Search results for ""author nicholas james""

Over more than twenty years working as a plumber, Nick has shared thousands of mugs of tea with hundreds of fascinating people. Here he gives his plumber’s-eye view of society in a series of entertaining, amusing and outrageous beneath-the-kitchen-sink dramas. While fixing pipes, Nick was also looking for characters to write about. In his toolbox, in addition to spanners, he had a notebook, which wasn’t just for jotting down measurements. And ‘the secret plumber’ has some great stories to tell, about people who might just be your friends, family or neighbours. There’s the frankly terrifying high-court judge, whose wife calls the shots; the divorcing woman, using him to help her build a rather bizarre botox business; and all the wonderful people he meets when his number is posted on Grindr as an LGBTQ+-friendly plumber. This book is Tales of the Unexpected – in overalls. It shows London as it really is: one of the most diverse places on the planet, ranging from downright dangerous to preposterously posh. To Nick, London is a melting pot, filled with an extraordinary variety of fascinating people, who have one thing in common – they all need a plumber!

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In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed that an ant’s brain, no larger than a pin’s head, must be sophisticated to accomplish all that it does. Yet today many people still find it surprising that insects and other arthropods show behaviors that are much more complex than innate reflexes. They are products of versatile brains which, in a sense, think.Fascinating in their own right, arthropods provide fundamental insights into how brains process and organize sensory information to produce learning, strategizing, cooperation, and sociality. Nicholas Strausfeld elucidates the evolution of this knowledge, beginning with nineteenth-century debates about how similar arthropod brains were to vertebrate brains. This exchange, he shows, had a profound and far-reaching impact on attitudes toward evolution and animal origins. Many renowned scientists, including Sigmund Freud, cut their professional teeth studying arthropod nervous systems. The greatest neuroanatomist of them all, Santiago Ramón y Cajal—founder of the neuron doctrine—was awed by similarities between insect and mammalian brains.Writing in a style that will appeal to a broad readership, Strausfeld weaves anatomical observations with evidence from molecular biology, neuroethology, cladistics, and the fossil record to explore the neurobiology of the largest phylum on earth—and one that is crucial to the well-being of our planet. Highly informative and richly illustrated, Arthropod Brains offers an original synthesis drawing on many fields, and a comprehensive reference that will serve biologists for years to come.

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