Showing titles in Science & Technology

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.

Best-selling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson. Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives - a camera, a phone, a computer, a bicycle, a car, a dishwasher perhaps - all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection....

Although Thomas Alva Edison was the most famous American of his time, and remains an international name today, he is mostly remembered only for the gift of universal electric light. His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world - already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices - that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius patented 1,093 inventions, not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.

Comment devient-on le plus jeune Français à partir vers la Station spatiale ? Comment passer de sa Normandie natale aux pas de tir de Baïkonour et de Cap Canaveral ? Pour la première fois, Thomas Pesquet se raconte sans détour, dans un récit très personnel aussi drôle que surprenant. Il nous entraîne des coulisses de l’école des astronautes jusqu’au frisson du décollage, partage le quotidien de ses 396 jours à bord de l’ISS et l’émerveillement de découvrir, flottant dans le vide intersidéral, notre planète si fragile.

A small number of people, motivated by an insatiable greed for power and wealth, and backed by a pinstripe army of enablers, have driven the world to the brink of destruction. Patrick Alley, co-founder of Global Witness and the author of Very Bad People, introduces us to some of the world's worst warlords, grifters and kleptocrats who can be found everywhere from presidential palaces to the board rooms of some of the world's best known companies. Pitted against them, the book also follows the people unravelling the deals, tracking the money and going undercover at great risk.

From the acclaimed Vanity Fair and GQ journalist–an unprecedented, in-depth portrait of the man whose return to Apple precipitated one of the biggest turnarounds in business history. With a new epilogue on Apple’s future survival in today’s roller-coaster economy, here is the revealing biography that blew away the critics and stirred controversy within industry and media circles around the country.

With his characteristic eyebrow-raising behavior, Richard P. Feynman once provoked the wife of a Princeton dean to remark, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!" But the many scientific and personal achievements of this Nobel Prize-winning physicist are no laughing matter. Here, woven with his scintillating views on modern science, Feynman relates the defining moments of his accomplished life.

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."

Nikola Tesla was a major contributor to the electrical revolution that transformed daily life at the turn of the 20th century. His inventions, patents, and theoretical work formed the basis of modern AC electricity, and contributed to the development of radio and television. Like his competitor Thomas Edison, Tesla was one of America's first celebrity scientists, enjoying the company of New York high society and dazzling the likes of Mark Twain with his electrical demonstrations. An astute self-promoter and gifted showman, he cultivated a public image of the eccentric genius.

Gifted Hands reveals the remarkable journey of Dr. Ben Carson from an angry, struggling young boy with everything stacked against him to the director of pediatric neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. Join Dr. Carson on his journey from a struggling inner-city student to the pinnacle of his career as a world-renowned neurosurgeon. A man of humility, decency, compassion, courage, and sensitivity, he now serves as a role model for everyone who wants to achieve their God-given potential.

In February 1971, as Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell hurtled Earthward through space, he was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. He intuitively sensed that his presence and that of the planet in the window were all part of a deliberate, universal process, and that the glittering cosmos itself was, in some way, conscious. The experience was so overwhelming, Mitchell knew his life would never be the same.

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter was one of the most audacious and remarkable deals in tech history. The Battle for Twitter takes listeners back to the very beginning and how we reached this point. It looks at the origins of the platform, the vision of its cofounder Jack Dorsey, and how it became a battleground for ideas, controversies, and viral moments that shaped the world we live in today.

In The Last Stargazers, Emily Levesque reveals the hidden world of the professional astronomer. She celebrates an era of ingenuity and curiosity and asks us to think twice before we cast aside our sense of wonder at the universe.

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

Gripping and darkly comic, Breaking Twitter takes listeners inside the battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time – Elon Musk – and the company that owns our world’s best hope for a shared global conversation. From employee accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with, this is the full story from all sides.

In The Smallest Lights in the Universe, MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager interweaves the story of her search for meaning and solace after losing her first husband to cancer, her unflagging search for an Earth-like exoplanet and her unexpected discovery of new love. Sara Seager has made it her life's work to peer into the spaces around stars - looking for exoplanets outside our solar system, hoping to find the one-in-a-billion world enough like ours to sustain life. But with the unexpected death of her husband, her life became an empty, lightless space.

Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany's air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications.

Only a select few individuals can claim to have changed the world. Steve Jobs is one of these. The mythology around the man is so strong that even six years after his death he still dominates online discussion. Jobs wasn't just a successful businessman. He was a visionary who made it his mission to humanize personal computing, rewriting the rules of user experience design, hardware design, and software design.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

Mother American Night is the wild, funny, heartbreaking, and often unbelievable (yet completely true) story of an American icon. Born into a powerful Wyoming political family, John Perry Barlow wrote the lyrics for thirty Grateful Dead songs while also running his family’s cattle ranch. He hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory, went on a date with the Dalai Lama’s sister, and accidentally shot Bob Weir in the face on the eve of his own wedding. Despite being a freely self-confessed acidhead, he served as Dick Cheney’s campaign manager during Cheney’s first run for Congress.