Showing titles in History

From one of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, comes an intimate and astonishingly frank examination of her own rape at 15, the life of her rapist, and how both shaped her life and work. Jessica Stern is one of the world’s foremost experts on...

Vor 100.000 Jahren war der Homo sapiens noch ein unbedeutendes Tier, das unauffällig in einem abgelegenen Winkel des afrikanischen Kontinents lebte. Unsere Vorfahren teilten sich den Planeten mit mindestens fünf weiteren menschlichen Spezies und die Rolle, die sie im Ökosystem spielten, war nicht größer als die von Gorillas, Libellen oder Quallen. Vor 70.000 Jahren dann vollzog sich ein mysteriöser und rascher Wandel mit dem Homo sapiens.

Every applicable government agency and almost all mainstream media outlets claim that chemtrails are merely a "conspiracy theory". They say that the lines in the sky are harmless condensation trails and that jet aircrafts have always produced emissions that can linger in the sky for hours as they spread out and form a hazy cloud-cover. They say that anybody who asserts that aircraft are routinely spraying us with toxic materials is crazy. If this is so, then why are we consistently seeing anomalously high levels of toxins in rainwater samples as well as in ambient air samples?

Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the 18th century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds - it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe’s industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion.

How does the physics we know today - a highly professionalized enterprise, inextricably linked to government and industry - link back to its origins as a liberal art in Ancient Greece? What is the path that leads from the old philosophy of nature and its concern with humankind's place in the universe to modern massive international projects that hunt down fundamental particles and industrial laboratories that manufacture marvels? This audiobook introduces us to Islamic astronomers and mathematicians calculating the size of the Earth while their caliphs conquered much of it and more.

From Aristotle to Einstein, An Incomplete Theory takes us on a riveting journey through time, making pit stops at the lives of many exceptional individuals whose insightful work is the foundation of the physical science we know today. Free from equations, this book unlocks the vault of human knowledge with no assumption of scientific background on the part of the listener. It tells and weaves together the stories behind some of history’s greatest thinkers and scientific discoveries.

Collections of preserved plant specimens, known as herbaria, have existed for nearly five centuries. These pressed and labeled plants have been essential resources for scientists, allowing them to describe and differentiate species and to document and research plant changes and biodiversity over time—including changes related to climate. Maura C. Flannery tells the history of herbaria, from the earliest collections belonging to such advocates of the technique as sixteenth-century botanist Luca Ghini, to the collections of poets, politicians, and painters, and to the digitization today.

Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.

Trois ans de travail avec plus de vingt scientifiques et de spécialistes de haut niveau : Voici révélées les preuves modernes de l'existence de Dieu. Pendant près de quatre siècles, de Copernic à Freud en passant par Galilée et Darwin, les découvertes scientifiques se sont accumulées de façon spectaculaire, donnant l'impression qu'il était possible d'expliquer l'Univers sans avoir besoin de recourir à un dieu créateur.

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species—but there's a catch. Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these 'sleeping beauties' crop up everywhere. But why? Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Bully for Brontosaurus and learn about natural history.

A collection of BBC radio documentaries celebrating the lunar landings and their legacy. On July 20th 1969, for the first time in history, man walked on the moon. Over 50 years later, this 'giant leap for mankind' still captures our imagination, and in this four-part collection, we bring together some of the most fascinating and insightful BBC documentaries about our ever-changing relationship with our only natural satellite.

In these ten absorbing series, award-winning authors Naomi Alderman and Philip Ball and guest presenters take a look at the many amazing events and characters from science's long history. Among the topics explored are feuding dinosaur hunters, jumping genes, the engine that nearly ran out of steam, the day the Earth stopped standing still, how laughing gas was discovered, the first female professional scientist in Britain, and how an eel sparked our interest in electricity.

Drawing on conversations with hundreds of the world’s top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the New York Times, Natalie Angier creates a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy. The Canon is a vital book for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time—from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it’s for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or what electricity is.

In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.

The periodic table of elements, first encountered by many of us at school, provides an arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered by their atomic number, electron configuration, and recurring chemical properties, and divided into periodic trends. In this Very Short Introduction audiobook, Eric R. Scerri looks at the trends in properties of elements that led to the construction of the table and shows how the deeper meaning of the table's structure gradually became apparent with the development of atomic theory.

A true scientific pause-resister that traces a remarkable scientific breakthrough (the isolation of endorphins in the brain) as dedicated scientists race - not only with their fellow scientists - but against time and the profit hungry giant pharmaceutical companies. This audiobook chronicles the fascinating discovery of endorphins, the body's natural painkiller.

A masterful, genre-defying narrative of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA’s deep-space mission to Europa—the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our solar system—powered by a motley team of obsessives and eccentrics. When scientists discovered...

Biologist Rob Dunn's Every Little Thing is the story of man's obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E. O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity's unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world-from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.

“Offers a useful reminder of the role of modern science in fundamentally transforming all of our lives.” —President Barack Obama (on Twitter) “An important book.” —Steven Pinker, The New York Times Book Review The surprising and important story of how humans gained what amounts to an...