Showing titles in Science & Engineering

Best-selling author Steven Johnson recounts - in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion - the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America's Founding Fathers. The Invention of Air is a title of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

Daniel Levitin follows up his acclaimed New York Times best-selling first book, This Is Your Brain on Music, with The World in Six Songs, an audacious look at how the brain evolved to play and listen to music in six fundamental forms and gave rise to human culture.

Want to learn more about organic food? Curious about alternative power sources? Want to do your part to help save the environment? The way that you live, work, travel, eat, drink, and dress affects the earth and the environment - and this concise, eye-opening book gives you all the tools you need to live a "green" lifestyle.

Here is a revolutionary perspective on the relationship between religion and science that builds a bridge between people of all beliefs.

Green to Gold is an essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This audio explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green to Gold, shows how companies generate lasting value.

From one of the world's greatest economic minds, author of the New York Times best seller The End of Poverty, a clear and vivid map of the road to sustainable and equitable global prosperity—and an augury of the global economic collapse that lies ahead if we don't follow it.

As far as we can see there are countless other galaxies of all shapes and sizes set within an ever-expanding space that was created in a "Big Bang" nearly 14 billion years ago. Along with solutions to old puzzles, however, come new riddles, as most of our Universe appears to be in the form of some kind of unseen "dark matter" and incomprehensible "dark energy" whose natures and origins remain unfathomable.

How on earth did James Herriot come to be sitting on a high Yorkshire moor, smelling vaguely of cows? James isn't sure, but he knows that he loves it. This second hilarious volume of memoirs contains more tales of James' unpredictable boss Siegfried Farnon; his charming student, brother Tristan; animal mayhem galore; and his first encounters with a beautiful girl named Helen.

The heart of this course examines the planets themselves, and reveals how they are constructed and how they differ from one another. By studying the physical astronomy of all the planets in the Solar System, we can attempt to understand their true nature. Ultimately, these lectures will bring us to a greater understanding of the Solar System's creation, which brings us again back to the beginning and what it means to us as we look outward from our rotating Earth.

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted Pluto out of planethood. Far from the sun, tiny, and eccentric in orbit, it's a wonder Pluto has any fans. Yet during the mounting debate over Pluto's status, Americans rallied behind the extraterrestrial underdog.

Based on entirely new research - including a detailed questionnaire completed by five million people in 33 countries - Why Him? Why Her? will change your understanding of why you love him (or her) and help you use nature's chemistry to find and keep your life partner.

While reporting just outside of Darfur, Stephan Faris discovered that climate change was at the root of that conflict, and he began to wonder what current and impending - and largely unanticipated - crises such changes have in store for the world. Forecast provides the answers. Global warming will spur the spread of many diseases. Italy has already experienced its first climate-change epidemic of a tropical disease, and malaria is gaining ground in Africa.

Embracing the Wide Sky is a unique and brilliantly imaginative portrait of how we think, learn, remember and create, brimming with personal insights and anecdotes, and explanations of the most up-to-date, mind-bending discoveries from fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology and linguistics. This is a profound and provocative book that will transform our understanding and respect for every kind of mind.

We are a nation battered every day by stories about horrific calamities, tragic events, frightening statistics. Inevitably our thoughts turn personal and we wonder if we have what it takes to get through the worst thrown our way. While there are plenty of books about coping with adversity, it isn't until now, with The Survivors Club, that we discover the human factors that determine survival.

Written in 1791 as a response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is a seminal work on human freedom and equality. Using the French Revolution and its ideals as an example, he demonstrates his belief that any government must put the inherent rights of its citizens above all else, especially politics.

Most works about the environment build on dire threats warning of the possible extinction of humanity. Alan Weisman avoids frightening off readers by disarmingly wiping out our species in the first few minutes. He then continues with an astounding depiction of how Earth will fare once we're no longer around. The World Without Us is a one-of-a-kind work that sweeps through time from the moment of humanity's future extinction to millions of years into the future.

Take a "fantastic voyage" through the whorls and curves of the human brain, no miniaturization required. Learn everything from how quickly you can possibly think (and that left-handed people think faster) to why being bad feels so good (yes, there's a biochemical explanation).

Here's a biographical profile of Charles Goodyear, the man who gave the world one of its most useful products - vulcanized rubber. Natural rubber, the milky sap of rubber trees, is not a very practical commodity. It melts in hot weather or cracks and freezes in cold weather. In 1839, Charles Goodyear came across a process that made rubber so useful it changed the world we live in. A century later there were 122 rubber factories in Ohio.

Here's a biographical profile of the Duesenberg brothers, Augie and Fred, who built some of America's most famous cars, cars that today sell for millions at auctions. Jay Leno, owner of an extensive classic car collection, calls the Duesenberg SJ his favorite car. He feels it is "probably the greatest American car" ever built. The Duesenberg name evokes images of a European heritage, an automobile built in the image and traditions of iconic stalwarts such as Mercedes, Benz, Bugatti and Ferrari.

Here's a biographical profile of Ransom E. Olds, regarded as the first of the great American automobile pioneers. He not only sold the first car manufactured in America, his company was the first of the great automobile enterprises, a model and training ground for the Dodge brothers, Henry Ford, Henry Leland (founder of Cadillac and Lincoln), and other automotive trailblazers.