Showing titles in History

Michael Faraday: The Life and Legacy of the Influential 19th Century Scientist Who Pioneered Electromagnetism examines the life and work that made Faraday one of history’s most important scientists. You will learn about Michael Faraday like never before.

From the sleek Aston Martin that spits out bullets, nails, and passengers at the push of a button to the microjet that makes hairpin turns to avoid a heat-seeking missile, the science and technology of James Bond films have kept millions of movie fans guessing for decades. Are these amazing feats and gadgets truly possible? The Science of James Bond takes you on a fascinating excursion through the true science that underlies Bond's most fantastic and off-the-wall accoutrements.

Eclipses: What Everyone Needs to Know helps explain the profound differences between a 99.99 percent partial eclipse and true totality, and inform listeners how to experience this most beautiful natural phenomenon successfully. It covers eclipses of sun, moon, and other astronomical objects, and their applications in science, as well as their role in history, literature, and myth. It describes the phenomena to expect at a solar eclipse and the best ways to record them - by camera, video, or by simple handmade experiments.

The secrets of science meet the drama of the high seas. Amir D. Aczel - the distinguished science writer behind and Mystery of the Aleph - turns detective as he uncovers the fascinating story of the invention of the compass.

For over two thousand years, from the Medieval Arabic world to the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, scientific progress has relied on different methods of establishing fact from fiction. Achieve logical perfection, the reasoning went, and you would be rewarded with ultimate, universal truth. But there is far more to proof than axioms, theories and laws: when demonstrating that a new medical treatment works, persuading a jury of someone's guilt, or deciding whether you trust a self-driving car or a financial transaction, the weighing up of evidence is far from simple.

In Britain, we're sometimes inclined to think of science as happening far away from us - in labs or universities or even in the past - and having little impact on our lives. In this groundbreaking series, Lisa Jardine weaves science back into the everyday by showing how the concerns of scientists have always been the concerns of us all. Starting in Restoration England, we travel through seven ages to examine Britain's unparalleled contribution to science.

Physics informs our understanding of how the world works - but more than that, key breakthroughs in physics have transformed everyday life. We journey back to 10 separate days in history to understand how particular breakthroughs were achieved, meet the individuals responsible and see how each breakthrough has influenced our lives.

Fascinated from an early age by the natural world in general and ants in particular, Edward Osborne Wilson's field work on them and on all social insects has vastly expanded our knowledge of their many species and fascinating ways of being. This work led to his 1975 book Sociobiology, which created an intellectual firestorm from his contention that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is governed by the laws of evolution and genetics. Subsequently, Wilson has become a leading voice on the crucial importance to all life of biodiversity.

Authors Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin trace the emergence of the concept of the environment following World War II, a period characterized by both hope for a new global order and fear of humans' capacity for almost limitless destruction. It was at this moment that a new idea and a new narrative about the planet-wide impact of people's behavior emerged, closely allied to anxieties for the future. With the rise of "the environment", the authors argue, came new expertise, making certain kinds of knowledge crucial to understanding the future of our planet.

La nostra vita, ci ricorda Bill Bryson, è il risultato di "una straordinaria dose di fortuna biologica", l'esito di una serie lunghissima di eventi, per molti versi assolutamente misteriosi. Questo libro prova a spiegare come un tale colpo di fortuna si sia potuto verificare.

The epic story of the invention of a global network of weights, scales, and instruments for measurement.

Millions of transactions each day depend on a reliable network of weights and measures. This network has been called a greater invention than the steam engine, comparable only to the development of the printing press.

The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes.

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly—he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear reactor that Nazi scientists had tried—and failed—to build at the end of World War II. This unexpected gift, wrapped in a piece of paper inscribed with a few cryptic but crucial lines, would launch Koeth, a nuclear physicist and professor, and his colleague Miriam Hiebert, a cultural heritage scientist, on an odyssey to trace the tale of these cubes.

100 Great Scientists Who Changed the World introduces the giants of scientific discovery and examines their achievements - the men and women who, often in the face of extreme skepticism or worse, have striven and succeeded in pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge. Ranging across the spectrum of scientific endeavor from the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo through the medical revolutions of Hippocrates and Galen, it includes the fields of physics, biology, chemistry, and genetics.

In this Very Short Introduction, John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture.

Alzheimer’s disease, a haunting and harrowing ailment, is one of the world’s most common causes of death. Alzheimer’s lingers for years, with patients’ outward appearance unaffected while their cognitive functions fade away. Patients lose the ability to work and live independently, to remember and recognize. There is still no proven way to treat Alzheimer’s because its causes remain unknown. Mind Thief is a comprehensive and engaging history of Alzheimer’s that demystifies efforts to understand the disease.

Arriva su Audible la seconda stagione del podcast "Questa è Scienza!". Massimo Polidoro, scrittore e divulgatore scientifico, incontrando ricercatori, divulgatori e studiosi provenienti dai campi più diversi, fisica, biologia, psicologia, medicina, chimica, matematica..., ci conduce alla scoperta dei tanti modi in cui la scienza attraversa la nostra vita quotidiana, aiutandoci a capire quello che ognuno di noi dovrebbe conoscere. La scienza è qualcosa di incredibilmente affascinante.

Christmas, 1859. Just one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his intellectual forebears.

We all know the history of science that we learned from grade school textbooks: how Galileo used his telescope to show that the earth was not the center of the universe; how Newton divined gravity from the falling apple; how Einstein unlocked the mysteries of time and space with a simple equation. This history is made up of long periods of ignorance and confusion, punctuated once an age by a brilliant thinker who puts it all together. These few tower over the ordinary masses, and in the traditional account, it is to them that we owe science in its entirety. This belief is wrong.

Sixty years ago, cars and airplanes were still death traps waiting to happen. Today, both are safer than ever, thanks in part to one pioneering air force doctor's research on seatbelts and ejection seats. The exploits of John Paul Stapp (1910-1999) come to thrilling life in this biography of a Renaissance man who was once blasted - faster than a .45 caliber bullet - across the desert in his Sonic Wind rocket sled, only to be slammed to a stop in barely a second.