"Transformative...[Taylor's] experience...will shatter [your] own perception of the world."-ABC News The astonishing New York Times bestseller that chronicles how a brain scientist's own stroke led to enlightenment On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor, a thirty-seven- year-old Harvard-trained brain scientist experienced a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. As she observed her mind deteriorate to the point that she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life-all within four hours-Taylor alternated between the euphoria of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain, which recognized she was having a stroke and enabled her to seek help before she was completely lost. It would take her eight years to fully recover. For Taylor, her stroke was a blessing and a revelation. It taught her that by "stepping to the right" of our left brains, we can uncover feelings of well-being that are often sidelined by "brain chatter." Reaching wide audiences through her talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference and her appearance on Oprah's online Soul Series, Taylor provides a valuable recovery guide for those touched by brain injury and an inspiring testimony that inner peace is accessible to anyone.

A lyrical and honest portrait of illness and the way it changes life and faith, from the award-winning author of "Things Seen and Unseen."
In the winter of 2009, Nora Gallagher was told she had an inflamed optic nerve, cause unknown, that if untreated would leave her blind. With this news, and the search for a diagnosis and treatment, her once busy and fast-moving life tunneled into a quieter country she calls Oz: unfamiliar, slower, deeply rooted in uncertainty and vulnerability. "Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic," written as Gallagher was still recovering, is a moving meditation on serious illness, what helped her through and what didn't, why a wall exists between the sick and the healthy, and what can take it down partway. It is also a testament of modern faith--accepting of both science and intellect--and a hard-won revelation of what lies at the heart of ordinary suffering.

This book presents the extraordinary story of a Bolognese woman of the settecento. Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (1711-1778) defended 49 Theses at the University of Bologna on April 17, 1732 and was awarded a doctoral degree on May 12 of the same year. Three weeks before her defense, she was made a member of the Academy of Sciences in Bologna. On June 27 she defended 12 additional Theses. Several of the 61 Theses were on physics and other science topics. Laura was drawn by the philosophy of Newton at a time when most scientists in Europe were still focused on Descartes and Galen. This last set of Theses was to encourage the University of Bologna to provide a lectureship to Laura, which they did on October 29, 1732. Although quite famous in her day, Laura Bassi is unfortunately not remembered much today.

This book presents Bassi within the context of the century when she lived and worked, an era where no women could attend university anywhere in the world, and even less become a professor or a member of an academy. Laura was appointed to the Chair of experimental physics in 1776 until her death. Her story is an amazing one. Laura was a mother, a wife and a good scientist for over 30 years. She made the transition from the old science to the new very early on in her career. Her work was centered on real problems that the City of Bologna needed to solve. It was an exciting time of discovery and she was at the edge of it all the way.

A gripping narrative of the love and betrayal of J. Robert Oppenheimer, told through the lives of three unique women.

Set against a dramatic backdrop of war, spies, and nuclear bombs, "An Atomic Love Story "unveils a vivid new view of a tumultuous era and one of its most important figures. In the early decades of the 20th century, three highly ambitious women found their way to the West Coast, where each was destined to collide with the young Oppenheimer, the enigmatic physicist whose work in creating the atomic bomb would forever impact modern history. His first and most intense love was for Jean Tatlock, though he married the tempestuous Kitty Harrison--both were members of the Communist Party--and was rumored to have had a scandalous affair with the brilliant Ruth Sherman Tolman, ten years his senior and the wife of another celebrated physicist. Although each were connected through their relationship to Oppenheimer, their experiences reflect important changes in the lives of American women in the 20th century: the conflict between career and marriage; the need for a woman to define herself independently; experimentation with sexuality; and the growth of career opportunities.

Beautifully written and superbly researched through a rich collection of firsthand accounts, this intimate portrait shares the tragedies, betrayals, and romances of an alluring man and three bold women, revealing how they pushed to the very forefront of social and cultural changes in a fascinating, volatile era.

To British television viewers, the name 'Patrick Moore' has been synonymous with Astronomy and Space Travel since he first appeared on The Sky at Night in 1957. To amateur astronomers he has been a source of inspiration, joy, humour and even an eccentric role model since that time. Most people know that his 55 years of presenting The Sky at Night is a world record, but what was he really like in person? What did he do away from the TV cameras, in his observatory, and within the British Astronomical Association, the organisation that inspired him as a youngster? Also, precisely what did he do during the War Years, a subject that has always been shrouded in mystery? Martin Mobberley, a friend of Patrick Moore's for 30 years, and a former President of the British Astronomical Association, has spent ten years exhaustively researching Patrick's real life away from the TV cameras. His childhood, RAF service, tireless voluntary work for astronomy and charity and his endless book writing are all examined in detail. His astronomical observations are also examined in unprecedented detail, along with the battles he fought along the way and his hatred of bureaucracy and political correctness. No fan of Sir Patrick Moore can possibly live without this work on their bookshelf!

In 2006, Kwan Kew Lai left her full-time position as a professor in the United States to provide medical humanitarian aid to the remote villages and the war-torn areas of Africa. This memoir follows her experiences from 2006 to 2013 as she provided care during the HIV/AIDs epidemics, after natural disasters, and as a relief doctor in refugee camps in Kenya, Libya, Uganda and in South Sudan, where civil war virtually wiped out all existing healthcare facilities. Throughout her memoir, Lai recounts intimate encounters with refugees and internally displaced people in camps and in hospitals with limited resources, telling tales of their resilience, unflinching courage, and survival through extreme hardship. Her writing provides insight into communities and transports readers to heart-achingly beautiful parts of Africa not frequented by the usual travelers. This is a deeply personal account of the huge disparities in the healthcare system of our "global village" and is a call to action for readers to understand the interconnectedness of the modern world, the needs of less developed neighbors, and the shortcomings of their healthcare systems.

"Healing the split between my mind and my body has been my life's challenge. In the sixty years that I have practiced psychotherapy, I have learned that the pathway to emotional health is through the body. The underlying purpose of Bioenergetic Analysis has always been to heal the mind-body split." - From the Introduction. Alexander Lowen was a teacher, lawyer, medical doctor, psychotherapist, writer, and a pioneer in the fields of body-psychotherapy and psychobiology. His life and work are recorded in this candid autobiography.

A medical "page-turner" that traces one doctor's "remarkable journey to the essence of medicine" (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the H tel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves-"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, relatively low-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.

On August 18, 1977 a special 'Soddy Session' was held at the Fifteenth International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, Scotland, with Dr. Thaddeus J. Trenn as Symposium Chairman. This session was organized to commemorate the lOOth anniversary of the birth of Fre derick Soddy (born September 2, 1877, Eastbourne, England; died September 22, 1956, Brighton, England), who was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 'for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes'. Soddy taught and/or carried out research at Oxford University (where he was Lee's Professor of Chemistry), McGill University (where he and Sir Ernest Rutherford proposed the disintegration theory of radioactivity), University College, London (where he and Sir William Ramsay demonstrated natural transmuta tion), Glasgow University (where he formulated his displacement law and concept of isotopes), llnd Aberdeen University. In addition to his contributions to radiochemistry, he proposed a number of controversial economic, social, and political theories. The present volume contains the eight lectures presented at the symposium, two additional papers written especially for this volume (Kauffman, Chapter 4 and Krivomazov, Chapter 6), a paper on Soddy's economic thought (Daly, Chapter 11), and three selections from Soddy's works. Furthermore, an introductory account of Soddy's life and work by Thaddeus J. Trenn as well as a Soddy chronology, and name and subject indexes compiled by the editor are provided."

The true history of physics can only be read in the life stories of those who made its progress possible. Matvei Bronstein was one of those for whom the vast territory of theoretical physics was as familiar as his own home: he worked in cosmology, nuclear physics, gravitation, semiconductors, atmospheric physics, quantum electrodynamics, astro physics and the relativistic quantum theory. Everyone who knew him was struck by his wide knowledge, far beyond the limits of his trade. This partly explains why his life was closely intertwined with the social, historical and scientific context of his time. One might doubt that during his short life Bronstein could have made truly weighty contributions to science and have become, in a sense, a symbol of his time. Unlike mathematicians and poets, physicists reach the peak of their careers after the age of thirty. His thirty years of life, however, proved enough to secure him a place in the Greater Soviet Encyclopedia. In 1967, in describing the first generation of physicists educated after the 1917 revolution, Igor Tamm referred to Bronstein as "an exceptionally brilliant and promising" theoretician 268]."

Many people know Edward Teller as the "Father of the H-Bomb." To his supporters he was a hero of the Cold War. To his detractors he was evil personified. Between these extremes was the life of the real man. In this definitive and comprehensive biography, a personal acquaintance of Teller's presents a balanced portrait of the multifaceted and enigmatic scientist against the backdrop of a turbulent period of history. Taking pains to avoid bias and preconceptions, thr author critically examines Teller's personality, family background, and the experiences that guided his actions-correcting many of the myths that others and Teller himself promulgated. Drawing for the first time on hitherto unknown archival material from Hungarian, American, and German sources, the author provides fresh insights that help the reader to understand Teller's motivations, his relationships with friends and foes, and his driven personality. In addition to this research and his own memories of Teller, Hargittai has interviewed such prominent figures as Richard Garwin, Freeman Dyson, George A. Keyworth, and Wendy Teller (Edward Teller's daughter), among others. The author reviews the significant facets of Teller's life: his Jewish-Hungarian origins, forced emigrations, brilliance in science, and devotion to the defense of the United States. He discusses Teller's ruthless Machiavellism in achieving his goals, which included his pivotal role in the creation of the hydrogen bomb and the second weapons laboratory at Livermore, as well as his damaging testimony against physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Teller's peers viewed this testimony as a betrayal and, in effect, sent him into internal exile, which Hargittai describes as more tormenting to him than his previous emigrations. The author notes that Teller was sometimes called "a monomaniac with many manias," such as his fierce opposition to nuclear test bans during the Cold War and, toward the end of his life, his role as propagandist for the Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet, his very excesses may have in fact contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. Who was Edward Teller-the real "Dr. Strangelove," the driven crusader for the H-Bomb, the villain who destroyed Oppenheimer, or the devoted husband, loyal friend, patriot, and strongly idealistic scientist? This monumental work will reveal the contradictory nature of this complex man in all his strengths, flaws, and brilliance.

In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women--known as "human computers"--who broke the boundaries of both gender and science. Based on extensive research and interviews, Nathalia Holt offers a unique perspective on the role of women in science: both where we've been, and the far reaches of space to which we're heading.

This book is about the author's life motivated by two pursuits: medicine, his profession and flyfishing, his favourite recreation. Each in their own way has provided him with challenges, enjoyment and fulfilment.The book recounts the author's experiences as a wartime school boy, post-war medical student, army doctor in Ghana, and medical research worker at Hammersmith Hospital, London, the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, the Methodist Hospital, Houston and McGill University, Montreal. It describes his drastic change in mid-career from gastroenterology to clinical lipidology and his subsequent efforts to promote the lipid hypothesis of atherosclerosis in the face of entrenched opposition from some members of the cardiological establishment. Among his achievements was the introduction of plasmapheresis to prolong the lives of severely affected patients with familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH), a hitherto fatal disorder, and he was among the first to describe the efficacy of statins in FH patients in the UK. The book also describes his leisure time activities including running in the London and New York marathons, and the hazards thereof, and his flyfishing expeditions to catch Atlantic salmon in Scotland and Russia, bonefish in the Bahamas and brown trout in England.The narrative covers the period from the Second World War to the present day, during which there have been dramatic changes in medical practice and social attitudes. It reflects the author's experiences during the latter half of the 20th century, stretching from the early days of penicillin to the introduction of statins, and it concludes with his up to date appraisal of recent and exciting advances in cholesterol-lowering therapy for cardiovascular disease.

WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016 'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson 'Dazzling' Literary Review 'Brilliant' Sunday Express 'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist 'A superb biography' The Economist 'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon. His colourful adventures read like something out of a Boy's Own story: Humboldt explored deep into the rainforest, climbed the world's highest volcanoes and inspired princes and presidents, scientists and poets alike. Napoleon was jealous of him; Simon Bolivar's revolution was fuelled by his ideas; Darwin set sail on the Beagle because of Humboldt; and Jules Verne's Captain Nemo owned all his many books. He simply was, as one contemporary put it, 'the greatest man since the Deluge'. Taking us on a fantastic voyage in his footsteps - racing across anthrax-infected Russia or mapping tropical rivers alive with crocodiles - Andrea Wulf shows why his life and ideas remain so important today. Humboldt predicted human-induced climate change as early as 1800, and The Invention of Nature traces his ideas as they go on to revolutionize and shape science, conservation, nature writing, politics, art and the theory of evolution. He wanted to know and understand everything and his way of thinking was so far ahead of his time that it's only coming into its own now. Alexander von Humboldt really did invent the way we see nature.

Konrad Zuse is one of the great pioneers of the computer age. He created thefirst fully automated, program controlled, freely programmable computer using binary floating-point calculation. It was operational in 1941. He built his first machines in Berlin during the Second World War, with bombs falling all around, and after the war he built up a company that was taken over by Siemens in 1967. Zuse was an inventor in the traditional style, full of phantastic ideas, but also gifted with a powerful analytical mind. Single-handedly, he developed one of the first programming languages, the Plan Calculus, including features copied only decades later in other languages. He wrote numerousbooks and articles and won many honors and awards. This is his autobiography, written in an engagingly lively and pleasant style, full of anecdotes, reminiscences, and philosophical asides. It traces his life from his childhood in East Prussia, through tense wartime experiences and hard times building up his business after the war, to a ripe old age andwell-earned celebrity.

Life and death in a modern hospital, from Seamus O'Mahony, the award-winning author of The Way We Die Now and Can Medicine Be Cured? Seamus O'Mahony charts the realities of work in the 'ministry of bodies', that huge complex where people come to be cured and to die. From unexpected deaths to moral quandaries and bureaucratic disasters, O'Mahony documents life in the halls and wards that all of us will visit at some point in our lives with his characteristic wit and dry and unsentimental intelligence. Absurd general emails, vain and self-promoting specialists, the relentless parade of self-destructive drinkers and drug users, the comical expectations of baffled patients: this is not a conventional medical memoir, but the collective biography of one of our great modern institutions - the general hospital - through the eyes of a brilliant writer, who happens to be a doctor.

"A fitting biography of one of the most brilliant, acerbic, and under-appreciated astrophysicists of the twentieth century. John Johnson has delved deeply into a rich and eventful life, and produced a rollicking account of how Fritz Zwicky split his time between picking fights with his colleagues and discovering amazing things about our universe."-Sean Carroll, author of The Big Picture Fritz Zwicky was one of the most inventive and iconoclastic scientists of his time. He predicted the existence of neutron stars, and his research pointed the way toward the discovery of pulsars and black holes. He was the first to conceive of the existence of dark matter, the first to make a detailed catalog of thousands of galaxies, and the first to correctly suggest that cosmic rays originate from supernovas. Not content to confine his discoveries to the heavens, Zwicky contributed to the United States war against Japan with inventions in jet propulsion that enabled aircraft to launch from carriers in the Pacific. After the war, he was the first Western scientist to interview Wernher von Braun, the Nazi engineer who developed the V-2 rocket. Later he became an outspoken advocate for space exploration, but also tangled with almost every leading scientist of the time, from Edwin Hubble and Richard Feynman to J. Robert Oppenheimer and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. In Zwicky, John Johnson, Jr., brings this tempestuous maverick to life. Zwicky not only made groundbreaking contributions to science and engineering; he rose to fame as one of the most imaginative science popularizers of his day. Yet he became a pariah in the scientific community, denouncing his enemies, real and imagined, as "spherical bastards" and "horses' asses." Largely forgotten today, Zwicky deserves rediscovery for introducing some of the most destructive forces in the universe, and as a reminder that genius obeys no rules and has no friends.

A short gift book of festive hospital diaries from the author of million-copy bestseller This is Going to Hurt

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat . . . but 1.4 million NHS staff are heading off to work. In this perfect present for anyone who has ever set foot in a hospital, Adam Kay delves back into his diaries for a hilarious, horrifying and sometimes heartbreaking peek behind the blue curtain at Christmastime.

Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas is a love letter to all those who spend their festive season on the front line, removing babies and baubles from the various places they get stuck, at the most wonderful time of the year.

'The perfect surgical stocking-filler' The Times

With his "deeply informed and compassionate book...Dr. Epstein tells us that it is a 'moral imperative' [for doctors] to do right by their patients" (New York Journal of Books). The first book for the general public about the importance of mindfulness in medical practice, Attending is a groundbreaking, intimate exploration of how doctors approach their work with patients. From his early days as a Harvard Medical School student, Epstein saw what made good doctors great-more accurate diagnoses, fewer errors, and stronger connections with their patients. This made a lasting impression on him and set the stage for his life's work-identifying the qualities and habits that distinguish master clinicians from those who are merely competent. The secret, he learned, was mindfulness. Dr. Epstein "shows how taking time to pay attention to patients can lead to better outcomes on both sides of the stethoscope" (Publishers Weekly). Drawing on his clinical experiences and current research, Dr. Epstein explores four foundations of mindfulness-Attention, Curiosity, Beginner's Mind, and Presence-and shows how clinicians can grow their capacity to provide high-quality care. The commodification of health care has shifted doctors' focus away from the healing of patients to the bottom line. Clinician burnout is at an all-time high. Attending is the antidote. With compassion and intelligence, Epstein offers "a concise guide to his view of what mindfulness is, its value, and how it is a skill that anyone can work to acquire" (Library Journal).

Such Silver Currents is the first biography of a mathematical genius and his literary wife, their wide circle of well-known intellectual and artistic friends, and through them of the age in which they lived. William Clifford is now recognised not only for his innovative and lasting mathematics, but also for his philosophy, which embraced the fundamentals of scientific thought, the nature of the physical universe, Darwinian theory, the nature of consciousness, personal morality and law, and the whole mystery of being. Clifford algebra is seen as the basis for Dirac's theory of the electron, fundamental to modern physics, and Clifford also anticipated Einstein's idea that space is curved. The book includes a personal reflection on William Clifford's mathematics by the Nobel Prize winner Sir Roger Penrose O.M. The year after his election to the Royal Society, Clifford married Lucy Lane, the journalist and novelist. During their four years of marriage they held Sunday salons attended by many well-known scientific, literary and artistic personalities. Following William's early death, Lucy became a close friend and confidante of Henry James. Her wide circle of friends included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Thomas Huxley, Sir Frederick Macmillan and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

As world demand for electrical energy increases, it will be the ingenuity and skill of brilliant electrochemists that enables us to utilize the planet's mineral reserves responsibly. This biographical dictionary profiles 85 electrochemists from 19 nations who during the past 270 years have researched and developed ever more efficient batteries and energy cells. Each entry traces the subject's origin, education, discoveries and patents, as well as hobbies and family life. The breakthroughs of early innovators are cataloged and the work of living scientists and technicians is brought up to date. An appendix provides a cross-referenced timeline of innovation.