Showing results by publisher "--Tyson Hanks" in Science & Technology

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager interweaves the story of her search for meaning and solace after losing her first husband to cancer, her unflagging search for an Earth-like exoplanet and her unexpected discovery of new love. Sara Seager has made it her life's work to peer into the spaces around stars - looking for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, her life became an empty, lightless space.

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.

Free Creations of the Human Mind: The Worlds of Albert Einstein presents a concise and nuanced account of Einstein's life and work embedded in his intellectual and social contexts. His life is interconnected with so many of the important political and intellectual movements of his era—Zionism, pacifism, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, civil rights, McCarthyism, the League of Nations, and substantial discoveries in epochal theories of special relativity and quantum theory.

Freeman Dyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist who dreams of exploring the heavens and has designed a spaceship to take him there. His son, George, a brilliant high-school dropout, lives in a tree house and is designing a giant kayak to explore the icy coastal wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

In this groundbreaking audiobook, author and narrator Eric Leo takes you on an electrifying journey from atheism to a revolutionary scientific spirituality. 108: The Story of Discovering Earth's Consciousness reveals how planets and stars are sentient beings communicating through electromagnetic fields — with Earth (Gaia) as our living, conscious home. Leo's raw, first-person narration brings visceral intensity to his decade-long transformation — from paranoid delusions of celebrity stalkers to the stunning realization he was actually perceiving Gaia's attempts to communicate.

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.

They didn't start out as environmental warriors. Clair Patterson was a geochemist focused on determining the age of the Earth. Herbert Needleman was a pediatrician treating inner-city children. But in the chemistry lab and the hospital ward, they met a common enemy: lead. It was literally everywhere. Though few people worried about it at the time, lead was also toxic. In Toxic Truth, journalist Lydia Denworth tells the little-known stories of these two men who were among the first to question the wisdom of filling the world with such a harmful metal.

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” These are the opening lines that radical thinker, environmentalist, and technologist Stewart Brand wrote for The Whole Earth Catalog. His thesis—that humans should use our god-like powers to build a better way to live—is at the core of his extraordinary life. At key historical moments in the 20th century, Stewart Brand was behind the scenes shaping things. As founding editor of Wired Magazine Kevin Kelly says, “Stewart has a Forest Gump-like superpower—he can sense where the future is and be there.”

From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist–an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. With a new epilogue on Apple’s future survival in today’s roller-coaster economy, here is the revealing biography that blew away the critics and stirred controversy within industry and media circles around the country.

In the 1940s and '50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

The founder of modern science and the embodiment of the conflict between science and faith, Galileo remains the most fascinating figure of his age. In this biography, James Reston Jr. provides a lively, vivid portrait of Galileo, taking the listener to the heart of this passionate, embattled, arrogant, and brilliant man.

In little more than half a decade, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects, even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.

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.

These 12 half-hour lectures are about what Einstein got wrong. He may have kindled a scientific revolution with his famous theory of relativity and his proof that atoms and light quanta exist, but he balked at accepting the most startling implications of these theories - such as the existence of black holes, the big bang, gravity waves, and mind-bendingly strange phenomena in the quantum realm. This course by research physicist Dan Hooper of the University of Chicago assumes no background in science and uses very little math.

A real-life "Indiana Jones", Donald P. Ryan, PhD, offers a breathtaking personal account of his adventures in archaeology in Beneath the Sands of Egypt. Fans of The Lost City of Z will thrill to the exploits of this "unconventional archaeologist" as he retrieves the remains of Egypt's past - including his breakthrough discovery in the Valley of the Kings of Egypt's famous female pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter was one of the most audacious and remarkable deals in tech history. The Battle for Twitter takes listeners back to the very beginning and how we reached this point. It looks at the origins of the platform, the vision of its cofounder Jack Dorsey, and how it became a battleground for ideas, controversies, and viral moments that shaped the world we live in today.

The Space Barons is the story of a group of billionaire entrepreneurs who are pouring their fortunes into the epic resurrection of the American space program. Nearly a half century after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, these Space Barons—most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with Richard Branson and Paul Allen—are using Silicon Valley-style innovation to dramatically lower the cost of space travel and send humans even further than NASA has gone.

German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and an infamous spy. He was convicted of espionage by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?

Based on years of reporting on Samsung for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and Time from his base in South Korea and his countless sources inside and outside the company, Geoffrey Cain offers the first deep look behind the curtains of the biggest company nobody knows. How has this happened? Forty years ago, Samsung was a rickety Korean agricultural conglomerate that produced sugar, paper, and fertiliser.