Showing titles in History

As scientists confidently look forward to average life expectancies hitting 100+ years in some Western societies, it’s easy to forget how precarious our grasp on good health has been. It is a struggle no better demonstrated than by the myriad and extraordinary measures that humans have gone to – as diverse as animal sacrifice to stem cell transplants – in their quest to stave off death and disease. Acclaimed historian Mark Jackson takes a fresh global view of mankind’s great battle, exploring both Western and Eastern traditions.

In 1995, a scandal erupted when the New York Times revealed that the Smithsonian possessed a century’s worth of nude “posture” photos of college students. In this riveting history, Beth Linker tells why these photos were only a small part of the incredible story of twentieth-century America’s largely forgotten posture panic—a decades-long episode in which it was widely accepted as scientific fact that Americans were suffering from an epidemic of bad posture, with potentially catastrophic health consequences.

¿Qué es un cisne negro? Para empezar, es un suceso improbable, sus consecuencias son importantes y todas las explicaciones que se puedan ofrecer a posteriori no tienen en cuenta el azar y sólo buscan encajar lo imprevisible en un modelo perfecto. El éxito de Google y YouTube, y hasta el 11-S, son “cisnes negros”. Para Nassim Nicholas Taleb, los cisnes negros son parte integrante de nuestro mundo, desde el auge de las religiones hasta los acontecimientos de nuestra vida personal. ¿Por qué no podemos identificar este fenómeno hasta que ya ha sucedido?

How much can we know about the world? In this audiobook physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing he reaches a provocative conclusion: Science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know.

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

Michael Faraday: The Life and Legacy of the Influential 19th Century Scientist Who Pioneered Electromagnetism examines the life and work that made Faraday one of history’s most important scientists. You will learn about Michael Faraday like never before.

Science and religion have always been considered mutually exclusive concepts, but are they really? Philosopher Ken Wilber shows how we might begin to think about science and religion in ways that allow for their reconciliation, on terms acceptable to both camps.

How did life begin? Why are we here? These are some of the most profound questions we can ask. For almost a century, a small band of eccentric scientists has struggled to answer these questions and explain one of the greatest mysteries of all: how and why life began on Earth. There are many different proposals and each idea has attracted passionate believers who promote it with an almost religious fervour, as well as detractors who reject it with equal passion.

What began as a utopian environment, where mice had sumptuous accommodations, had all the food and water they could want, and were free from disease and predators, turned into a mouse hell. Science writer and animal behaviorist Lee Alan Dugatkin introduces listeners to the work of rodent researcher John Bumpass Calhoun. Dugatkin shows how an ecologist-turned-psychologist-turned-futurist became a science rock star embedded in the culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Almost daily, headlines announce newly discovered links between cancers and their genetic causes. Science journalist Jessica Wapner vividly relates the backstory behind those headlines, reconstructing the crucial breakthroughs, explaining the science behind them, and giving due to the dozens of researchers, doctors, and patients whose curiosity and determination restored the promise of a future to the more than 50,000 people diagnosed each year with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

Topics explored in this dialogue include: how you can address the greatest challenge of our times, the role of the arts in deep ecology, how the shift from linear thinking to systems thinking in the sciences affects us now and in the future, understanding the complexity of living systems and life itself, why creativity is the driving force of evolution, what religion and deep ecology have in common, what's really behind the information age, and the mathematics of complexity.

We’re living in a golden age of scientific breakthroughs and technological advancements. Now, you have the chance to dig into some of the most fascinating and important scientific advancements in recent years. Unexpected, consequential, and often counterintuitive, 12 Revolutionary Discoveries That Could Change Everything offers an inspiring introduction to science in the 21st century. Taught by Scientific American editor in chief Laura Helmuth, these eye-opening lectures will satiate even the most inquisitive mind.

Space Race 2.0 has started, and the winner—America or Communist China—will define the future of humanity. The space race was a critical determining factor in the Cold War. After its Sputnik miracle, the Soviets’ loss of the race to the Moon undermined the international mystique of Communism and crushed the USSR’s dreams of world domination. America’s wildly successful Apollo program, by sharp contrast, brought America global glory and prestige—along with a plethora of “miracle technologies” that accelerated economic growth and strengthened US national security for half a century.

The product of research around the globe and interviews with dozens of prominent scientists, God's Equation tells us it is almost as though Einstein were God's mouthpiece, revealing the most fundamental truths about our larger environment, truths scientists are just now confirming.

A gripping journey of discovery, The Catalyst moves from the early experiments that first hinted at RNA's spectacular powers, to Cech's own paradigm-shifting finding that it can catalyze cellular reactions, to the cutting-edge biotechnologies poised to reshape our health.

In the last 350-odd years, the international “scientific community” has come to be the bastion of consensus and concerted action, especially in the face of two global crises: disastrous climate change, and a deadly pandemic. How did “the scientific community” come into existence, and why does it work? Rivals is an attempt to answer these questions in the form of a brief historical overview, from the late seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

Following the model of his bestselling Forbidden History and Forbidden Religion, J. Douglas Kenyon has assembled from his bimonthly journal, Atlantis Rising, material that explores science and technology that has been suppressed by the orthodox scientific community—from the true function of the Great Pyramid and the megaliths at Nabta Playa to Immanuel Velikovsky’s astronomical insights, free energy from space, cold fusion, and Rupert Sheldrake’s research into telepathy and ESP.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within the context of his vast research and tackles the vexing questions of a scientist’s personal responsibility and guilt when serving an abhorrent military regime.

Pioneering oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer unravels the mystery of marine currents, uncovers the astonishing story of flotsam, and changes the world's view of trash, the ocean, and our global environment. Curtis Ebbesmeyer is no ordinary scientist. He's been a consulting oceanographer for multinational firms and a lead scientist on international research expeditions, but he's never held a conventional academic appointment.

In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what's essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively.