Showing titles in History

In 1943, Albert Schatz, a young Rutgers College Ph.D. student, worked on a wartime project in microbiology professor Selman Waksman's lab, searching for an antibiotic to fight infections on the front lines and at home. In his 11th experiment on a common bacterium found in farmyard soil, Schatz discovered streptomycin, the first effective cure for tuberculosis, one of the world's deadliest diseases.

Galileo Unbound traces the journey that brought us from Galileo's law of free fall to today's geneticists measuring evolutionary drift, entangled quantum particles moving among many worlds, and our lives as trajectories traversing a health space with thousands of dimensions. Remarkably, common themes persist that predict the evolution of species as readily as the orbits of planets or the collapse of stars into black holes.

Shoulders of Giants is a narrative history of how mathematics revealed the hidden forces shaping the modern world. From the geometry of ancient Greece to the emergence of electromagnetic theory, this audiobook follows the thinkers who transformed abstract symbols into practical tools — ideas that eventually carried signals, voices, and energy across continents. Along the way appear vivid portraits of mathematicians and physicists grappling with space, motion, light, and invisible fields, driven as much by obsession and rivalry as by curiosity.

Winner of the 2008 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir The definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein. Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award­–winning actor Geoffrey Rush...

“Sarah Stewart Johnson interweaves her own coming-of-age story as a planetary scientist with a vivid history of the exploration of Mars in this celebration of human curiosity, passion, and perseverance.”—Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dreams WINNER OF THE PHI BETA KAPPA AWARD...

Before Charles Darwin, other luminaries planted the seeds that would one day evolve into the theory that would make him famous. Author Rick Coste begins by shining a spotlight on the writers, philosophers, and scientists who planted the seeds that would blossom into the theory of evolution by natural selection, from Aristotle’s big ideas to young Mary Anning’s discovery of the first ichthyosaur skeleton. After exploring the contributions of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, Evolution Talk investigates the very beginnings of life itself.

The Loch Ness monster: a creature that should have died out with the dinosaurs or a legend built on hoaxes and wishful thinking? Sir Peter Scott, internationally renowned naturalist and president of the World Wildlife Fund, was convinced that the monster existed. So were senior scientists at London's Natural History Museum and Chicago University; they lost their jobs because they refused to renounce their belief in the creature.

Simply put, an algorithm is a set of instructions-it's the code that makes computers run. A basic idea that proved elusive for hundreds of years and bent the minds of the greatest thinkers in the world, the algorithm is what made the modern world possible. Without the algorithm, there would have been no computer, no Internet, no virtual reality, no e-mail, or any other technological advance that we rely on every day.

Stephen Hawking is one of the most remarkable figures of our time, a Cambridge genius who has earned international celebrity as a brilliant theoretical physicist and become an inspiration and revelation to those who have witnessed his courageous triumph over disability. This is Hawking's life story by Kitty Ferguson, who has had special help from Hawking himself and his close associates and who has a gift for translating the language of theoretical physics for non-scientists.

In this provocative history of contemporary debates over evolution, veteran journalist Tom Bethell depicts Darwin's theory as a 19th-century idea past its prime, propped up by logical fallacies, bogus claims, and empirical evidence that is all but disintegrating under an onslaught of new scientific discoveries. Bethell presents a concise yet wide-ranging tour of the flash points of modern evolutionary theory. Bethell's account is enriched by his own personal encounters with of some of our era's leading scientists and thinkers.

The inspiring true story of Loïe Fuller, a radical 19th-century art nouveau icon who turned artificial light into performance art and became the incandescent inventor of modern dance, is revealed in this transportive and hypnotic historical narrative.

Upon completing his historic work on the Human Genome Project in 2002, J. Craig Venter declared that he would sequence the genetic code of all life on earth. Thus began a fifteen-year quest to collect DNA from the world's oldest and most abundant form of life: microbes. Boarding the Sorcerer II, a 100-foot sailboat turned research vessel, Venter travelled over 65,000 miles around the globe to sample ocean water and the microscopic life within. In this book, Venter and science writer David Ewing Duncan tell the remarkable story of these expeditions and of the momentous discoveries that ensued.

The long-awaited story of the science, the business, the politics, the intrigue behind the scenes of the most ferocious competition in the history of modern science—the race to map the human genome. On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research...

When the woman he loved was diagnosed with a metastatic cancer, science writer George Johnson embarked on a journey to learn everything he could about the disease and the people who dedicate their lives to understanding and combating it. What he discovered is a revolution under way—an...

A pediatrician and infectious disease specialist warns of the resurgence of measles, the antivaccine movement, and how we can prepare for the next pandemic Every single child diagnosed with measles represents a system failure—an inexcusable unforced error. The technology to prevent essentially...

Is it possible for something or someone to be made invisible? This question, which has intrigued authors of science fiction for over a century, has become a headline-grabbing topic of scientific research. In this book, science writer and optical physicist Gregory J. Gbur traces the science of invisibility from its sci-fi origins in the nineteenth-century writings of authors such as H. G. Wells and Fitz James O'Brien to modern stealth technology, invisibility cloaks, and metamaterials. He explores the history of invisibility and its science and technology connections.

Daniel P. Todes provides concise introduction to the life and science of the great Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Beyond a basic biography, Todes devotes particular attention to Pavlov's Nobel Prize-winning research on digestion and his iconic studies of conditional reflexes and higher nervous activity, as well as his experiments with dogs. Todes shows that Pavlov was not a behaviorist, did not use a bell, and was uninterested in training dogs. The Russian scientist sought to explain not merely external behaviors, but the emotional and intellectual life of animals and humans. 

This is the dramatic and inspirational first-person story of theoretical physicist Dr. Ronald Mallett, who recently discovered the basic equations for a working time machine that he believes can be used as a transport vehicle to the past. Combining elements of Rocket Boys and Elegant Universe, Time Traveler follows Mallett's discovery of Einstein's work on space-time, his study of Godel's work on a solution of Einstein's equation that might allow for time travel.

Brought to you by Penguin. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter was presented with the findings of scientists who had been investigating whether human activities might change the climate in harmful ways. "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late," their report said. They were right...

Es la intención de este audiolibro mostrar que en la relatividad general esas dos caras de la cultura muestran el mismo aire de familia que cualquiera puede apreciar entre el rostro delirante que la tradición nos ha legado de don Quijote y ese icono de la modernidad que es el rostro de un Einstein desmelenado.