Showing titles in Science & Technology

The Moog synthesizer "bent the course of music forever" Rolling Stone declared. Bob Moog, the man who did that bending, was a lovable geek with Einstein hair and pocket protectors. He walked into history in 1964 when his homemade contraption unexpectedly became a sensation-suddenly everyone wanted a Moog. The Moog's gamechanging sounds saturated sixties counterculture and burst into the disco party in the seventies to set off the electronic dance music movement. Bob had singlehandedly founded the synth industry and became a star.

Born in 1905 in the center of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viktor Frankl was a witness to the great political, philosophical, and scientific upheavals of the 20th century. In these stirring recollections, Frankl describes how as a young doctor of neurology in prewar Vienna, his disagreements with Freud and Adler led to the development of "the third Viennese School of Psychotherapy", known as logotherapy; recounts his harrowing trials in four concentration camps during the War; and reflects on the celebrity brought by Man's Search for Meaning in 1945.

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.

Thinking in Numbers is the book that Daniel Tammet, best-selling author and mathematical savant, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes, everyday examples, and ruminations on history, literature, and more, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions, and equations underpin all our lives.

Books Do Furnish a Life is divided by theme, including celebrating nature, exploring humanity, and interrogating faith. For the first time, it brings together Richard Dawkins's forewords, afterwords and introductions to the work of some of the leading thinkers of our age - Carl Sagan, Lawrence Krauss, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Wolpert - with a selection of his reviews to provide an electrifying celebration of science writing, both fiction and non-fiction. It is also a sparkling addition to Dawkins's own remarkable canon of work.

In 40 years, Earth's population will reach 10 billion. Can our world support that? What kind of world will it be? Those answering these questions generally fall into two deeply divided groups - Wizards and Prophets, as Charles Mann calls them in this balanced, authoritative, nonpolemical new book. The Prophets, he explains, follow William Vogt, a founding environmentalist who believed that in using more than our planet has to give, our prosperity will lead us to ruin.

In 1610, Galileo published the Siderius nuncius, or Starry Messenger, a "hurried little masterpiece" in John Heilbron's words. Presenting to the world his remarkable observations using the recently invented telescope, Galileo dramatically challenged our idea of the perfection of the heavens and the centrality of the Earth in the universe. Indeed, the appearance of the little book is regarded as one of the great moments in the history of science.

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone.

Sharks have been on this planet for over 400 million years, so there is a lot they can teach us about survival and adaptability. For example: how do sharks, which unlike other fish are denser than water, stay afloat? They keep moving. When Jasmin Graham, an award-winning young shark scientist, started to feel that the traditional path to becoming a marine biologist was pulling her under, she remembered this important lesson: keep moving forward.

The riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC, a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s.

Delete everything you think you know about tech pioneer John McAfee, whose antivirus software operates on millions of computers around the world. Drawn from hours of conversations between Mark Eglinton and John McAfee in 2019, No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes provides startling insight into the extraordinary life of one of America's genuine renegades.

Jim Simons is the greatest moneymaker in modern financial history. His record bests those of legendary investors, including Warren Buffett, George Soros and Ray Dalio. Yet Simons and his strategies are shrouded in mystery. The financial industry has long craved a look inside Simons's secretive hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies and veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Gregory Zuckerman delivers the goods.

Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

In 2010, Cady Coleman boarded a rocket and blasted off into space for her third NASA mission, a six-month expedition to the International Space Station where she was the only woman on her six-person crew. After years spent overcoming obstacles in competitive and elite environments, including grappling with her own doubts and needing to overturn the expectations of others, Coleman became a success story in a role that wasn’t built with her in mind. In Sharing Space, Cady shares counterintuitive insights integral to her success.

Terry Tempest Williams's mother told her: "I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until after I'm gone." Fans of Williams's iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was a member of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.

In her mid-20s, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener - stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial - left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: A world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.

What can death teach us about life? Conducting many thousands of post-mortems has given Dr Richard Shepherd the opportunity to examine death at every stage of life. Each autopsy is its own unique investigation, providing evidence of how, through life, the risks to us ebb and flow. From old to young, from murder to misadventure and from illness to accidental death, each body has taught him something: about human development, about mortality, about its owner's life story, about justice and even about himself.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

In How the Laser Happened, Nobel laureate Charles Townes provides a highly personal look at some of the leading events in 20th-century physics. This lively memoir, packed with firsthand accounts and historical anecdotes, is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of science and an inspiring example for students considering scientific careers.

No Stone Unturned recreates the genesis of NecroSearch International: a small ,eclectic group of scientists and law enforcement personal, active and retired, who volunteer their services to help locate the clandestine graves of murder victims and recover the remains and evidence to assist with the apprehension and conviction of the killers.