History

The astonishing new story of human originsWas Darwin wrong when he traced our origins to Africa? The Real Planet of the Apes makes the explosive claim that it was in Europe, not Africa, where apes evolved the most important hallmarks of our human lineage...

In 1524, Pope Clement VII gave two condemned criminals to his physician to test a promising new antidote. After each convict ate a marzipan cake poisoned with deadly aconite, one of them received the antidote, and lived-the other died in agony. In...

Since the time of Aristotle, there had been a clear divide between the three kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral. But by the eighteenth century, biological experiments, and the wide range of new creatures coming to Europe from across the world,...

Neuroscientists investigate the mechanisms of spatial memory. Molecular biologists study the mechanisms of protein synthesis and the myriad mechanisms of gene regulation. Ecologists study nutrient cycling mechanisms and their devastating imbalances in...

How did one of the great inventions of the nineteenth century-Thomas Edison's phonograph-eventually lead to one of the most culturally and economically significant technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Sound Recording traces the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262572255Author Slava GerovitchFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

When we stop at the pharmacy to pick up our Prozac, are we simply buying a drug? Or are we buying into a disease as well? The first complete account of the phenomenon of antidepressants, this authoritative, highly readable book relates how depression, a...

In his latest book, Eric Scerri presents a completely original account of the nature of scientific progress. It consists of a holistic and unified approach in which science is seen as a living and evolving single organism. Instead of scientific...

In this authoritative volume, a New York Times Notable Book of 1993, scientific researcher and historian William Brock recounts the astonishing rise of a sophisticated science. Tracing the roots of chemistry back to the alchemists' futile attempts to...

A re-examination of the role of charity and treating venereal disease in public hospitals in early-modern London. This book explores how London society responded to the dilemma of the rampant spread of the pox among the poor. Some have asserted that...

An award-winning history of the Enlightenment quest to devise a mathematical model of rationalityWhat did it mean to be reasonable in the Age of Reason? Enlightenment mathematicians such as Blaise Pascal, Jakob Bernoulli, and Pierre Simon Laplace sought...

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters,...

Weaving together lyrical history and personal memoir, Virdi powerfully examines society's-and her own-perception of life as a deaf person in America. At the age of four, Jaipreet Virdi's world went silent. A severe case of meningitis left her alive but...

Are you afraid of a nuclear reactor accident? Should you be? This book will arm you with the scientific knowledge necessary to make a rational and informed opinion on the subject, without having to be an expert in nuclear physics. Written so that a...

New perspectives on the iconic physicist's scientific and philosophical formationAt the end of World War II, Albert Einstein was invited to write his intellectual autobiography for the Library of Living Philosophers. The resulting book was his uniquely...

A must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. This book contains the text of Thomas S. Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific...

Throughout the history of science, different thinkers, philosophers and scientists postulated the existence of entities that, in spite of their not being visible or detectable in their time, or perhaps ever, were nevertheless useful to explain the real...

This book describes how two newly invented communications technologies - the telephone and the electric light - were publicly envisioned, in specialized engineering trade journals as well as in more popular media, at the end of the nineteenth century...

For evolutionary biologists, the concept of chance has always played a significant role in the formation of evolutionary theory. As far back as Greek antiquity, chance and "luck" were understood to be key factors in the evolution of the natural world...

Limiting Outer Space propels the historicization of outer space by focusing on the Post-Apollo period. After the moon landings, disillusionment set in. Outer space, no longer considered the inevitable destination of human expansion, lost much of its...

Nineteenth-Century Science is a science anthology which provides over 30 selections from original 19th-century scientific monographs, textbooks and articles written by such authors as Charles Darwin, Mary Somerville, J.W. Goethe, John Dalton, Charles...

The first biography of a pioneering scientist who made significant contributions to our understanding of dark matter and championed the advancement of women in science. One of the great lingering mysteries of the universe is dark matter. Scientists...

In the late fifteenth century, clocks acquired minute hands. A century later, second hands appeared. But it wasn't until the 1850s that instruments could recognize a tenth of a second, and, once they did, their impact on modern science and society was...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780062508355Author Brian SwimmeFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint HarperCollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 454g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307276605Author Marcia BartusiakFormat PaperbackPage Count 337Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 331g

Charles Darwin is often credited with discovering evolution through natural selection, but the idea was not his alone. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, working independently, saw the same process at work in the natural world and elaborated much the...

In this masterful account, a historian of science surveys the molecular biology revolution, its origin and continuing impact.Since the 1930s, a molecular vision has been transforming biology. Michel Morange provides an incisive and overarching history of...

John Stewart Bell (1928-1990) was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century physics, famous for his work on the fundamental aspects of the century's most important theory, quantum mechanics. While the debate over quantum theory between the...

Our stories of industrial innovation tend to focus on individual initiative and lone breakthroughs. With Making Jet Engines, Hermione Giffard uses the case of the development of jet engines during World War II to offer a different way of understanding...

A major rethinking of the European novel and its relationship to early evolutionary scienceThe 120 years between Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption...

At last: geometry in an exemplary, accessible and attractive form! The authors emphasise both the intellectually stimulating parts of geometry and routine arguments or computations in concrete or classical cases, as well as practical and physical...

Tales of the intrepid early naturalists who set sail on dangerous voyages of discovery in the vast, unknown Pacific On the great Pacific discovery expeditions of the "long eighteenth century," naturalists for the first time were commonly...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262545549Author Catherine M. JacksonFormat PaperbackPage Count 460Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences, and one which has repeatedly led to fundamental changes in our view of the world. This book covers the history of our study of the cosmos from prehistory through to a survey of modern astronomy and astrophysics...

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was one of the founders of quantum theory. He is numbered alongside Newton, Maxwell and Einstein as one of the greatest physicists of all time. Together the lectures in this volume, originally presented on the occasion of the...

In Chasing Sound, Susan Schmidt Horning traces the cultural and technological evolution of recording studios in the United States from the first practical devices to the modern multi-track studios of the analog era. Charting the technical development of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307275530Author Richard ForteyFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 312gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

The first full study of "birth figures" and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian...

American Genesis is the book that helped earn Thomas Hughes his reputation as one of the foremost historians of technology of our age. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the book tells the sweeping story of America's technological revolution...

An in-depth look at the history of the environment.Is it possible for the economy to grow without the environment being destroyed? Will our lifestyles impoverish the planet for our children and grandchildren? Is the world sick? Can it be healed? Less...