of information, and are both effected by signals.

A gorgeously illustrated and wholly comprehensive timeline of the earth's entire history that explains how everything is interconnected.

As comprehensive as the subtitle suggests, What on Earth Happened is a primer for Planet Earth, a giant narrative leap across time and space, one seismic change at a time. Combining the history of earth science and the history of human civilization, What on Earth Happened covers how the earth was formed, how life began, the way the ecosystem works, how species evolved, the rise of man, migration, the development of tools, language, agriculture, art, transportation, architecture, cities, religion, government, global conflicts, and medicine. In short, it shows how everything―from the mountains and flowers and the birds and the bees to the Iraq war and the oil under the Arctic―is all wonderfully, complexly interconnected.

Entertaining and accessible―and gorgeously illustrated with specially commissioned graphs, charts and maps―What on Earth Happened connects the dots of the past to tell a coherent, comprehensive, and compelling story about our very own third rock from the sun.

At one time, heart disease was a death sentence. In The Heart Healers, world renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. James Forrester tells the story of the mavericks and rebels who defied the accumulated medical wisdom of the day to begin conquering heart disease. By the middle of the 20th century, heart disease was killing millions and, as with the Black Death centuries before, physicians stood helpless. Visionaries, though, had begun to make strides earlier. On Sept. 7, 1895, Ludwig Rehn successfully sutured the heart of a living man with a knife wound to the chest for the first time. Once it was deemed possible to perform surgery on the heart, others followed. In 1929, Dr. Werner Forssman inserted a cardiac catheter in his own arm and forced the x-ray technician on duty to take a photo as he successfully threaded it down the vein into his own heart...and lived. On June 6, 1944 - D-Day - another momentous event occurred far from the Normandy beaches: Dr. Dwight Harken sutured the shrapnel-injured heart of a young soldier, saved his life and the term "cardiac surgeon" born.

Dr. Forrester tells the story of these rebels and the risks they took with their own lives and the lives of others to heal the most elemental of human organs - the heart. The result is a compelling chronicle of a disease and its cure, a disease that is still with us, but one that is slowly being worn away by "The Heart Healers".