Experts outline a plan to overhaul the U.S. energy innovation system for accelerated, large-scale adoption of reliable, low-cost, low-carbon energy technologies.
The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.
Earth System Analysis for Sustainability uses an integrated systems approach to provide a panoramic view of planetary dynamics since the inception of life some four billion years ago and to identify principles for responsible management of the global environment in the future. Perceiving our planet as a single entity with hypercomplex, often unpredictable behavior, the authors use Earth system analysis to study global changes past and future.
Scientists Debate Gaia is a multidisciplinary reexamination of the Gaia hypothesis, which was introduced by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s. The Gaia hypothesis holds that Earth's physical and biological processes are linked to form a complex, self-regulating system and that life has affected this system over time. Until a few decades ago, most of the earth sciences viewed the planet through disciplinary lenses: biology, chemistry, geology, atmospheric and ocean studies. The Gaia hypothesis, on the other hand, takes a very broad interdisciplinary approach.
Janos Bolyai (1802-1860) was a mathematician who changed our fundamental ideas about space. As a teenager he started to explore a set of nettlesome geometrical problems, including Euclid's parallel postulate, and in 1832 he published a brilliant twenty-four-page paper that eventually shook the foundations of the 2000-year-old tradition of Euclidean geometry.
In 1824 a young Norwegian named Niels Henrik Abel proved conclusively that algebraic equations of the fifth order are not solvable in radicals. In this book Peter Pesic shows what an important event this was in the history of thought. He also presents it as a remarkable human story. Abel was twenty-one when he self-published his proof, and he died five years later, poor and depressed, just before the proof started to receive wide acclaim.
Science and engineering research must be communicated within the research community and to the general public, and a crucial element of that communication is visual. In Envisioning Science, science photographer Felice Frankel provides a guide to creating dynamic and compelling photographs for journal submissions and scientific presentations to funding agencies, investors, and the general public. The book is organized from the large to small—from photographing laboratory equipment to capturing new material and biological structures at the microscopic level.
In the mid to late 1890s, J. J. Thomson and colleagues at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory conducted experiments on "cathode rays" (a form of radiation produced within evacuated glass vessels subjected to electric fields)—the results of which some historians later viewed as the "discovery" of the electron. This book is both a biography of the electron and a history of the microphysical world that it opened up.
The separateness and connection of individuals is perhaps the central question of human life: What, exactly, is my individuality? To what degree is it unique? To what degree can it be shared, and how? To the many philosophical and literary speculations about these topics over time, modern science has added the curious twist of quantum theory, which requires that the elementary particles of which everything consists have no individuality at all. All aspects of chemistry depend on this lack of individuality, as do many branches of physics. From where, then, does our individuality come?
Rivers going underground, great springs emerging from the ground, independent hollows and basins instead of connecting valleys, deep potholes and vast caves, isolated towerlike hills reminiscent of the unbelievably steep peaks depicted in Chinese paintings—these are some of the distinctive features of karst, the name given to the kinds of country that owe their special characteristics to the unusual degree of solubility of their component rocks in natural waters.
A set of tables of spheroidal wave functions designed to simplify the computation of acoustic and electromagnetic scattering from spheroids. The tables were computed to five-place accuracy on the Whirlwind digital computer, and automatically tabulated. An introduction discusses the mathematical properties of the functions and describes some of their applications.
Richard Brauer (1901-1977) was one of the leading algebraists of this century. Although he contributed to a number of mathematical fields, Brauer devoted the major share of his efforts to the study of finite groups, a subject of considerable abstract interest and one that underlies many of the more recent advances in combinatorics and finite geometries.
Experts outline a plan to overhaul the U.S. energy innovation system for accelerated, large-scale adoption of reliable, low-cost, low-carbon energy technologies.
A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more.
Innovative, long-term strategies for reducing vulnerability to large-scale natural disasters and for providing financial support for disaster victims.
How science consultants make movie science plausible, in films ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Finding Nemo.
What it’s like to explore Mars from Earth: How the Mars rovers provide scientists with a virtual experience of being on Mars.
The distinctive and amazing songs and calls of birds: a meditation and a lexicon.
A celebration of whales, dolphins, and porpoises and an introduction to their variety, behavior, and natural history; features 180 color photographs.
The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.
