Wonders of life
Subtitle: exploring the most extraordinary force in the universe
By: Brian Cox ; and Andrew Cohen
Contributors: Cohen, Andrew, author; Science Channel (Television network)
Publisher: Harper Design
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780062238832
Subjects: Life (Biology); Evolution (Biology)
Other titles: Wonders of life :
Notes: "As seen on SCI, Science Channel"--Cover.

"First published in the United Kingdom by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers."

Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Wonders of life; title: Home. Evolution of life ; Return of the king ; A very special home ; Simple but complex ; The history of the exploration of water ; Water, water everywhere; title: ; Water, the essential ingredient ; Walking on water ; Treetops to teardrops : the magic of hydrogen bonds ; Into the light. A train journey through time ; A child star ; A unique and colourful world ; The origin;s of life's colours ; From the smallest beginnings; title: ; Eating the Sun ; A breath of fresh air ; Breath of life ; Four-legged life story; title: What is life? The briefest of beauty. Day of the dead ; What is life? ; Energy and the First Law of Thermodynamics ; First life. Life's first energy source ; On Professor Cox's battery and the origin of life ; Searching for Eden : a warm little pond; title: ; Universal life ; Prokaryotic and eukaryotic life ; Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics : Schrödinger's Paradox ; Follow the Sun ; The origin of life's order ; One big family; title: Size matters. Life-size differences. Same planet, different world ; Ocean giants ; The physics of a killer ; Small is beautiful ; Of royal crowns and ocean giants ; Big things don't jump ; Lost giants ; The world of the small. Inside an insect ; Beetle mania ; Broken men and splashing horses ; As small as it gets; title: ; The smallest multicellular life on Earth ; Size really matters ; An island of giants; title: Expanding universe. The expanding universe. Plugging in ; The common sense ; A bolt from the blue ; The universal nature of sensing ; River monsters ; Good vibrations. The power of hearing ; The human ear : a wonder of acoustic engineering ; The ossicles : one of nature's great evolutionary bodges ; Evolving ears and eyes ; The jawless lamprey ; Let there be light; title: . Seeing the light ; Eye wide open ; A very human experience of a very human creature ; Compound vs. camera : the advantages and disadvantages of the simple and the complex ; Seeing the universe; title: Endless forms most beautiful. A universal common ancestor. Evolution and Madagascar ; Darwin's bark spider ; Darwin's orchid ; A name for life ; The stuff of life ; The bird : collision of a trillion suns ; The Hoyle Resonance : are we lucky to be here at all? ; Carbon cycle. The greatest cycles of life ; Harvesting carbon ; Why carbon? ; The building blocks of biology ; DNA from the beginning ; Meet the ancestors ; Tree of life ; Mutations : the spring from which diversity flows ; The power of mutations ; Tossing a coin isn't enough ; The power of islands ; Island Madagascar ; A creature from another world ; Precious islands.