Name: Winter World
ISBN: 9780061463396

Winter World

From award-winning writer and biologist Bernd Heinrich, an intimate, accessible and eloquent illumination of animal survival in Winter. From flying squirrels to grizzly bears, torpid turtles to insects with antifreeze, the animal kingdom relies on some staggering evolutionary innovations to survive winter. Unlike their human counterparts, who must alter their environment to accommodate our physical limitations, animals are adaptable to an amazing range of conditions--i.e., radical changes in a creature's physiology take place to match the demands of the environment. Winter provides an especially remarkable situation, because of how drastically it affects the most elemental component of all life: water. Examining everything from food sources in the extremely barren winter landscape to the chemical composition that allows certain creatures to survive, Heinrich's Winter World awakens the largely undiscovered mysteries by which nature sustains herself through the harsh, cruel exigencies of winters

What Hacker News says

durkieNov 2024

A great book about how animals survive super cold winters is "Winter World" by Bernd Heinrich.

Bernd is a super fascinating biologist who really dives deep in to things. At one point in the book I think he was talking about chipmunks surviving winter, and it goes really fun on the first principles. Something like: "chipmunks have a surface area of X m^2, and need to maintain an internal temperature of Y˚C. If the outside temperature is -40˚C they therefore they need to consume Z calories per hour just to maintain body temperature. Their favorite food are pine nuts from the white pine tree. The pine nuts each have B calories, so the chipmunk will need to eat D of them per hour. How many nuts can a chipmunk fit in its mouth? Well I found a dead one and shoved pine nuts in to its mouth until I couldn't fit anymore, and managed to get 17 in there. That means..."

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maratdDec 2019

Also Winter World (and the other two books in the trilogy). Fun read. Very similar in style to the The Expanse.

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kkaranthOct 2019

* Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich: A great pop-sci book about how animals adapt to extreme winter biomes

* Deep by James Nestor: A look at the extreme sport of freediving, where contestants train to submerge to depths much greater than 400ft without any oxygen and pressure equalizing equipment

* The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by John Gertner: A great book about the history of Bell Labs, the scientists and engineers that brought great innovations to society including phones

* Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla by Marc Seifer: A biography of Nikola Tesla. Its quite astounding how much one person can achieve in their lifetime

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