“Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring / up through the atmosphere, / up where the air is clear! / Oh, let’s go fly a kite!” So – memorably – sang the freshly awakened and amended George Banks, superbly portrayed by David Tomlinson, in Disney’s “Mary Poppins.”
Birds do it. Bees do it. Educated fleas? Yes, them too. But how do they pick their partners, or convince one another to do it with them? And after they do it, what comes next? All this, of course, is fair game for those who study animal behavior, as well as a wide range of other interesting subjects that Tristram D. Wyatt presents in his new “Animal Behavior; A Very Short Introduction.”
I defy you to find more than a handful of people who can provide a clear and relatively easy-to-comprehend explanation of gravity and its effects. Not just the basic “Newton’s apple” material most of us learned in school, but the deeper, universe-spanning phenomena in which it plays a role.
Everyone talks about the weather, but how many really understand how it actually functions. How do temperature and pressure influence the planet’s weather systems? How is weather different from climate? Storm Dunlop (yes, that is his given name) takes up these and a number of other related questions in his new “Weather; A Very Short Introduction.”