POPLAR Publishing Co., Ltd., a leading independent publisher of children's books in Japan, has been in business for more than 70 years. As it started as a children's books publisher, it has always tried to provide children with enjoyable and exciting books. Today, the company's goals remain unchanged: everything it publishes should be enjoyable and enrich people's lives.
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Chemicals. So incomprehensible, invisible, and sometimes killing. We often encounter them in everyday life, but we don't even know how dangerous they can be -toxins in food, contaminated water, unsafe substances in medicines, and toxic compounds even in the air. Which of the poisons are natural and which are human created? What kills thousands of people, and what can be a cure? You will find the answers to these questions in this illustrated manual on the most dangerous substances on the planet. This is probably the most beautiful book about deadly compounds.
Are we under the influence? Manipulative parasites are everywhere in the natural world: parasitic worms make crickets commit suicide by drowning themselves; other worms condition ants to remain motionless for hours so that they can be eaten by predators; mice that have become addicted to feline urine more or less throw themselves into cats' mouths; cuckoos make other species of birds raise their offspring for them; a fungus can take over the nervous system of an ant and enslave it… Not only are parasites everywhere, but nothing seems able to resist them. The author, Clément Lagrue, is a parasitologist and one of the few researchers in the world who have devoted themselves to the study of these amazing creatures. Tiny as they are, they can exert extraordinary power over organisms that are far bigger and stronger – and, to all appearances, more complex – than they are, and turn them into zombies. For their own purposes, they can modify their hosts against their will, both in terms of morphology (e.g. their color) and physiology (e.g. making the host salivate more, use more oxygen or produce excess lipids). And we humans are not spared! Parasites could in fact explain some behavioral disorders. Welcome to the fiendish world of manipulative parasites!
A psychologist and a doctor discuss everything about love. “We definitely don’t understand each other… we might as well be speaking different languages!” This is more or less how a good many heated conversations between men and women end. Eventually, once the crisis is over, we realise that – despite our love, our good faith and our best efforts – it was all a huge… misunderstanding. It’s in an attempt to clear up this very misunderstanding (because we are old friends, one a man, the other a woman, one a doctor, the other a psychologist), that we felt we wanted to try to get to know each other so as to have a real chance of better understanding each other’s language, despite our obvious differences. We searched through our respective professional practices for anything that might explain behavioural differences from a psychological or medical point of view. We also interviewed people around us, particularly the younger generation, because we wanted to understand how their vision of the world differed from our own.
A necessary book about our society’s addiction to plastic. Nathalie Gontard has been exploring and studying plastic in her laboratory and all over the world for 30 years. Initially fascinated by this magic material’s potential, she watched as stealthily invaded the planet, making traditional materials look dated. She found its footprints on beaches, deep in the soil and even inside countless animals. We now need to face the facts: millions of recyclers and hundreds of inventers of “new materials” won’t be able to stop the steady contamination of our environment. We must eradicate the source of the danger and question politicians and industrialists blinded by their belief in purely material progress. It’s up to us to mobilise ourselves and bring an end to this catastrophic overproduction. It’s up to us to find a way of ensuring our comfort without destabilising this little planet whose tenants we are. We must acknowledge our addiction in order to reduce our consumption to what is strictly necessary. A perfectly accessible challenge that this book encourages us to take up straight away.
