An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it. A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world’s children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential. During the past thirty years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how—with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies—we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the “miracle” of ready-to-eat therapeutic food. Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell writes of her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; fifty percent live below the poverty line; and forty-two percent of Malawi’s children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.) As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as “the warm heart of Africa,” Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are. Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, “elegant” (The Economist) and “extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching” (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has written an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.

Between 1824 and 1832 Romantic Poet, Giacomo Leopardi, wrote the Dialogue between a Goblin and a Gnome.The Story behind is quite simple: the human race destroyed itself, nobody was aware of it, or cared. The sun kept going up and down; the universe worked as it did in the last five Billion years...On Earth, the time for the Little People has come...Everybody wondered how the Tall People could have died, having so much to enjoy life.The Pumpkins are a family of Wonder miners and dealers from the Ripeshine Village. They mine a crumbled Mall near a large market place where they sell the goods they collect.Things change when they discover a secret warehouse of toys and reactivate N.E.C. a little toybot that soon becomes a member of the Pumpkin family...Yet, their lives are about to change.Something from the long-lost past wakes up in the Shining Mountains, unifying the fierce Cyborcs in a conquering force...Something bad...

How do we learn? And how can we learn better? In this groundbreaking look at the science of learning, Sanjay Sarma, head of Open Learning at MIT, shows how we can harness this knowledge to discover our true potential. Drawing from his own experience as an educator as well as the work of researchers and innovators at MIT and beyond, in Grasp, Sarma explores the history of modern education, tracing the way in which traditional classroom methods—lecture, homework, test, repeat—became the norm and showing why things needs to change. The book takes readers across multiple frontiers, from fundamental neuroscience to cognitive psychology and beyond, as it considers the future of learning. It introduces scientists who study forgetting, exposing it not as a simple failure of memory but as a critical weapon in our learning arsenal. It examines the role curiosity plays in promoting a state of “readiness to learn” in the brain (and its troublesome twin, “unreadiness to learn”). And it reveals how such ideas are being put into practice in the real world, such as at unorthodox new programs like Ad Astra, located on the SpaceX campus. Along the way, Grasp debunks long-held views such as the noxious idea of “learning styles,” equipping readers with practical tools for absorbing and retaining information across a lifetime of learning.

This volume presents a variety of studies relating to the reach to grasp movement and provides a necessary and valuable contribution to the field of motor control. The professions covered in this book range from those interested in the basic sciences to those more interested in practical application. Neurophysiologists and biomechanists join with therapists and neural modelers to present an extensive overview of current developments. Evolutionary and developmental aspects are included together with descriptions of how this movement is affected by central nervous system damage. Purely theoretical aspects of the motor control of this movement are interspersed with treatment applications and robotics.

Newly Revised Edition as of December 1, 2021 Paige He was my first love and my greatest heartbreak. Now he’s my assignment. I’ve worked too hard to get my dream job at the largest paper on the west coast, and I won’t let Jack Fuller, the league’s most notoriously private quarterback ruin this chance for me. But the moment we lock eyes, all those old feelings come rushing back in a way I’m completely unprepared for and instead of holding onto my hurt, I find myself giving him another chance. When I push back against writing the article, my bosshole editor threatens to get what he wants, one way or another. The only way I can protect Jack is to spin the story myself. Will Jack be able to forgive me when I tell him what I’ve done? Jack A reporter and an extremely private quarterback shouldn’t mix, but she’s not just any reporter—she’s my ex and the only woman I’ve ever loved. Paige O’Malley has owned my heart since I was sixteen years old, but I was a dumb, cowardly kid and let her go when things got hard. Now she’s here and I know I only have one chance to win her back. I refuse to lose her again. Until I’m blindsided by an article I never saw coming and suddenly I question if any of it was real or if she was just using me for a story the entire time. In the Grasp is the first steamy standalone contemporary sports romance in the LA Wolves series.

This is the first book to cover GRASP (Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures), a metaheuristic that has enjoyed wide success in practice with a broad range of applications to real-world combinatorial optimization problems. The state-of-the-art coverage and carefully crafted pedagogical style lends this book highly accessible as an introductory text not only to GRASP, but also to combinatorial optimization, greedy algorithms, local search, and path-relinking, as well as to heuristics and metaheuristics, in general. The focus is on algorithmic and computational aspects of applied optimization with GRASP with emphasis given to the end-user, providing sufficient information on the broad spectrum of advances in applied optimization with GRASP. For the more advanced reader, chapters on hybridization with path-relinking and parallel and continuous GRASP present these topics in a clear and concise fashion. Additionally, the book offers a very complete annotated bibliography of GRASP and combinatorial optimization. For the practitioner who needs to solve combinatorial optimization problems, the book provides a chapter with four case studies and implementable templates for all algorithms covered in the text. This book, with its excellent overview of GRASP, will appeal to researchers and practitioners of combinatorial optimization who have a need to find optimal or near optimal solutions to hard combinatorial optimization problems.