Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in History

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.

This is the story of the Universe including life as we know it.

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.

This momentous biography tells the story of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T. H. Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley.

This ""valuable and entertaining"" (New York Times Book Review) book explores how scientists are adapting nature's best ideas to solve tough 21st century problems. Biomimicry is rapidly transforming life on earth. Biomimics study nature's most successful ideas over the past 3.5 million years...

The early history of Earth covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries, and even millennia become virtually meaningless. Instead, paleontologists and scientists who study geochronology divide time into periods and eras. What humans commonly refer to as the “Ice Age” is actually a series of fluctuating climate events that have occurred throughout the planet’s history. These ongoing historical phenomena are difficult to conceptualize because of both the time frame involved and the natural process by which they cyclically unfold.

Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley had a huge impact on Gothic horror and science fiction genres. The name Frankenstein has become part of our everyday language, often used in derogatory terms to describe scientists who have overstepped a perceived moral line. But how did a 19-year-old woman with no formal education come up with the idea for an extraordinary novel such as Frankenstein?

The authoritative story of the headline-making discovery of gravitational waves—by an eminent theoretical astrophysicist and award-winning writer. From the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots and A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, the epic story of the scientific campaign to record the...

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.

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.

Ever since the human mind developed the capacity for thought, people have pondered not just the meaning of life, but the genesis of the world, the universe, and all the natural marvels and precious forms of life within it. To this day, all of these intricate subjects continue to be matters of great contention, and they are often best encapsulated in the debate between creationism and evolution. On the one hand are those who are adamant that it was God, or some other supreme being, that designed and crafted every detail of the universe.

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.

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.

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.

Stepping effortlessly from myth to cutting-edge science, Mutants gives a brilliant narrative account of our genetic code and the captivating people whose bodies have revealed it - a French convent girl who found herself changing sex at puberty; children who, echoing Homer's Cyclops, are born with a single eye in the middle of their foreheads; a village of long-lived Croatian dwarves; one family, whose bodies were entirely covered with hair, was kept at the Burmese royal court for four generations and gave Darwin one of his keenest insights into heredity.

When Donald Johanson found a partial skeleton, approximately 3.5 million years old, in a remote region of Ethiopia in 1974, a headline-making controversy was launched that continues today. Bursting with all the suspense and intrigue of a fast-paced adventure novel, here is Johanson’s lively account of the extraordinary discovery of “Lucy.” By expounding the controversial change Lucy makes in our view of human origins, Johanson provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of the history of paleoanthropology and the colorful, eccentric characters who were, and are, a part of it.

In 1919, British scientists led extraordinary expeditions to Brazil and Africa to test Albert Einstein's revolutionary new theory of general relativity in what became the century's most celebrated scientific experiment. The result ushered in a new era and made Einstein a global celebrity by confirming his dramatic prediction that the path of light rays would be bent by gravity. Today, Einstein's theory is scientific fact. Yet the effort to "weigh light" by measuring the gravitational deflection of starlight during the May 29, 1919, solar eclipse has been clouded by myth and skepticism.

Many of us know little about Archimedes other than his "Eureka" exclamation upon discovering that he could immerse an object in a full tub of water and measure the spillage to determine the object's weight. That seemingly simple observation not only proved to King Hieron II of Syracuse that a certain amount of silver had been used in what was supposed to be his solid-gold crown, it established the key principles of buoyancy that govern the flotation of hot-air balloons, ships, and denizens of the sea.

The Top Ten Bestseller Black holes. DNA. The Large Hadron Collider. Ever had that sneaking feeling that you are missing out on some truly spectacular science? You do? Well, fear not, for help is at hand. Ben Miller was working on his Physics PhD at Cambridge when he accidentally became a...

A magnificently reported and soulfully crafted exploration of the human immune system–the key to health and wellness, life and death. An epic, first-of-its-kind book, entwining leading-edge scientific discovery with the intimate stories of four individual lives, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning...