Showing titles in Science & Technology

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Computer engineers use 'chaos monkey' software to wreak havoc and test system robustness. Similarly, tech entrepreneurs like Antonio García Martínez are society's chaos monkeys - their innovations disrupt every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and holidays (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder) - all in search of the perfect business miracle. Describing himself as 'high strung, fast talking, and wired on a combination of caffeine, fear, and greed at all times', García Martínez left Wall Street to make his fortune in Silicon Valley.

The British believe that, through ingenuity and scientific prowess, they alone have a war-winning weapon: radar. They are wrong. The Germans have it too. They believe that their unique maritime history means their pilots have no need of navigational aids. Flying above the clouds they, like the seafarers of old, had the stars to guide them, and that is all that is required. They are wrong. Most of the bombs the RAF will drop in the first years of the war land miles from their target.

Cliff Todd devoted his life to bringing bomb makers to justice. He and his colleagues at the Ministry of Defence's Forensic Explosives Laboratory are the unsung heroes of terrorist bomb attacks—the men and women in white suits who piece together who planted the bombs, what a device consisted of and how the perpetrators might give themselves away. They played a pivotal role in uncovering the secrets behind some of the world's most horrifying terrorist outrages. Explosive tells the stories of these high-profile cases.

Dr. Joel Salinas is a Harvard-trained researcher and neurologist with extraordinary gifts that provide him unique access to his patients and enable him to experience life in an extraordinary way. He has mirror-touch synesthesia, a neurological trait that allows him to feel others' emotions and physical sensations. Susceptible to the pain and discomfort of his patients, Salinas uses his heightened empathic ability - what he calls "compulsory mindfulness" - to help understand and better treat their conditions.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Choose one: (A) Science gives us objective knowledge of an independently existing reality.... or (B) Scientific knowledge is always provisional and tells us nothing that is universal, necessary, or certain about the world.Made your choice? Welcome to the science wars. This long-running battle over the status of scientific knowledge began in ancient Greece, raged furiously among scientists, social scientists, and humanists during the 1990s, and has reemerged in today's conflict between science and religion over issues like evolution.

If you had told Roger McNamee three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund's bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn't.

The brilliant young forensic pathologist had no idea that the body on the slab in front of him would change his life - and ultimately change the world. The body belonged to legendary American footballer Mike Webster, whose mental health had rapidly declined after he had stopped playing - he had ended up Tasering himself to relieve his chronic back pain and fixing his rotting teeth with superglue. Dr Bennet Omalu found that the psychosis suffered by "Iron Mike" was no accident.

As a child, Aomawa Shields was always bumping into things, her neck craned up at the sky, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. Now an astronomer and astrobiologist at the top of her field, Dr Shields studies the universe outside our solar system, researching and uncovering the planets circling distant stars with just the right conditions that could support life. But it's been a road as winding and complex as the physics she has mastered. Life on Other Planets is a journey of discovery on this world and on others.

From the authors of the New York Times bestselling Plague of Corruption comes the prescription on how to end the plague infecting our medical community.

In Good Blood, best-selling writer Julian Guthrie tells the gripping tale of the race to cure a horrible affliction known as Rh disease that stalked families and caused a mother’s immune system to attack her own unborn child. The story is anchored by two very different men on two continents: Dr. John Gorman in New York, who would land on a brilliant yet contrarian idea, and the unassuming Australian whose almost magical blood - and his unyielding devotion to donating it - would save millions of lives.

This extraordinary travel book tells the true story of how in 1997 writer Michael Paterniti agreed to take a road trip from New Jersey to California, reuniting the preserved brain of the great scientist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) with his granddaughter Evelyn. Paterniti's improbable travelling companion is 84-year-old Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who not only removed Einstein's brain from his head during the autopsy but purloined it from Princeton Hospital also!

Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens all life on Earth. Desert Storm fighter pilot and NASA astronaut Ron Garan addresses this head-on in Floating in Darkness: A Journey of Evolution. Ron takes us on an extraordinary journey through outer space and inner space. He explores the dancing, intersecting orbits of religion, spirituality, and science while grappling with his own role in the violence of combat and the effects of war on all aspects of human life.

Inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Bertrand Russell and David Hilbert's pursuit of the fundamental rules of mathematics, some of the most brilliant minds of the generation came together in post-World War I Vienna to present the latest theories in mathematics, science, and philosophy and to build a strong foundation for scientific investigation. Composed of such luminaries as Kurt Gödel and Rudolf Carnap, and stimulated by the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle left an indelible mark on science.

How did thousands of premature infants come to be exhibited at America's most popular amusement park? In Miracle at Coney Island: How a Sideshow Doctor Saved Thousands of Babies and Transformed American Medicine, Claire Prentice uncovers the incredible true story of Martin Couney, the "incubator doctor."

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, historian Rosemary Ashton reveals in this compelling microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence.

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life he was also ignored by most working scientists, his ideas opposed by even his closest friends. This stunning downfall can be traced to Einstein's earliest successes and to personal qualities that were at first his best assets.

A compelling look inside the Space Shuttle missions that helped lay the groundwork for the Space Age, Shuttle, Houston explores the determined personalities, technological miracles, and 11th-hour saves that have given us human spaceflight. Relaying stories of missions (and their grueling training) in vivid detail, Paul Dye, NASA's longest-serving flight director, examines the split-second decisions that the directors and astronauts were forced to make in a field where mistakes are unthinkable and errors led to the loss of national resources - and more importantly one's crew.

From Aristotle to Ada Lovelace: a brief history of the mathematical ideas that have forever changed the world and the everyday people and pioneers behind them. The story of our best invention yet. From our ability to calculate the passing of time to the algorithms that control computers and much else in our lives, numbers are everywhere. They are so indispensable that we forget how fundamental they are to our way of life.