Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives and the increasing fortunes of nations hung on a resolution. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution--a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. "Longitude" is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison's forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation, and clockmaking, and opens a new window on our world.

A "gleaming, humane" ("The New York Times Book Review") memoir of the relationship between a cadaver named Eve and a first-year medical student
Medical student Christine Montross felt nervous standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags was initially unnerving. But once Montross met her cadaver, she found herself intrigued by the person the woman once was and fascinated by the strange, unsettling beauty of the human form. They called her Eve. The story of Montross and Eve is a tender and surprising examination of the mysteries of the human body, and a remarkable look at our relationship with both the living and the dead.

An autobiography of a ground-breaking medical doctor. Dr. David A. Hamburg started as a medical student with interest in stress disorders, paying special attention to the propensity toward violence, including the evolution of human aggression. This lead him on a path to becoming one of the most highly celebrated doctors in America - he was a member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian award of the United States). Most recently, he chaired committees at the United Nations and European Union on the prevention of genocide. This book will be inspirational for emerging scientists today.

Charles Darwin is well-known throughout the world for his revolutionary work from 1859; The Origin of Species, the foundational study of evolution which greatly challenged the near-universal belief in the Christian world, at that time, of creationism. Originally published in 1928, Dorsey attempts to provide a detailed account of the scientist's life and personality informed by letters, published works and an autobiography written by Darwin. Darwin's life was full of challenges both in his personal life as well as his career and The Evolution of Charles Darwin explores all aspects of his life from birth to death emphasising the great impact his work had in the scientific community and humanity as a whole.

An autobiography of a ground-breaking medical doctor. Dr. David A. Hamburg started as a medical student with interest in stress disorders, paying special attention to the propensity toward violence, including the evolution of human aggression. This lead him on a path to becoming one of the most highly celebrated doctors in America - he was a member of President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest civilian award of the United States). Most recently, he chaired committees at the United Nations and European Union on the prevention of genocide. This book will be inspirational for emerging scientists today.

'Enchanting to the point of escapism.' - Simon Ings, Spectator 'Hugh Aldersey-Williams rescues his subject from Newton's shadow, where he was been unjustly confined for over three hundred years.' - Literary Review Filled with incident, discovery, and revelation, Dutch Light is a vivid account of Christiaan Huygens's remarkable life and career, but it is also nothing less than the story of the birth of modern science as we know it. Europe's greatest scientist during the latter half of the seventeenth century, Christiaan Huygens was a true polymath. A towering figure in the fields of astronomy, optics, mechanics, and mathematics, many of his innovations in methodology, optics and timekeeping remain in use to this day. Among his many achievements, he developed the theory of light travelling as a wave, invented the mechanism for the pendulum clock, and discovered the rings of Saturn - via a telescope that he had also invented. A man of fashion and culture, Christiaan came from a family of multi-talented individuals whose circle included not only leading figures of Dutch society, but also artists and philosophers such as Rembrandt, Locke and Descartes. The Huygens family and their contemporaries would become key actors in the Dutch Golden Age, a time of unprecedented intellectual expansion within the Netherlands. Set against a backdrop of worldwide religious and political turmoil, this febrile period was defined by danger, luxury and leisure, but also curiosity, purpose, and tremendous possibility. Following in Huygens's footsteps as he navigates this era while shuttling opportunistically between countries and scientific disciplines, Hugh Aldersey-Williams builds a compelling case to reclaim Huygens from the margins of history and acknowledge him as one of our most important and influential scientific figures.

This book is about the life and work of a Turkish-American social scientist, Muzafer Sherif (1905-1988). He was known for his seminal work on norm and group formations, social judgment, and intergroup conflicts and cooperation. Although Sherif is identified as one of the founders of social psychology, his contribution to the science of psychology goes beyond the limits of social psychology as it is generally defined today. This volume aims to rediscover the theory and research of its subject in the socio-historical context of his time, as well as his relevance for contemporary psychology. Chapters cover a range of topics: an in-depth portrayal of Sherif's life and intellectual struggle in Turkey and in the United States; his metatheoretical considerations on the science of psychology; his theory and research on group and intergroup relationships, social norms and social change; formation and change of frames of reference, ego- involvements and identity; and psychology of slogans. Sherif had profound life experiences in different cultural contexts from the Ottoman Empire and World War I to American universities, which enabled him to see the essentiality of the historico-cultural context in the formation of human phenomena. Sherif's psychology is an elegant exemplar of an integrative science of psychology that is worth rediscovering.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel changed the world as we know it. He was responsible for building the Great Western Railway main line, introducing regular steamship travel across the Atlantic, building the first tunnel under a major river, and constructing docks, harbours and bridges that enabled Britain to expand and grow as the powerhouse of the world. Without his foresight and imagination, it is possible that nineteenth-century Britain might have been very different. There have been many books written about the man himself, but this book concentrates upon the structures, buildings and legacy of Brunel, introducing the reader to this great engineer and embarking upon a tour around Britain that reveals the many locations with a Brunel connection.

Gilded Age Americans lived cheek-by-jowl with free range animals. Cities and towns teemed with milk cows in dark tenement alleys, pigs rooting through garbage in the streets, geese and chickens harried by the packs of stray dogs that roamed the 19th century city. For all of American history, animals had been a ubiquitous and seemingly inevitable part of urban life, essential to sustaining a dense human population. As that population became ever-denser, though, city dwellers were forced to consider new ways to share space with their fellow creatures-and began to fit urban animals into one of two categories: the pets they loved or the pests they exterminated. Into the fracas of the urban landscape stepped Henry Bergh, who launched a then-shocking campaign to bring rights to animals. Bergh's movement was considered wildly radical for suggesting that animals might feel pain, that they might have rights. He and his cadre of activists put abusers on trial, sometimes literally calling the animal victims as witnesses in court. But despite all the showmanship, at its core the movement was guided by a fierce sense of its devotees' morality. A Traitor to His Species is a revelatory social history, bursting with colorful characters. In addition to the eccentric and droopily-mustachioed Bergh, the movement and its adversaries included former Five Points gang-leader-turned-sports-hall-entrepreneur Kit Burns and his prize bulldog Belcher, larger-than-life impresario P.T. Barnum, and pioneering Philadelphia activist Caroline Earle White. There are greedy robber barons and humanitarian visionaries-all bumping up against one another as the city underwent a monumental shift. For better or worse, they all forged our modern relationship to animals.

The life and art of the 18th-century naturalist Mark Catesby, and his pioneering work depicting the flora and fauna of North America, are explored in vibrant detail This book explores the life and work of the celebrated eighteenth-century English naturalist, explorer, artist and author Mark Catesby (1683-1749). During Catesby's lifetime, science was poised to shift from a world of amateur virtuosi to one of professional experts. Working against a backdrop of global travel that incorporated collecting and direct observation of nature, Catesby spent two prolonged periods in the New World - in Virginia (1712-19) and South Carolina and the Bahamas (1722-6). In his majestic two-volume Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731-43), esteemed by his contemporary John Bartram as 'an ornament for the finest library in the world', he reflected the excitement, drama and beauty of the natural world. Interweaving elements of art history, history of science, natural history illustration, painting materials, book history, paper studies, garden history and colonial history, this meticulously researched volume brings together a wealth of unpublished images as well as newly discovered letters by Catesby, which, with their first-hand accounts of his collecting and encounters in the wild, bring the story of this extraordinary pioneer naturalist vividly to life. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In 2017, Dr Suzanne Koven published an essay describing the challenges faced by women doctors, including her own personal struggle with "imposter syndrome"-a long-held, secret belief that she was not clever enough or good enough to be a "real" doctor. Accessed nearly 300,000 times by readers around the world, Koven's Letter to a Young Female Physician has evolved into a work that reflects on her career in medicine, in which women still encounter sexism, pay inequity and harassment. Koven tells engaging stories about her pregnancy during a gruelling residency in the AIDS era; the illnesses of her son and parents during which her roles as a doctor, mother and daughter converged; and the twilight of her career during the COVID-19 pandemic. Letter to a Young Female Physician offers an indelible eyewitness account from a doctor, mother, wife, daughter, teacher and writer that will encourage readers to embrace their own imperfect selves.

This book resurrects the Franz Alexanderian legacy, reminding his behemoth contributions and offers the reader with a deeply tender and touching portrait. It also considers his personal and professional life, the role of family in his decisions, and how those decisions affected other family members.

""I looked out over the trees and the city and the cars below, all moving fast to a somewhere I knew nothing about. Life was in full motion and it felt like I was missing it. What I didn't see was the face of a man standing at the first window in the adjacent wing, staring out much like me. I didn't see him until it was too late.""

In response to an encounter with that man whose face he saw at the window, Dr. James Judge made a vow, early in his career, to be a different kind of doctor than his medical training had taught him to be. He vowed not to deny his own humanity. He vowed not to shrink from his patients' unseen suffering. He vowed he would ask the "probing and important questions, the ones that had nothing to do with an illness and everything to do with it at the same time." And he vowed he would "listen."

In the years that followed, Dr. Judge kept a journal. In" The Closest of Strangers," Dr. Judge shares stories from that journal, stories that demonstrate the paradox of the patient-doctor relationship: that two people, essentially strangers, can somehow walk through life's most intimate moments together and, how, on that walk, they can both move toward healing.

The stories in"The Closest of Strangers" demonstrate the love, faith, courage, and remarkable, boundless resilience of the human spirit. Through these stories, you will be witness, as was Dr. Judge, to the powerful current of grace running through their lives-and his own.

"These are the stories of my intimate strangers," Dr. Judge says of the narratives recorded in this powerful volume. "Faces that have haunted me, and, I suppose, haunt me still. People I barely knew, but in some ways came to know more deeply, maybe, than I knew myself."

The stories Dr. Judge shares of his "intimate strangers" are all stories of courage and faith-in the face of fear, hopelessness, and devastating loss:

• In the course of a young boy's illness, a mother grows strong, a family grows close, and a community grows tender.
• A woman unable to keep up the "lacquered layers of expectations" in her "perfect" world courageously faces her emptiness and learns to experience the real substance of life.
• To bring her baby safely to term, an unmarried teenager fights a malignant tumor and a doctor's stern advice that she abort her pregnancy.
• A deeply troubled man entangled in addiction finds the courage to speak honestly about himself and to call on God to help him face and overcome his demons.
• A mother of a profoundly disabled child remains convinced that her little girl's life holds purpose-and so, miraculously, it does.

"Suffering sometimes brings with it certain gifts," Dr. Judge writes. "Qualities and strengths beyond value or measure." "The Closest of Strangers" testifies to those qualities and strengths-and to the lessons learned by a doctor who listened to his best teachers, who sometimes became his healers as well.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America's conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten-an omission that John Taliaferro's commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn in 1849 and grew up on the estate of ornithologist John James Audubon. Upon graduation from Yale, he dug for dinosaurs on the Great Plains with eminent paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh-an expedition that fanned his romantic notion of wilderness and taught him a graphic lesson in evolution and extinction. Soon he joined George A. Custer in the Black Hills, helped to map Yellowstone, and scaled the peaks and glaciers that, through his labors, would become Glacier National Park. Along the way, he became one of America's most respected ethnologists; seasons spent among the Plains Indians produced numerous articles and books, including his tour de force, The Cheyenne Indians: Their History and Ways of Life. More than a chronicler of natural history and indigenous culture, Grinnell became their tenacious advocate. He turned the sportsmen's journal Forest and Stream into a bully pulpit for wildlife protection, forest reserves, and national parks. In 1886, his distress over the loss of bird species prompted him to found the first Audubon Society. Next, he and Theodore Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club to promote "fair chase" of big game. His influence among the rich and the patrician provided leverage for the first federal legislation to protect migratory birds-a precedent that ultimately paved the way for the Endangered Species Act. And in an era when too many white Americans regarded Native Americans as backwards, Grinnell's cries for reform carried from the reservation, through the halls of Congress, all the way to the White House. Drawing on forty thousand pages of Grinnell's correspondence and dozens of his diaries, Taliaferro reveals a man whose deeds and high-mindedness earned him a lustrous peerage, from presidents to chiefs, Audubon to Aldo Leopold, John Muir to Gifford Pinchot, Edward S. Curtis to Edward H. Harriman. Throughout his long life, Grinnell was bound by family and sustained by intimate friendships, toggling between the East and the West. As Taliaferro's enthralling portrait demonstrates, it was this tension that wound Grinnell's nearly inexhaustible spring and honed his vision-a vision that still guides the imperiled future of our national treasures.

Carol Ruckdeschel is the wildest woman in America. She wrestles alligators, eats roadkill, rides horses bareback, and lives in a ramshackle cabin that she built by hand in an island wilderness. A combination of Henry David Thoreau and Jane Goodall, Carol is a self-taught scientist who has become a tireless defender of sea turtles on Cumberland Island, a national park off the coast of Georgia. Cumberland, the country's largest and most biologically diverse barrier island, is celebrated for its windswept dunes and feral horses. Steel magnate Thomas Carnegie once owned much of the island, and in recent years, Carnegie heirs and the National Park Service have clashed with Carol over the island's future. What happens when a dirt-poor naturalist with only a high school diploma becomes an outspoken advocate on a celebrated but divisive island? Untamed is the story of an American original standing her ground and fighting for what she believes in, no matter the cost.

An account from the frontline of fertility treatment, giving a unique insight into not only the medical and scientific advances involved but the human cost and rewards behind this life-changing technology. Simon Fishel worked with Robert Edwards during his pioneering early IVF research and was part of the team in the world's first IVF clinic, with all the trials and tribulations that involved at the time, including a writ for murder! As the science developed over the decades so did his career, as he sought to do more for patients and taught the new technologies to doctors all over the world. He came up against regulatory and establishment barriers, including fighting a 3-year legal case in the High Court of Justice and a death threat from a doctor if he refused to work with him. The clinic he founded has grown into the largest IVF group in the UK, developing exciting new procedures, and he has helped establish clinics throughout the world, even being invited to introduce IVF to China.

THE PERFECT SUMMER READ - From the #1 bestselling author of Hello, is this Planet Earth? and Ask an Astronaut As heard on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs __________________ 'What surprised me was how entirely serene I felt. I was weightless, no forces exerting themselves on my body. To my left was the Space Station. Below me, gradually going into shadow, was the Earth. And over my right shoulder was the universe.' In fascinating and personal detail, and drawing on exclusive diaries and audio recordings from his mission, astronaut Tim Peake takes readers closer than ever before to experience what life in space is really like: the sights, the smells, the fear, the sacrifice, the exhilaration and the deep and abiding wonder of the view. Warm, inspiring and often funny, Tim also charts his surprising road to becoming an astronaut, from a shy and unassuming boy from Chichester who had a passion for flight, to a young British Army officer, Apache helicopter pilot, flight instructor and test pilot who served around the world. Tim's extensive eighteen-year career in the Army included the command of a platoon of soldiers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, deployment in Bosnia, and operations in Afghanistan. Full of life lessons for readers of all ages, Limitless is the story of how ordinary can become extraordinary. __________________ 'For someone who has literally been out of this world Tim's an incredibly down to earth guy and I think you'll be amazed at some of the things he has done ... it's so inspiring to know that even going into space didn't change him as much as being a parent did.' JOE WICKS 'Tim is one of our nation's good guys - and his story is a testament to his courage, kindness and a never-give-up spirit.' BEAR GRYLLS 'Full of courage, camaraderie and daring escapades, this reads like a Boys' Own adventure' MIRROR 'A fantastic book' PIERS MORGAN 'Fasten your seatbelt for an exhilarating read ... His accounts of blasting into orbit at 25 times the speed of sound and floating, weightless, around the space station are enthralling.' EXPRESS Bestseller in the UK, Sunday Times, October 2020

Everyone knows the story of the codebreaker and computer science pioneer Alan Turing. Except ... When Dermot Turing is asked about his famous uncle, people want to know more than the bullet points of his life. They want to know everything - was Alan Turing actually a codebreaker? What did he make of artificial intelligence? What is the significance of Alan Turing's trial, his suicide, the Royal Pardon, the GBP50 note and the film The Imitation Game? In Reflections of Alan Turing, Dermot strips off the layers to uncover the real story. It's time to discover a fresh legacy of Alan Turing for the twenty-first century.

Lhwyd, the illegitimate son of a father ruined by the Civil War, had to make his own way in the world. A competent botanist before going up to Oxford as a student, he spent much time there at the Botanical Garden before being appointed to the newly established Ashmolean Museum, where he became its second Keeper. This biography traces the development of his research interests from botany to palaeontology - and then to antiquarian studies, which led to him studying the Celtic languages as a source of linguistic evidence in historical studies. Thus he became the founder of Celtic Studies. Lhwyd's diverse research interests were underpinned by an evidence-led methodology - the collection (by personal observation where possible) of material, which would then be classified as a preliminary to drawing conclusions - and, as such, his is a valuable contribution to the history of science.