Named one of the greatest minds of the 20th century by Time, Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for one of that century's most important advancements: the world wide web.  Now, this low-profile genius-who never personally profitted from his invention -offers a compelling protrait of his invention.  He reveals the Web's origins and the creation of the now ubiquitous http and www acronyms and shares his views on such critical issues as censorship, privacy, the increasing power of softeware companies , and the need to find the ideal balance between commercial and social forces.  He offers insights into the true nature of the Web, showing readers how to use it to its fullest advantage.  And he presents his own plan for the Web's future, calling for the active support and participation of programmers, computer manufacturers, and social organizations to manage and maintain this valuable resource so that it can remain a powerful force for social change and an outlet for individual creativity.

Although many texts attempt to explain intellectual property law to scientists and engineers, they are ineffective because they fail to present the subject within the proper scope; they are either too expansive or too detailed for the needs of researchers and inventors. Instead of giving a mile-high view of all types of intellectual property or, at the other extreme, turning readers into pseudo-patent attorneys, Patent Law for Scientists and Engineers provides researchers and students with an understanding of the aspects of patent law necessary to work with patent professionals and enhance patent coverage. The editor has structured the text so it can be easily integrated into a reader's research routine. Each chapter supports the issues discussed with fact patterns that emphasize the steps necessary to protect patent rights. The book describes actual scenarios encountered by scientists and engineers, highlighting the protection of latent patent rights that may exist within an invention or technical solution.

This thought-provoking publication covers a wide-range of innovative areas of research and technologies that are unlocking groundbreaking new potentials in science. It contains important scientific information gleaned from the lectures of some of the world's experts in their respective fields. The book offers 'exceptional scientific insights, oftentimes addressing challenges before they are even recognized as questions. Chronicling the revolutionary ideas of Nobel Laureates, winners of Wolf Prize, US National Medal of Science and other notable scientists.

An outstanding collection of Benjamin Franklin's scientific correspondence, The Ingenious Dr. Franklin has long been unavailable yet deserves a place beside his Autobiography as essential reading for everyone interested in history, wit, and invention. Portioned into three sections, "Practical Schemes and Suggestions," "Diverse Experiments and Observations," and "Scientific Deductions and Conjectures," these letters discuss an extraordinary range of topics, including the art of procuring pleasant dreams, choosing eye glasses, the first human flight, the character of clouds, the behavior of oil and water, smallpox and cancer, the cause of colds, charting the Gulf Stream, and prehistoric animals of the Ohio. Culled from ponderous volumes of collected works or private collections, these engaging and unabridged letters were assembled to allow readers to discover for themselves Benjamin Franklin's vigorous personality, his humanity, and his penetrating intelligence.

Learn robotics through magic, or enhance your magic with robotics! This book is a beginner's guide to creating robotics-infused magic. You'll be introduced to simple DIY electronics and Arduino programming, and you will learn how to use those tools to create a treasure trove of magic bots and effects, with readily-sourced materials and everyday objects. It's magic through the lens of the Maker Movement, with a dedication to accessibility -- cardboard meets Arduino meets magic! All ages, backgrounds, and abilities will find clever, fun projects within these pages that challenge their creativity and explode their imagination.

What would life be like without cars, television, the Internet and computers, or the omnipresent smartphone? Setting aside the question of whether things would be better or worse, what we do know for sure is that today there are some inventions that we just can't do without. And yet some of them are very recent, in their infancy we might say, while others are a little over a century old, which in any case is but a blip if compared to the history of humanity. They all have changed the existence of a considerable number of people, their advent has been such a breakthrough that it has always marked a "before" and "after". The result of the brilliant intuition of exceptional men and women, of the perseverance and tenacity of great entrepreneurs or ingenious ideas of common people, these inventions have influenced and changed medicine, society, economics, culture, and history itself. This book full of curiosities and explanations will guide readers to the discovery of the most important inventions that have influenced the contemporary world, from the end of the 19th century to our own time, revealing the secrets and events that led to their creation and introducing the exceptional figures who conceived them.

The richly varied lives of the Martin brothers reflected the many upheavals of Britain in the age of Industrial Revolution. Low-born and largely unschooled, they were part of a new generation of artists, scientists and inventors who witnessed the creation of the modern world. William, the eldest, was a cussedly eccentric inventor who couldn't look at a piece of machinery without thinking about how to improve it; Richard, a courageous soldier, fought in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo; Jonathan, a hellfire preacher tormented by madness and touched with a visionary genius reminiscent of William Blake, almost burned down York Minster in 1829; while John, the youngest Martin, single-handedly invented, mastered and exhausted an entire genre of painting, the apocalyptic sublime, while playing host to the foremost writers, scientists and thinkers of his day. In The Prometheans Max Adams interweaves the fascinating story of these maverick siblings with a magisterial and multi-faceted account of the industrial, political and artistic ferment of early 19th-century Britain. His narrative centres on a generation of inventors, artists and radical intellectuals (including the chemist Humphry Davy, the engineer George Stephenson, the social reformer Robert Owen and the poet Shelley) who were seeking to liberate humanity from the tyranny of material discomfort and political oppression. For Adams, the shared inspiration that binds this generation together is the cult of Prometheus, the titan of ancient Greek mythology who stole fire from Zeus to give to mortal man, and who became a potent symbol of political and personal liberation from the mid-18th century onwards. Whether writing about Davy's invention of the miner's safety lamp, the scandalous private life of the Prince Regent, the death of Shelley or J.M.W. Turner's use of colour, Adams's narrative is pacy, characterful, and rich in anecdote, quotation and memorable character sketch. Like John Martin himself, he has created a sprawling and brightly coloured canvas on an epic scale.

From Homer Hickam, the author of the #1 bestselling Rocket Boys adapted into the beloved film October Sky, comes this astonishing memoir of high adventure, war, love, NASA, and his struggle for literary success. Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys and the movie adaptation October Sky have become one of the most popular stories in the world, inspiring millions to pursue a better life. But what happened to Homer after he was a West Virginia rocket boy? In his latest memoir, Homer recounts his life in college where he built the world's biggest, baddest game cannon, fought through some of the worst battles in Vietnam, became a scuba instructor, discovered sunken U-boats, wrote the definitive account of a World War II naval battle, befriended Tom Clancy, made a desperate attempt to save the passengers of a sunken river boat, trained the first Japanese astronauts, taught David Letterman to scuba dive, helped to fix the Hubble Space Telescope, wrote his number one bestselling Rocket Boys, and was on set during the making of October Sky. Although told with humor and wit, Hickam does not shy away from the pain and hardship endured and the mistakes he made during the tumultuous decades since his life in the town he made famous-Coalwood, West Virginia.

This is a book comprising 28 small chapters focusing on medical scientists and their discoveries. The title states past truth because these are truly historical and memorable events to be noted by anyone with an interest in medicine, but also present poetry which looks at how these discoveries have impacted on us through the times. The chapters are wide-ranging, but many are from the field of cardiology. Examples of these scientists include Hans Spemann who contributed to the work on stem cells; John Gibbon and cardiopulmonary bypass; Christian Doppler and his theory; Albrecht Fleckenstein and advances in cardiac therapy; Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize. This book will be of interest to anyone in medicine who has an interest in the history of outstanding medical discoveries and the individuals behind them.

Josiah Wedgwood, perhaps the greatest English potter who ever lived, epitomized the best of his age. From his kilns and workshops in Stoke-on-Trent, he revolutionized the production of ceramics in Georgian Britain by marrying technology with design, manufacturing efficiency and retail flair. He transformed the luxury markets not only of London, Liverpool, Bath and Dublin but of America and the world, and helping to usher in a mass consumer society. Tristram Hunt calls him 'the Steve Jobs of the eighteenth century'. But Wedgwood was radical in his mind and politics as well as in his designs. He campaigned for free trade and religious toleration, read pioneering papers to the Royal Society and was a member of the celebrated Lunar Society of Birmingham. Most significantly, he created the ceramic 'Emancipation Badge', depicting a slave in chains and inscribed 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' that became the symbol of the abolitionist movement. Tristram Hunt's hugely enjoyable new biography, strongly based on Wedgwood's notebooks, letters and the words of his contemporaries, brilliantly captures the energy and originality of Wedgwood and his extraordinary contribution to the transformation of eighteenth-century Britain.

Foreword by Admiral Lord West Whilst living in Liverpool, Britain's second most heavily bombed city during World War II, the author experienced at first-hand the terrible effects of the war on the civilian population and when studying at Cambridge he witnessed the American heavy bombers and their fighter escorts flying to attack targets in Germany and occupied Europe. Serving as an engineering officer in the Royal Navy in HMS Sheffield provided first-hand realisation of the importance of engineering and emphasised that victories achieved in the Battle of Britain and other campaigns were made possible by newly-developed machines, equipment or techniques. These innovations gave the Allied forces a significant advantage and helped ensure eventual victory. Engineering Hitler's Downfall features numerous inventions such as the decoding machines developed at Bletchley Park; the hand-held mine detectors that cleared pathways through enemy minefields, firstly at the Battle of el Alamein but also in most subsequent actions; the newly-located factories and tanks that enabled the Russians to repulse the German invasion; the escort carriers and long range aircraft that enabled U-boats to be attacked in the mid-Atlantic; the 4000 plus Bailey bridges that allowed narrow ravines and rivers as wide as the Rhine to be crossed; the Mulberry harbours through which the D-Day bridgehead was reinforced and supplied and the pipelines under the ocean that supplied fuel for invading troops. These and many other examples illustrate what was achieved under such immense pressure. The book includes timelines to set it all in context with respect to the course of the war.

The breathtakingly rapid pace of change in computing makes it easy to overlook the pioneers who began it all. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing explores the fascinating lives, ideas, and discoveries of seven remarkable mathematicians. It tells the stories of the unsung heroes of the computer age - the logicians.

The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

A close look at Gunter Blobel's transformative contributions to molecular cell biology. The difficulty of reconciling chemical mechanisms with the functions of whole living systems has plagued biologists since the development of cell theory in the nineteenth century. As Karl S. Matlin argues in Crossing the Boundaries of Life, it is no coincidence that this longstanding knot of scientific inquiry was loosened most meaningfully by the work of a cell biologist, the Nobel laureate Gunter Blobel. In 1975, using an experimental setup that did not contain any cells at all, Blobel was able to target newly made proteins to cell membrane vesicles, enabling him to theorize how proteins in the cell distribute spatially, an idea he called the signal hypothesis. Over the next twenty years, Blobel and other scientists were able to dissect this mechanism into its precise molecular details. For elaborating his signal concept into a process he termed membrane topogenesis-the idea that each protein in the cell is synthesized with an "address" that directs the protein to its correct destination within the cell-Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1999. Matlin argues that Blobel's investigative strategy and its subsequent application addressed a fundamental unresolved dilemma that had bedeviled biology from its very beginning-the relationship between structure and function-allowing biology to achieve mechanistic molecular explanations of biological phenomena. Crossing the Boundaries of Life thus uses Blobel's research and life story to shed light on the importance of cell biology for twentieth-century science, illustrating how it propelled the development of adjacent disciplines like biochemistry and molecular biology.

We all like to think we are pretty smart. New medical advances seem to come along every day; space travel suddenly doesn't seem so difficult; self-driving cars are no longer a thing of the future . but if we were stranded on a desert island tomorrow, most of us wouldn't know how to catch a fish or start a fire, let alone rebuild all that extraordinary technology we now rely on.

The truth is that we're not necessarily more clever than our ancestors, we just have an accumulation of centuries of technological progress on which we can rely. As this book shows, many of the ancients were much more advanced that we realize - indeed there are recent inventions that had actually been discovered centuries earlier and then forgotten. And what about all those modern day devices and machines that rely on ancient inventions such as paper, levers and gears?

From brain surgery in the Stone Age to Chinese whisky from the 7th century BC, to Damascus steel - once the hardest metal in the world, which we no longer know how to make - this insightful book collects together the stories of hundreds of ancient devices, inventions and breakthroughs from around the world and across the centuries, giving us a fascinating glimpse into past eras that were far more technologically advanced than we sometimes realize.

We think of the Stephensons and Brunel as the fathers of the railways, and their Liverpool and Manchester and Great Western Railways as the prototypes of the modern systems. But who were the railways' grandfathers and great-grandfathers? The rapid evolution of the railways after 1830 depended on the juggernauts of steam locomotion being able to draw upon centuries of experience in using and developing railways, and of harnessing the power of steam. Giants the Stephensons and others may have been, but they stood upon the foundations built by many other considerable - if lesser-known - talents. This is the story of those early pioneers of steam.

A prismatic look at the meeting of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and the impact these two pillars of science had on the world of physics, which was in turmoil. In 1911, some of the greatest minds in science convened at the First Solvay Conference in Physics, a meeting like no other. Almost half of the attendees had won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Over the course of those few days, these minds began to realize that classical physics was about to give way to quantum theory, a seismic shift in our history and how we understand not just our world, but the universe. At the center of this meeting were Marie Curie and a young Albert Einstein. In the years preceding, Curie had faced the death of her husband and soul mate, Pierre. She was on the cusp of being awarded her second Nobel Prize, but scandal erupted all around her when the French press revealed that she was having an affair with a fellow scientist, Paul Langevin. The subject of vicious misogynist and xenophobic attacks in the French press, Curie found herself in a storm that threatened her scientific legacy. Albert Einstein proved a supporter in her travails. They had an instant connection at Solvay. He was young and already showing flourishes of his enormous genius. Curie had been responsible for one of the greatest discoveries in modern science (radioactivity) but still faced resistance and scorn. Einstein recognized this grave injustice, and their mutual admiration and respect, borne out of this, their first meeting, would go on to serve them in their paths forward to making history. Curie and Einstein come alive as the complex people they were in the pages of The Soul of Genius. Utilizing never before seen correspondance and notes, Jeffrey Orens reveals the human side of these brilliant scientists, one who pushed boundaries and demanded equality in a man's world, no matter the cost, and the other, who was destined to become synonymous with genius.

"Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it." -John Horgan "If you want to know about AI, read this book...It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence." -Peter Thiel Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake. AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don't correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven't a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence-and what it would take to get there. "Larson worries that we're making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve...Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity." -David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal "A convincing case that artificial general intelligence-machine-based intelligence that matches our own-is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know." -Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

In this book, Richard W. Bulliet focuses on three major phases in the evolution of the wheel and their relationship to the needs and ambitions of human society. He begins in 4000 B.C.E. with the first wheels affixed to axles. He then follows with the innovation of wheels turning independently on their axles and concludes five thousand years later with the caster, a single rotating and pivoting wheel. Bulliet's most interesting finding is that a simple desire to move things from place to place did not drive the wheel's development. If that were the case, the wheel could have been invented at any time almost anywhere in the world. By dividing the history of this technology into three conceptual phases and focusing on the specific men, women, and societies that brought it about, Bulliet expands the social, economic, and political significance of a tool we only partially understand. He underscores the role of gender, combat, and competition in the design and manufacture of wheels, adding vivid imagery to illustrate each stage of their development.

As accomplished as she is unknown, Marie Marvingt set the world's first women's aviation records, won the only gold medal ever given for being outstanding in all sports, invented the ambulance airplane, was the first female bomber pilot in history, fought in World War I disguised as a man, has been recognized as a hero of the Resistance in World War II, was the first to survive a crossing of the English Channel in a balloon, worked all her life as a journalist, spent years in North Africa, exploring, nursing, accompanying troops, and inventing metal skis. Today she remains the most decorated woman in the world. Unbelievable? Some people think so. Her life was so unusually rich in exploits, daring, and accomplishments that people dismissed it as a hoax. This biography introduces you to the gifted woman said to be ""the most incredible woman since Joan of Arc,"" provides proof that she did indeed do everything ascribed to her, and investigates some of the other reasons she has been forgotten. Known as the ""fiancee of danger,"" she was the model for the silent film series, The Perils of Pauline. This first English-language biography of Marie Marvingt is the story of the real ""Pauline.