Showing titles in Science & Technology

Candace Pert stood at the dawn of three revolutions: the women’s movement, integrative health, and psychopharmacology. A scientific prodigy, she was 30 years ahead of her time, preaching a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to healthcare and medicine long before yoga hit the mainstream and “wellness” took root in our vernacular. Her bestselling book Molecules of Emotion made her the mother of the Mind/Body Revolution, launching a paradigm shift in medicine. Deepak Chopra credits her with creating his career, and he said as much in his eulogy at her funeral.

Deep in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the sun than the Earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called (16) Psyche. It is one of the largest objects in the belt, potentially containing the equivalent of the world’s total economy in metals, though they cannot be brought back to Earth. But (16) Psyche has the potential to unlock something even more valuable: the story of how planets form, and how our planet formed.

We all make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. Not even some of the greatest geniuses in history, as Mario Livio tells us in this marvelous story of scientific error and breakthrough. Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein were all brilliant scientists. Each made groundbreaking contributions to his field - but each also stumbled badly. These five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on Earth, the evolution of the Earth itself, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. As Mario Livio luminously explains, the scientific process advances through error.

Biografía resumida que contiene los datos más relevantes de la vida del conocido físico.

Against the odds, John Urschel found a way to manage his double life as a scholar and an athlete. While he was an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, he simultaneously pursued his PhD in mathematics at MIT. This is his story.

Asked to name a great physicist, most people would mention Newton or Einstein, Feynman or Hawking. But ask a physicist and there’s no doubt that James Clerk Maxwell will be near the top of the list. Maxwell, an unassuming Victorian Scotsman, explained how we perceive color. He uncovered the way gases behave. And, most significantly, he transformed the way physics was undertaken in his explanation of the interaction of electricity and magnetism, revealing the nature of light and laying the groundwork for everything from Einstein’s special relativity to modern electronics.

Antes de conquistar Marte, debemos aprender a sobrevivir en el espacio. Un libro ejemplar sobre el triunfo de la imaginación humana, la fuerza de voluntad y las maravillas infinitas de la galaxia. Scott Kelly es el hombre que más tiempo ha pasado en el espacio, 340 días, durante los cuales ha visto y vivido cosas que prácticamente ninguno de nosotros veremos o experimentaremos nunca.

As a child, Jory Fleming was wracked by uncontrollable tantrums, had no tolerance for people, and couldn’t manage the outside world. Slightly more than a decade later, he was bound for England, selected to attend one of the world’s premier universities. How to Be Human explores life amid a world constructed for neurotypical brains when yours is not. But the miracle of this book is that instead of dwelling on Jory’s limitations, those who inhabit the neurotypical world will begin to better understand their own.

Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.

Working from exclusive inside reporting, New Yorker writer Nicholas Schmidle tells the remarkable story of the test pilots, engineers, and visionaries behind Virgin Galactic’s campaign to build a space tourism company. Schmidle follows a handful of characters - Mark Stucky, Virgin’s lead test pilot; Richard Branson, the eccentric billionaire funding the venture; Mike Moses, the grounded, unflappable president; Mike Alsbury, the test pilot killed in a fatal crash; and others - in pursuit of their collective goal: to make space tourism a reality.

In 1942, a team at the University of Chicago achieved what no one had before: a nuclear chain reaction. At the forefront of this breakthrough stood Enrico Fermi. Straddling the ages of classical physics and quantum mechanics, equally at ease with theory and experiment, Fermi truly was the last man who knew everything - at least about physics. But he was also a complex figure who was a part of both the Italian Fascist Party and the Manhattan Project, and a less-than-ideal father and husband who nevertheless remained one of history's greatest mentors.

From the author of Steve Jobs, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil.

Without John C. Houbolt, a mid-level engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon. Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth. It's the scenario used in 1950s cartoons and horror movies about traveling to outer space. Houbolt had another idea: Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR would link two spacecraft in orbit while the crafts were travelling at 3,600 miles an hour around the moon. His plan was ridiculed and considered unthinkable.

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation as a legendary figure in American aerospace management.

Full of exclusive new stories, and astonishing detail only an astronaut would know, the book conveys what space exploration is really like: the wondrous view of Earth, the surreal weightlessness, the extraordinary danger, the surprising humdrum, the unexpected humour, the newfound perspective, the years of training, the psychological pressures, the gruelling physical toll, the thrill of launch and the trepidation of re-entry. The book also examines the surprising, shocking and often poignant stories of astronauts back on Earth, whose lives are forever changed as they readjust to terra firma.

In her memoir All That Remains, internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist Dame Sue Black recounted her life lived eye to eye with the Grim Reaper. During the course of it, she offered a primer on the basics of identifying human remains, plenty of insights into the fascinating processes of death, and a sober, compassionate understanding of its inescapable presence in our existence. Now in this book, Black builds on that memoir, taking us on a guided tour of the human skeleton and explaining how each person's life history is revealed in their bones.

Explorer, diving pioneer, filmmaker, inventor, and activist, Jacques Cousteau was blessed from his childhood with boundless curiosity about the natural world. As the leader of fascinating, often dangerous expeditions all over the planet, he discovered firsthand the complexity and beauty of life on earth and undersea - and watched the toll taken by human activity in the 20th century.

Since the 1930s, the scale of scientific endeavors has grown exponentially. The birth of Big Science can be traced to Berkeley, California, nearly nine decades ago, when a resourceful young scientist pondered his new invention and declared, "I'm going to be famous!" Ernest Orlando Lawrence's cyclotron would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact.This is the incredible story of how one invention changed the world and of the man principally responsible for it all. Michael Hiltzik tells the riveting full story here for the first time.

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her. Desperate for a solution, she asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. With no blueprint to life, Pang began to create her own, using the language she understands best: Science. That lifelong project eventually resulted in An Outsider's Guide to Humans, an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in.

It was a time of bold new technology, historic moments, and international jousting on the final frontier. But it was also a time of human drama, of moments less public but no less dramatic in the lives of those who made the golden age of space flight happen. These are the moments and the lives that Into That Silent Sea captures, a book that tells the intimate stories of the men and women, American and Russian, who made the space race their own and gave the era its compelling character.