Scientific Journeys

Scientific Journeys PDF Author: H. Frederick Dylla
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030558002
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
This collection of essays traces a scientific journey bookmarked by remarkable mentors and milestones of science. It provides fascinating reading for everyone interested in the history, public appreciation, and value of science, as well as giving first-hand accounts of many key events and prominent figures. The author was one of the “sputnik kids” growing up in the US at the start of the space age. He built a working laser just two years after they were first invented, an experience that convinced him to become a physicist. During his 50-year career in physics, many personalities and notable events in science and technology helped to form his view of how science contributes to the modern world​, including his conviction that the impact of science can be most effective when introduced within the context of the humanities - especially history, literature and the arts. From the Foreword by former U.S. Congressman, Rush D. Holt: In this volume, we have the wide-ranging thoughts and observations of Fred Dylla, an accomplished physicist with an engineer’s fascination for gadgets, a historian’s long perspective, an artist’s aesthetic eye, and a teacher’s passion for sharing ideas. Throughout his varied career [...] his curiosity has been his foremost characteristic and his ability to see the connection between apparently disparate things his greatest skill. [...] Here he examines the roots and growth of innovation in examples from Bell Laboratories, Edison Electric Light Company, and cubist painter Georges Braque. He considers the essential place of publishing in science, that epochal intellectual technique for learning how the world works. He shows the human enrichment and practical benefits that derive from wise investments in scientific research, as well as the waste resulting from a failure to embrace appropriate technologies.

Scientific Journeys

Scientific Journeys PDF Author: H. Frederick Dylla
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030558002
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection of essays traces a scientific journey bookmarked by remarkable mentors and milestones of science. It provides fascinating reading for everyone interested in the history, public appreciation, and value of science, as well as giving first-hand accounts of many key events and prominent figures. The author was one of the “sputnik kids” growing up in the US at the start of the space age. He built a working laser just two years after they were first invented, an experience that convinced him to become a physicist. During his 50-year career in physics, many personalities and notable events in science and technology helped to form his view of how science contributes to the modern world​, including his conviction that the impact of science can be most effective when introduced within the context of the humanities - especially history, literature and the arts. From the Foreword by former U.S. Congressman, Rush D. Holt: In this volume, we have the wide-ranging thoughts and observations of Fred Dylla, an accomplished physicist with an engineer’s fascination for gadgets, a historian’s long perspective, an artist’s aesthetic eye, and a teacher’s passion for sharing ideas. Throughout his varied career [...] his curiosity has been his foremost characteristic and his ability to see the connection between apparently disparate things his greatest skill. [...] Here he examines the roots and growth of innovation in examples from Bell Laboratories, Edison Electric Light Company, and cubist painter Georges Braque. He considers the essential place of publishing in science, that epochal intellectual technique for learning how the world works. He shows the human enrichment and practical benefits that derive from wise investments in scientific research, as well as the waste resulting from a failure to embrace appropriate technologies.

Journeys in Science

Journeys in Science PDF Author: Fanuel Muindi
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128130911
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Journeys in Science: Inspiring the Next Generation examines the STEM education pipeline and discusses important strategies on working through the various challenges that STEM trainees face. The book takes a look at career possibilities for scientists in the broadest sense, and is not solely limited to academia. Coverage includes individual and local concepts, as well as a discussion on how STEM education impacts trainee communities across the globe. The book also focuses on diversity in STEM and offers valuable insights based on the authors' own experiences. - Offers advice for those in the STEM pipeline at all stages of training - Contains global perspectives on trainees in STEM - Includes personal vignettes, also utilizing primary research literature and data

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey PDF Author: Florence Williams
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003499
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Winner of the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A Five Books "Best Literary Science Writing" Book of 2023 • A Smithsonian Best Science Book of 2022 • A Prospect Magazine Top Memoir of 2022 • A KCRW Life Examined Best Book of 2022 "Keen observer [and] deft writer" (David Quammen) Florence Williams explores the fascinating, cutting-edge science of heartbreak while seeking creative ways to mend her own. When her twenty-five-year marriage suddenly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. But when she starts feeling physically sick, losing weight and sleep, she sets out in pursuit of rational explanation. She travels to the frontiers of the science of "social pain" to learn why heartbreak hurts so much—and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong. Soon Williams finds herself on a surprising path that leads her from neurogenomic research laboratories to trying MDMA in a Portland therapist’s living room, from divorce workshops to the mountains and rivers that restore her. She tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, undergoes electrical shocks while looking at pictures of her ex, and discovers that our immune cells listen to loneliness. Searching for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, she seeks out new relationships and ventures into the wilderness in search of an extraordinary antidote: awe. With warmth, daring, wit, and candor, Williams offers a gripping account of grief and healing. Heartbreak is a remarkable merging of science and self-discovery that will change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love.

Data Journeys in the Sciences

Data Journeys in the Sciences PDF Author: Sabina Leonelli
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030371778
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced. The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data. The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research.

Cure

Cure PDF Author: Jo Marchant
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0385348169
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A rigorous, skeptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's surprising ability to heal the body. Have you ever felt a surge of adrenaline after narrowly avoiding an accident? Salivated at the sight (or thought) of a sour lemon? Felt turned on just from hearing your partner's voice? If so, then you've experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your body. Yet while we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of "healing thoughts" was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease and even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers. In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication. We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone. Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, lays out its limitations and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives. With clarity and compassion, Cure points the way towards a system of medicine that treats us not simply as bodies but as human beings. A New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize

The Great Unknown

The Great Unknown PDF Author: Marcus du Sautoy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735221812
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
“An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe “No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer—mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions—about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons—while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.

Graphic Science

Graphic Science PDF Author: Darryl Cunningham
Publisher: Myriad Editions
ISBN: 0993563333
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
'Darryl Cunningham's simplicity of style is deceptive. I never fail to learn from his work, always educational and deeply human too. This is the sort of book you think you have bought for your child, then refuse to give up until you have finished it first. Buy two copies to be on the safe side.'— Robin Ince Much is known about scientists such as Darwin, Newton, and Einstein, but what about lesser-known scientists—people who have not achieved a high level of fame, but who have contributed greatly to human knowledge? What were their lives like? What were their struggles, aims, successes, and failures? How do their discoveries fit into the bigger picture of science as a whole? Overlooked, sidelined, excluded, discredited: key figures in scientific discovery come and take their bow in an alternative Nobel Prize gallery in a colourful graphic novel by Darryl Cunningham. Antoine Lavoisier: the father of French chemistry who gave oxygen its name, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who found himself on the wrong side of a revolution and paid the price with his life. The contribution to his work by his wife Marie-Anne Lavoisier is only now being fully recognised. Mary Anning: a poor, working-class woman who made her living fossil-hunting along the beach cliffs of southern England. Anning found herself excluded from the scientific community because of her gender and social class. Wealthy, male, experts took credit for her discoveries. George Washington Carver: born a slave, Carver become one of the most prominent botanists of his time, as well as a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver devised over 100 products using one major ingredient—the peanut—including dyes, plastics and gasoline. Alfred Wegener: a German meteorologist, balloonist, and arctic explorer, his theory of continental drift was derided by other scientists and was only accepted into mainstream thinking after his death. He died in Greenland on an expedition, his body lost in the ice and snow. Nikola Tesla: a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A competitor of Edison, Tesla died in poverty despite his intellectual brilliance. Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics while Bell Burnell was excluded. Fred Hoyle: an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis – the process whereby most of the elements on the Periodic Table are created. He was also noted for the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to prevailing theories. This eccentric approach contributed to him to being overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee for his stellar nucleosynthesis work. Any one of these figures could have been awarded a Nobel prize. Not every scientific discoverer was lauded in their time, for reasons of gender, race, or lack of wealth, or (in the case of Lavoisier) being too wealthy: in the 21st century, there are many more reparations and reputations to be made.

The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future

The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future PDF Author: Zach St. George
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324001615
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
An urgent and illuminating portrait of forest migration, and of the people studying the forests of the past, protecting the forests of the present, and planting the forests of the future. Forests are restless. Any time a tree dies or a new one sprouts, the forest that includes it has shifted. When new trees sprout in the same direction, the whole forest begins to migrate, sometimes at astonishing rates. Today, however, an array of obstacles—humans felling trees by the billions, invasive pests transported through global trade—threaten to overwhelm these vital movements. Worst of all, the climate is changing faster than ever before, and forests are struggling to keep up. A deft blend of science reporting and travel writing, The Journeys of Trees explores the evolving movements of forests by focusing on five trees: giant sequoia, ash, black spruce, Florida torreya, and Monterey pine. Journalist Zach St. George visits these trees in forests across continents, finding sequoias losing their needles in California, fossil records showing the paths of ancient forests in Alaska, domesticated pines in New Zealand, and tender new sprouts of blight-resistant American chestnuts in New Hampshire. Everywhere he goes, St. George meets lively people on conservation’s front lines, from an ecologist studying droughts to an evolutionary evangelist with plans to save a dying species. He treks through the woods with activists, biologists, and foresters, each with their own role to play in the fight for the uncertain future of our environment. An eye-opening investigation into forest migration past and present, The Journeys of Trees examines how we can all help our trees, and our planet, survive and thrive.

Why We Age

Why We Age PDF Author: Steven N. Austad
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471296461
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Why has the life span of the average American increased from 48 to 75 years in this century alone? . . . If the body is a machine that simply wears out, why do some cells seem immortal? . . . Is there an aging gene? And can we control it? . . . Can antioxidants and hormone therapy actually slow the aging process and extend life? Steven Austad s compelling book investigates the history, the theories, and the personalities behind the quest to understand the nature of aging. Here is hard evidence from the front lines of research that science is finally closing in on the fundamental processes of human biology and life. "Austad s book can be read with pleasure and profit by any intelligent person with a smattering of biological knowledge." Science "In this clear, engrossing overview, Austad takes the sting out of a subject that will ultimately capture us all." Publishers Weekly "Why We Age is remarkably rigorous in its analysis and thorough scope. . . . A comprehensive examination of its topic." Science Editors, Amazon.com "The problem with long life is that one keeps getting older; here s an able and clearly written summary of the latest theories on why we age and what might be done to ameliorate the process." Kirkus Reviews

Strange Situation

Strange Situation PDF Author: Bethany Saltman
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1925938239
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
A full-scale investigation of the controversial and often misunderstood science of attachment theory, inspired by the author’s own experience as a parent and daughter. When award-winning editor, writer, researcher, and longtime Zen student Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she felt like there was something ‘off’ about her experience. She knew she loved her daughter, but would oftentimes be angry, short on patience, even unkind. She went in search of the reasons why, and how to better understand herself, her daughter, and their relationship. Saltman launched a broad inquiry into the science of attachment, a field of developmental psychology that answers the question of why — from an evolutionary point of view — love exists between parents and children. Specifically, she focused on the data from a famous laboratory procedure, the ‘Strange Situation’, used around the world by scientists as the gold standard for measuring attachment security. What Saltman found by studying the Strange Situation is that love is unbreakable. Each and every one of us — including her — is built for it. In this intimate, rigorous, and deeply personal rendering, Saltman discovers that while our behaviour as parents is important, what matters most is the way we think about our attachments, transmitted mind to mind from generation to generation. This is excellent news. After all, as Saltman’s decades of Zen practice tell her and her readers, the one thing completely within our power to change is our minds.