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 supremely famous physicists, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, appeared to have become sterile in the 1930s, Bell was able to revive it and to make crucial advances - Bell's Theorem or Bell's Inequalities. He was able to demonstrate a contradiction between quantum theory and essential elements of pre-quantum theory - locality and causality. The book gives a non-mathematical account of Bell's relatively impoverished upbringing in Belfast and his education. It describes his major contributions to quantum theory, but also his important work in the physics of accelerators, and nuclear and elementary particle physics.

North is north and south is south. Or is it?

Without electromagnetism, life on Earth would not be possible. The quest to understand it began with the idea that the magnet was a physical embodiment of the heavens, possessing as it did its own North and South poles. Could the discovery that, every once in a long while, the Earth’s magnetic poles switch places, significantly weakening the field’s protective power, be its end? It’s never happened in the history of humankind, but it has happened many times before and it will happen again…

Alanna Mitchell travels the world to unveil the history of this enigmatic force, introducing the enchanting figures whose investigations into magnetism began in the thirteenth century and revealing how later scientists made their pivotal discoveries. The Spinning Magnet is a warning of a future where solar radiation storms wipe out power grids and electronic communications, but it is also a beautifully crafted narrative of one of the most powerful forces in the universe.

Influenza, AIDS, and Ebola: Viruses are normally defined as pathogens. Most viruses are, however, not enemies or killers. Well-known virologist and cancer researcher Karin Moelling describes surprising insights about a completely new and unexpected world of viruses. Viruses are ubiquitous, in the oceans, our environment, in animals, plants, bacteria, in our body, even in our genomes. They influence our weather, can contribute to control obesity, and can surprisingly be applied against threatening multi-resistant bacteria. The success story of the viruses started more than 3.5 billion years ago in the dawn of life when even cells did not exist. They are the superpower of life. There are more viruses on earth than stars in the sky. Viruses are everywhere. Some of them are incredibly ancient. Many viruses are hundredfold smaller than bacteria, but others are tenfold bigger and they were discovered only recently - the giant viruses, even deep within the permafrost where they were reactivated after 30,000 years.The author talks about a completely new world of viruses, which are based on the most recent, in part her own research results. Could viruses have been our oldest ancestors? Have viruses even 'invented' social behavior, do they lead to geniuses such as Mozart or Einstein - or alternatively to cancer? They can help to cure cancer. In this book, the author made a clear distinction between what is fact and what is her vision. This book is written for a general audience and not just for the experts. Its aim is to stimulate thinking, and perhaps to attract more young scientists to enter this field of research.

If the new boson is indeed the Higgs particle, its discovery represents an important milestone in the history of particle physics. However, despite the pressure to award Nobel Prizes to physicists associated with the Higgs boson, John Moffat argues that there still remain important data analyses to be performed before uncorking the champagne. John Moffat is Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Toronto and a senior researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Well-known for his outside-the-box research on topics such as dark matter, dark energy, and the varying speed of light cosmology (VSL), his new book takes a critical look at the hype surrounding the Higgs boson. In the process, he presents a cogent and often entertaining history of particle physics and an exploration of alternative theories of particle physics that do not feature the Higgs boson, including his own. He gives a detailed and personal description of how theoretical physicists come up with new theories, and emphasizes how carefully experimental physicists must interpret the complex data now coming out of accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The book does not shy away from controversial topics such as the sociology of particle physics. There is immense pressure on projects like the $9 billion LHC to come up with positive results in order to secure funding for the future. Yet to date, the Higgs boson may be the only positive result to emerge from the LHC experiments. The searches for dark matter particles, mini-black holes, extra dimensions, and supersymmetric particles have all come up empty-handed, with serious consequences for theoretical physics, including string theory and gravity theory. John Moffat is also the author of Reinventing Gravity (2008) and Einstein Wrote Back (2010).

1856. Eighteen-year-old chemistry student William Perkin's experiment has gone horribly wrong. But the deep brown sludge his botched project has produced has an unexpected power: the power to dye everything it touches a brilliant purple. Perkin has discovered mauve, the world's first synthetic dye, bridging a gap between pure chemistry and industry which will change the world forever. From the fetching ribbons tying back the hair of every fashionable head in London to the laboratories in which scientists developed modern vaccines against cancer and malaria, Simon Garfield tells the story of how the colour purple became a sensation.

Most of us believe that we possess a self - an internal individual who resides inside our bodies, making decisions, authoring actions and possessing free will. The feeling that a single, unified, enduring self inhabits the body - the 'me' inside me - is compelling and inescapable. This is how we interact as a social animal and judge each other's actions and deeds. But that sovereignty of the self is increasingly under threat from science as our understanding of the brain advances. Rather than a single entity, the self is really a constellation of mechanisms and experiences that create the illusion of the internal you. We only emerge as a product of those around us as part of the different storylines we inhabit from the cot to the grave. It is an ever changing character, created by the brain to provide a coherent interface between the multitude of internal processes and the external world demands that require different selves.

From the moment the first machine gun rang out over the Western Front, one thing was clear: mankind's military technology had wildly surpassed its medical capabilities. The war's new weaponry, from tanks to shrapnel, enabled slaughter on an industrial scale, and given the nature of trench warfare, thousands of soldiers sustained facial injuries. Medical advances meant that more survived their wounds than ever before, yet disfigured soldiers did not receive the hero's welcome they deserved. In The Facemaker, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris tells the astonishing story of the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, who dedicated himself to restoring the faces - and the identities - of a brutalized generation. Gillies, a Cambridge-educated New Zealander, became interested in the nascent field of plastic surgery after encountering the human wreckage on the front. Returning to Britain, he established one of the world's first hospitals dedicated entirely to facial reconstruction in Sidcup, south-east England. There, Gillies assembled a unique group of doctors, nurses and artists whose task was to recreate what had been torn apart. At a time when losing a limb made a soldier a hero, but losing a face made him a monster to a society largely intolerant of disfigurement, Gillies restored not just the faces of the wounded but also their spirits. Meticulously researched and grippingly told, The Facemaker places Gillies's ingenious surgical innovations alongside the poignant stories of soldiers whose lives were wrecked and repaired. The result is a vivid account of how medicine and art can merge, and of what courage and imagination can accomplish in the presence of relentless horror.

This is the book that Daniel Tammet, bestselling author and mathematical savant, was born to write. In Tammet's world, numbers are beautiful and mathematics illuminates our lives and minds. Using anecdotes and everyday examples, Tammet allows us to share his unique insights and delight in the way numbers, fractions and equations underpin all our lives. Inspired by the complexity of snowflakes, Anne Boleyn's sixth finger or his mother's unpredictable behaviour, Tammet explores questions such as why time seems to speed up as we age, whether there is such a thing as an average person and how we can make sense of those we love. Thinking in Numbers will change the way you think about maths and fire your imagination to see the world with fresh eyes.

At a time when women were excluded from science, a young girl made a discovery that marked the birth of paleontology and continues to feed the debate about evolution to this day. Mary Anning was only twelve years old when, in 1811, she discovered the first dinosaur skeleton - of an ichthyosaur - while fossil hunting on the cliffs of Lyme Regis, England. Until Mary's incredible discovery, it was widely believed that animals did not become extinct. The child of a poor family, Mary became a fossil hunter, inspiring the tongue-twister, "She Sells Sea Shells by the Seashore." She attracted the attention of fossil collectors and eventually the scientific world. Once news of the fossils reached the halls of academia, it became impossible to ignore the truth. Mary's peculiar finds helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, laid out in his On the Origin of Species. Darwin drew on Mary's fossilized creatures as irrefutable evidence that life in the past was nothing like life in the present. A story worthy of Dickens, The Fossil Hunter chronicles the life of this young girl, with dirt under her fingernails and not a shilling to buy dinner, who became a world-renowned paleontologist. Dickens himself said of Mary: "The carpenter's daughter has won a name for herself, and deserved to win it." Here at last, Shelley Emling returns Mary Anning, of whom Stephen J. Gould remarked, is "probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology," to her deserved place in history.

Have you ever wondered how Einstein, a regular man, can come up with radical ideas that shape the world to be what it is today?Albert Einstein is a familiar name to many in the scientific and non-scientific community due to his revolutionary ideas such as the Theory of Relativity, Special Relativity and significant contributions to the development of Quantum Mechanics. As such, many aspire to be like him and wonder how they can do that. The author believes that one needs to condition his/her mind to be able to think like the world-renowned Mathematical Physicist, Albert Einstein. The road to being successful can be challenging and it requires grit, confidence and guidance from the right people. Hence, this book is as a must-have guide to readers who wish to be one of the best scientists in the world!Related Link(s)

This volume contains papers based on invited talks given at the 2005 IMA Summer Workshop on Wireless Communications, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, June 22 - July 1, 2005. It presents some of the highlights of the workshop, and collects papers covering a broad spectrum of important and pressing issues in wireless communications.

The Environmental and climatic issues varies from continent to continent and is unique to Asia. Understanding the issues does need lot of research and study material which students may not be able to gather due to shortage of time and resources. Hence an effort is made by authors gathering there experience and academic input from renowned universities of world. Climate change is real and coping with it is major concern in coming days. Most of the books written and sold in the past need updating and customizing. The general description of climate change and world will not help the professionals and students. It needs to seen area wise as a professional will work in specific geographic area. Hence an effort is made to collect data from Asia which host most populated countries along with ecological hot spots.

There can be little doubt that the Greek tradition of philosophical criticism had its main source in Ionia. . . It thus leads the tradition which created the rational or scienti?c attitude, and with it our Western civilization, the only civilization, which is based upon science (though, of course, not upon science alone). Karl Popper, Back to the Presocratics Harvard University physicist and historian of Science, Gerald Holton, coined the term "Ionian Enchantment", an expression that links the idea back in the 6th c- tury B. C. to the ancient Ionians along the eastern Aegean coast, while capturing its fascination. Approximately within a seventy- ve year period (600-525 B. C. ) -a split second in the history of humanity- the three Milesian thinkers, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, without plain evidence, but with an unequalled power of critical abstraction and intuition, had achieved a true intellectual re- lution; they founded and bequeathed to future generations a new, unprecedented way of theorizing the world; it could be summarized in four statements: beneath the apparent disorder and multiplicity of the cosmos, there exists order, unity and stability; unity derives from the fundamental primary substratum from which the cosmos originated; this, and, consequently, the cosmic reality, is one, and is based not on supernatural, but on physical causes; they are such that man can - vestigate them rationally. These four statements are neither self-evident nor se- explanatory.

This new edition also treats smart materials and artificial life. A new chapter on information and computational dynamics takes up many recent discussions in the community.

As the world grieves over the catastrophic loss of humanity from the 26 December 2004 tsunami, we must resolve to learn from nature's lessons. This issue provides a framework and a set of tools to develop communities that are resilient to tsunami. This collection of papers represents a starting point on our new journey toward a safer world. The history of tsunami hazard mitigation tracks well with the history of destructive tsunamis in the United States. Following the 1946 Alaska g- erated tsunami that killed 173 people in Hawaii, the Paci?c Tsunami Warning Center was established in Hawaii by a predecessor agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Following the 1960 Chilean tsunami that killed 1,000 people in Chile, 61 in Hawaii, and 199 in Japan, the United States formed the Joint Tsunami Research E?ort (JTRE) and sta?ed the International Tsunami Information Center (ITIC) in Hawaii. JTRE was formed to conduct research on tsunamis while ITIC, sponsored by the United Nations, was formed to coordinate tsunami warning e?orts of the Paci?c Countries. Many research and mitigation e?orts were focused on the distant tsunami problem. Following the 1964 Alaskan t- nami that killed 117 in Alaska, 11 in California, and 4 in Oregon, the U. S. was confronted with the local tsunami problem. In response, the U. S. established the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska. In 1992, a Ms 7.

Nearly everything making up what we call the "environment" of a plant has an infuence on the way it grows. Sunlight, te- perature, moisture contents of soil and atmosphere and vib- tions are all obvious examples of environmental components, and transient variations in their amount or intensity lead the plant to manifest more or less immediate responses. Small changes in carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere can even have effects, but these take a longer time to be registered - at least those that are visible, albeit at the microscopic level. Plants meet the challenges of the environment by means of acclimation. In this respect, plants are notable for the pl- ticity of their development. However, where morphological or physiological plasticity is no longer an option, the responses would be by means of adaptations as a result of genetic - lection or genetic "assimilation" (Waddington 1957). Thus, a feature that was once a facultative transient response to an environmental perturbation becomes a constitutive charac- ristic of plant structure or function. It is in this way that the environment continually molds the way in which plants de- lop, and also defnes the areas upon planet Earth where they will thrive.

'A refreshing variation on the will-intelligent-robots-bring-Armageddon genre . . . this colorful mixture of expert futurology and quirky speculation does not disappoint' Kirkus

'A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.' Isaac Asimov, The First Law of Robotics

What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate for our human-robot future? For even as robots and AI intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology - it also concerns what robots tell us about being human.

From present-day Facebook and Amazon bots to near-future 'intimacy' bots and 'the robot that swiped my job' bots, bestselling American popular science writer David Ewing Duncan's Talking to Robots is a wonderfully entertaining and insightful guide to possible future scenarios about robots, both real and imagined.

Featured bots include robot drivers; doc bots; politician bots; warrior bots; sex bots; synthetic bio bots; dystopic bots that are hopefully just bad dreams; and ultimately, God Bot (as described by physicist Brian Greene).

These scenarios are informed by discussions with well-known thinkers, engineers, scientists, artists, philosophers and others, who share with us their ideas, hopes and fears about robots. David spoke with, among others, Kevin Kelly, David Baldacci, Brian Greene, Dean Kamen, Craig Venter, Stephanie Mehta, David Eagleman, George Poste, George Church, General R. H. Latiff, Robert Seigel, Emily Morse, David Sinclair, Ken Goldberg, Sunny Bates, Adam Gazzaley, Tim O'Reilly, Tiffany Shlain, Eric Topol and Juan Enriquez.

These discussions, along with some reporting on bot-tech, bot-history and real-time societal and ethical issues with robots, are the launch pads for unfurling possible bot futures that are informed by how people and societies have handled new technologies in the past.

The book describes how robots work, but its primary focus is on what our fixation with bots and AI says about us as humans: about our hopes and anxieties; our myths, stories, beliefs and ideas about beings both real and artificial; and our attempts to attain perfection.

We are at a pivotal moment when our ancient infatuation with human-like beings with certain attributes or superpowers - in mythology, religion and storytelling - is coinciding with our ability to actually build some of these entities.

The modern industrialized world is a complex system on a scale never before witnessed in the history of humankind. Technologically dependent, globally interconnected, it offers seemingly limitless conveniences, choices, and opportunities. Yet this same modern civilization is as unstable as a house of cards, fear complexity scientists like John L. Casti. All it would take to downsize our way of life-to send us crashing back to the 19th century way of life-is a nudge from what Casti calls an X-Event, an unpredictable occurrence that with extreme, even dire, consequences. When an X-Event strikes - and scientists believe it will-finance, communication, defense, and travel will stop dead in their tracks. The flow of food, electricity, medicine, and clean water will be disrupted for months, if not years. What will you do? A renowned systems theorist, Casti shows how our world has become impossibly complicated, relying on ever more advanced technology that is developing at an exponential rate. Yet it is a fact of mathematical life that higher and higher levels of complexity lead to a system that's ever more fragile and susceptible to sudden, spectacular collapse. Fascinating and chilling, "X-Events" provides a provocative tour of the catastrophic outlier scenarios that could quickly send us crashing back to the pre-industrial age: global financial black swans; a world-wide crash of the Internet that would halt all communication; the end of oil; nuclear winter; nano-plagues; robot uprisings; electromagnetic-pulse bombs; pandemic viruses; and more. You won't look at the world the same way again after reading this book.

This richly illustrated book is unique in bringing Einstein's relativity to a higher level for the non-specialist than has ever been attempted before, using nothing more than grade-school algebra. Bondi's approach with spacetime diagrams is simplified and expanded, clarifying the famous asymmetric aging-of-twins paradox. Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, is simplified for the reader using spacetime diagrams. The theory is applied to important topics in physics such as gravitational waves, gravitational collapse and black holes, time machines, the relationship to the quantum world, galactic motions and cosmology.

Biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus struggled in the eighteenth century to define species in light of their mutability while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. As taxonomy modernized, it moved into labs, yielding results counterintuitive to humanity s innate predisposition to order the world. By conceding scientific authority to taxonomists, Yoon argues, we ve contributed to our own alienation from nature."

At the beginning of the 21st century, physics is being driven to very unfamiliar territory--the domain of the incredibly small and the incredibly heavy. The new world is a world in which both quantum mechanics and gravity are equally important. But mysteries remain. One of the biggest involved black holes. Famed physicist Stephen Hawking claimed that anything sucked in a black hole was lost forever. For three decades, Leonard Susskind and Hawking clashed over the answer to this problem. Finally, in 2004, Hawking conceded.
THE BLACK HOLE WAR will explain the mind-blowing science that finally won out, and the emergence of a new paradigm that argues the world--this catalog, your home, your breakfast, you--is actually a hologram projected from the edges of space.

'A superbly written, riveting book.' Martin Rees

Searching for the fundamental laws of the universe, physicists have found themselves developing ambitious mathematical ideas. But without observation and experiment as their guide, are they now doing 'fairy-tale physics' as their detractors claim?

In The Universe Speaks in Numbers, Graham Farmelo argues that today's greatest scientific minds are working in a tradition that dates back to Newton. He takes us on an adventure, from the Enlightenment to the breakthroughs of Einstein and Dirac, to the work of modern physicists and mathematicians shedding light on each other's disciplines, to their mutual surprise and excitement. This blossoming relationship is responsible for huge advances in our understanding of space and time - and as Farmelo explains, could redefine reality as we know it.

LISTEN TO THE ACCOMPANYING PODCAST featuring interviews with leading scientists at www.grahamfarmelo.com

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver - an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information? This accessible examination of principles and evidence shows that a network of dualities lies at the heart of biological puzzles that have engaged the human mind for millennia.

As featured on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week

'A rich, timely study for the era of "global ageing"' Nature

The ageing of the world population is one of the most important issues facing humanity in the 21st century – up there with climate change in its potential global impact. Sometime before 2020, the number of people over 65 worldwide will, for the first time, be greater than the number of 0–4 year olds, and it will keep on rising. The strains this is causing on society are already evident as health and social services everywhere struggle to cope with the care needs of the elderly.

But why and how do we age? Scientists have been asking this question for centuries, yet there is still no agreement. There are a myriad competing theories, from the idea that our bodies simply wear out with the rough and tumble of living, like well-worn shoes or a rusting car, to the belief that ageing and death are genetically programmed and controlled.

In Borrowed Time, Sue Armstrong tells the story of science's quest to understand ageing and to prevent or delay the crippling conditions so often associated with old age. She focusses inward – on what is going on in our bodies at the most basic level of the cells and genes as the years pass – to look for answers to why and how our skin wrinkles with age, our wounds take much longer to heal than they did when we were kids, and why words escape us at crucial moments in conversation.This book explores these questions and many others through interviews with key scientists in the field of gerontology and with people who have interesting and important stories to tell about their personal experiences of ageing.

A collaboration to excite the mind and dazzle the eye, probing such mysteries as: Where the first dinosaurs appeared and how they evolved; how the giant sauropods lived and reared their young; hunting strategies among the predators; migratory habits and family life of the dinosaurs; possible causes of extinction. An extraordinary new look at the prehistoric life of the dinosaurs by some of the world's foremost paleontologists, dinosaur illustrators, and visionary authors. This unique collaboration produces a spectacular tour of the world of the dinosaurs with vivid pictures, fascinating new ideas and thought-provoking tales by a dozen respected dreamers.