Showing titles in History

The History of Science offers a fascinating overview of the major leaps forward in science across the ages. From the mathematical and medical advances of the ancient world, to the Scientific Revolution in the Renaissance, to the ground-breaking developments of the 20th century, a precise chronological account of progress is given.

'A fascinating book . . . Bhaskar is a reassuringly positive and often witty guide' Observer 'A fascinating, must-read book covering a vast array of topics from the arts to the sciences, technology to policy. This is a brilliant and thought-provoking response to one of the most critical...

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.

Книга рассказывает о жизни людей в далекой середине XX века, о формировании увлекательной науки о мозге человека, о тех, кто в мимолетных встречах на научных форумах или в теснейших контактах повседневной работы обогатил своими мыслями и трудом изучение сложнейшего создания на нашей планете — мозга человека. В книге — о расшифровке законов активности здорового и больного мозга и о приложимости этих законов не только в медицине, но и к событиям социального порядка государственного масштаба.

Reveals the cutting edge of New Science and shows how established science disallows inquiry that challenges the status quo--even when it produces verifiable results Contains 43 essays by 19 researchers denoting cutting-edge, heretical, or suppressed scientific research, including Immanuel...

Bloomsbury presents Nuclear Russia by Paul Josephson, read by Leighton Pugh. In the first cultural and political history of the Russian nuclear age, Paul Josephson describes the rise of nuclear physics in the USSR, the enthusiastic pursuit of military and peaceful nuclear programs through the...

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.

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.

GPS Declassified examines the development of GPS from its secret, cold war military roots to its emergence as a worldwide consumer industry. Drawing on previously unexplored documents, the authors examine how military rivalries influenced the creation of GPS and shaped public perceptions about its origin. Told by a son of a Navy insider and a science and technology journalist, the story chronicles the research and technological advances required for the development of GPS.

In 1676, Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote in a letter to philosopher Robert Hooke, "If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants." By the time he died, Newton had become science's greatest giant, and every scientist who has followed him has stood on his shoulders. Newton is widely considered the most influential scientist in history, best known for the discovery of gravity and the subsequent laws of motion that he theorized.

Over the past few years, devastating tsunamis off the coast of the Indian Ocean have killed hundreds of thousands of people. Even more alarmingly, scientists predict that these tsunamis, as well as a series of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, will be striking with even greater frequency and may eventually threaten Hawaii, California, and Oregon.

From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War...

Eclipses have stunned, frightened, emboldened, and mesmerized people for thousands of years. They were recorded on ancient turtle shells discovered in the Wastes of Yin in China, on clay tablets from Mesopotamia and on the Mayan "Dresden Codex". They are mentioned in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and at least eight times in the Bible. Columbus used them to trick people, while Renaissance painter Taddeo Gaddi was blinded by one. Sorcery was banished within the Catholic Church after astrologers used an eclipse to predict a pope's death.

Embark on a captivating voyage through the skies with "In The Sky With Stars: A History of Air Balloons." This meticulously crafted exploration unveils the extraordinary story of humanity's quest to conquer the skies, from the pioneering days of the Montgolfier brothers to the modern frontiers of space exploration.

The first human organ transplant in 1950 at a suburban hospital is the focus of The Graft: How a Pioneering Operation Sparked the Modern Age of Organ Transplants. The book examines the controversies the operation generated and the progress medicine has made in organ transplantation.

This book is the first to examine the history of imaginative thinking about intelligent machines. As real Artificial Intelligence (AI) begins to touch on all aspects of our lives, this long narrative history shapes how the technology is developed, deployed, and regulated. It is therefore a crucial social and ethical issue. Part I of this book provides a historical overview from ancient Greece to the start of modernity. Part II focuses on the 20th and 21st centuries in which a greater density of narratives emerge alongside rapid developments in AI technology.  

Bloomsbury presents So Very Small by Thomas Levenson, read by Mike Cooper. In 1665, an infectious disease swept through the British capital and claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people. It would take another two hundred years for the cause of the Great Plague of London to be confirmed: a...

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.

Mapping the Heavens provides a tour of the "greatest hits" of cosmological discoveries - the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is at the forefront of the research - an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe.

Vitamin C begins with scurvy, which afflicted Europe for four hundred years and killed millions. The reasons that a disease whose cure was known from the outset persisted over that time are at once baffling and familiar, and these trials eventually lead to invention of the science of epidemiology. Author Stephen M. Sagar MD then chronicles the discovery of vitamins at the beginning of the twentieth century, a story that encapsulates the rise of a scientific approach to nutrition but with surprising twists and turns.