Showing results for "The Race" in Science & Technology

A true scientific pause-resister that traces a remarkable scientific breakthrough (the isolation of endorphins in the brain) as dedicated scientists race - not only with their fellow scientists - but against time and the profit hungry giant pharmaceutical companies. This audiobook chronicles the fascinating discovery of endorphins, the body's natural painkiller.

The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Oscar Nominated For Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space...

In The Optimist, the Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey presents the most detailed account yet of Altman’s rise, his time as legendary entrepreneur Paul Graham’s protégé and successor as head of Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator where Altman became the premier power broker in Silicon Valley; the founding of OpenAI and his recruitment of a small yet superior team.

Everyone has heard of DNA. But by itself, DNA is just an inert blueprint for life. It is the ribosome - an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms - that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us. Gene Machine is an insider account of the race for the structure of the ribosome, a fundamental discovery that both advances our knowledge of all life and could lead to the development of better antibiotics against life-threatening diseases. 

'A thrilling account' - Walter Isaacson Musk versus Bezos. China versus the United States. The government versus the private sector. Welcome to the rivalries and alliances defining the New Space Age. At stake? Billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. A fleet of...

As featured on CNN’s Amanpour & Company and BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week with Andrew Marr One of the Financial Times’ best books of 2021 In this compelling journey through twenty-six countries, Simon Mundy traces how the struggle to respond to the climate crisis is rapidly reshaping the...

A harrowing memoir of one woman's extraordinary effort to save her husband's life—and the discovery of a forgotten cure that has the potential to save millions more. Epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee and her husband, psychologist Tom Patterson, were vacationing in Egypt when Tom came down...

In 1961, Wally Funk was among the Mercury 13, the first group of American pilots to pass the ‘Women in Space’ programme. Wally sailed through a series of rigorous physical and mental tests, her scores beating many of the male candidates, including those of John Glenn, the first American in orbit. But just one week before she was due to enter the final phase of training, the programme was abruptly cancelled. A combination of politics and prejudice meant that none of the women ever flew into space.

The dramatic story of the married scientists who founded BioNTech and developed the first vaccine against the COVID-19 pandemic. Nobody thought it was possible. In mid-January 2020, Ugur Sahin told Özlem Türeci, his wife and decades-long research partner, that a vaccine against what would soon...

A 2022 Audie Award Finalist A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched...

The year 2016 marks the 60-year anniversary of the phrase 'artificial intelligence', and in this fascinating audiobook Luke Dormehl charts the weird and wonderful journey of one of mankind's greatest projects, the creation of Thinking Machines. This is a story of what it means to be human in the face of accelerating machine intelligence. It's about trying to make computers that are smarter than we are and what happens when it goes wrong. About what creativity means when all knowledge is data that can be stored on microchips.

Breaking All The Rules: The Inside Story of the New Race traces the origins of a second Space Race that began at the end of the original 1960s US-Soviet space race and eventually led to SpaceX and the explosive growth in commercial space being seen today. The story covers how this revolution began with a band of misfit engineers and scientists and the inside story of how this was eventually ignited with the money and vision of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.

James Tobin, award-winning author of Ernie Pyle's War and The Man He Became, has penned the definitive account of the inspiring and impassioned race between the Wright brothers and their primary rival Samuel Langley across ten years and two continents to conquer the air. For years, Wilbur Wright...

A wry and thought-provoking tale about the defiant, eccentric figures obsessed with Australia's deadliest reptiles. Raymond Hoser is known as the Snakeman, a moniker he has zealously defended. As a day job, Hoser runs a business in Melbourne that offers several services. One service is snake...

Today, mobile connections are so readily accessible that it is perhaps easy to forget the time when only the elite had access to a phone provided by the sole operator: the Government of India. It all changed in the early 1990s as liberalisation stirred the Indian economy out of its decades of...

A New York Times bestseller! The historic race that reawakened the promise of manned spaceflight A Finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound...

Learn why NASA astronaut Mike Collins calls this extraordinary space race story "the best book on Apollo": this inspiring and intimate ode to ingenuity celebrates one of the most daring feats in human history. When the alarm went off forty thousand feet above the moon's surface, both astronauts...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth “[An] engaging and thought-provoking book, one focused on the theatrical politics and often deeply troubling science that shape our definitions of life on...

Quando Jennifer Doudna ainda cursava a sexta série, encontrou em sua cama um exemplar de A dupla hélice, de James Watson, deixado por seu pai. Avançando pelas páginas, Doudna ficou fascinada com os bastidores da competição científica pela descoberta dos tijolinhos que constroem a vida. Motivada pela paixão de entender o funcionamento da natureza e por transformar descobertas em invenções práticas, Doudna ajudaria a realizar aquilo que o próprio James Watson, um dos descobridores da estrutura do DNA, classificara como o próximo avanço científico mais importante da biologia.

In Billion Dollar Burger, Chase Purdy explores the companies at the cutting edge of the nascent food technology sector. He tells the inside account of JUST Inc. (formerly Hampton Creek) - the first and only food startup ever to hit unicorn status - and its lightning-rod CEO Josh Tetrick as they race to create a viable synthetic meat product, bring it to market ahead of the competition and upend the monolith of animal agriculture.