Showing titles in Science & Technology

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.

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.

As Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Walter Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist - yet."

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the iconic figures of the 20th century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress. When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s.

The extraordinary story of the Nazi-era scientific genius who discovered how cancer cells eat—and what it means for how we should. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg—a cousin of the famous finance Warburgs—was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the...

The Instant New York Times Bestseller "Pollan’s real genius—the word is not too strong—remains intact. That is his uncanny ability to scent the direction in which the culture is headed. He did it with food and psychedelics, and now, though A World Appears focuses on AI only intermittently...

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. 

Never before has criminal justice rested so heavily on scientific evidence. With ever-more sophisticated and powerful techniques at their disposal, forensic scientists have an unprecedented ability to help solve even the most complex cases. Angela Gallop has been a forensic scientist for over 40 years. After joining the Forensic Science Service, the first crime scene she attended was for a case involving the Yorkshire Ripper.

After the first Trump administration launched the Artemis program, NASA created a historic competition that pit Elon Musk's SpaceX against Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, flanked far away by Russia and China. At stake: billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. In this gripping work, veteran reporter Christian Davenport chronicles the mad scramble to shape humanity's off-planet future.

David L. Mearns has discovered some of the world's most fascinating and elusive shipwrecks. The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles his most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research, and mid-ocean stamina and courage required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, plus the moving human stories that lie behind each of these oceanic tragedies. Combining the adventuring derring-do of Indiana Jones with the precision of a scientist, The Shipwreck Hunter opens an illuminating porthole into the shadowy depths of the ocean.

Mary Anning was only 12 years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton - of an ichthyosaur - while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary's incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct.  

Marie Skłodowska Curie’s name is etched into the history of science as a pioneer, a groundbreaker, and an enduring symbol of perseverance. Born in Warsaw in 1867 under Russian occupation, she rose from modest beginnings to become one of the most celebrated scientists of all time. Her life story is not only about brilliant discoveries—it is also about overcoming barriers of gender, nationality, and circumstance with unwavering determination.

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award From the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, Magnificent Rebels is a riveting, eye-opening biography of the first Romantics: a revolutionary group of friends based in the small German town of Jena whose modern ideas transformed society...

Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller fans, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.

Brought to you by Penguin. Summer 1939. War is coming. The British believe that, through ingenuity and scientific prowess, they alone have a war-winning weapon: radar. They are wrong. The Germans have it too. They believe that their unique maritime history means their pilots have no need of...

The best-selling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns. In 2012, Nobel Prize winning scientist Jennifer Doudna hit upon an invention that will transform the future of the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical...

"A thorough, illuminating exploration of the most consequential controversy raging in modern science." --New York Times Book Review An Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review Longlisted for PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Longlisted for Goodreads Choice Award Every...

We all think we know who Steve Jobs was, what made him tick, and what made him succeed. Yet the single most important question about him has never been answered. The young, impulsive, egotistical genius was ousted in the mid-80s from the company he founded, exiled from his own kingdom and cast...

Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning—and brought him to the edge of madness.

Captain Scott's ill-fated journey to the Antarctic Pole in 1911 is part triumph, part tragedy - an epic tale of heroic endeavor which has inspired books and films over the generations. Despite the simple outline of the story, Scott and his fellow explorers emerge as richly varied characters, brought to life by the diarist's skill as a story-teller. Scott's journal reaches its moving and dramatic crescendo when the explorers reach the Pole, only to discover that the Norwegian, Amundsen, has beaten them to it by many weeks.