The planning and writing of this book has taken rather longer than I had originally intended; what began as a modest literary project for two second-year medical students has expanded over eight years to become a complete book. The subject matter lent itself all too easily to a sen sationalist approach yet, on the other hand, a strictly scientific approach would probably have resulted in a dull dry text of little interest to the general reader. I have therefore attempted to bridge the gap ...

In 1849, Thoreau published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The actual voyage was performed by the two brothers Henry and John in the late summer of 1839 in a boat of their own making, "painted green below with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence." During his Walden retirement, Thoreau worked over the original record of his pleasant outing, expanding it greatly by the inclusion of very various material, and ...

Publishing your research in an international journal is key to your success in academia. This guide is based on a study of referees' reports and letters from journal editors on reasons why papers written by non-native researchers are rejected due to problems with English usage. It draws on English-related errors from around 5000 papers written by non-native authors, 500 abstracts by PhD students, and over 1000 hours of teaching researchers how to write and present research papers.W...

What's inside a laptop? How can you stuff 1,000 CDs into an mp3 player? Who built the Internet? How smart is the world's smartest robot? How do smartphones and TV remote controls work?Glenn Murphy, author of Why is Snot Green?, answers these and lots of other brilliant technology questions in Robots, Chips and Techno Stuff. This fact-filled book is packed to capacity with megabytes of marvellous information, exploring everything from the first sim...

Yeasts are the active agents responsible for three of our most important foods - bread, wine, and beer - and for the almost universally used mind/ personality-altering drug, ethanol. Anthropologists have suggested that it was the production of ethanol that motivated primitive people to settle down and become farmers. The Earth is thought to be about 4. 5 billion years old. Fossil microorganisms have been found in Earth rock 3. 3 to 3. 5 billion years old. Microbes have been on Earth for th...

This book discusses secularization, arguing that it may be more complex and significant than is generally recognized. Using a number of online exploration methods, the author provides insights into how religion may be changing, and how information technology might be energized in this process.Working from the premise that the relationship between science and religion is complex, the author demonstrates that while science has contradicted some specific religious beliefs, science its...

Get your science groove on, and check out these awesome engineering projects: Tie-dye t-shirts made with markers, Jewelry made from old CDs, A s’mores cooker powered by the sun. Engineering is easy when you’re having this much fun!

Increased public concern over the control of environmental forces and industrial hazards has led to awareness for the need for improved conditions for all who work. Industry has expanded and developed new p'~ducts and new methods. A great many occupational diseases have accompanied this progress. Too much of the present data and knowledge have been obtained following accidents or sad experience. Thousands of women have died, have become acutely or chronically ill, and still others permanen...

A look into the life of America's first president and the efforts to recreate what he may have actually looked like at different points of that life.George Washington's face has been painted, printed, and engraved more than a billion times since his birth in 1732. And yet even in his lifetime, no picture seemed to capture the likeness of the man who is now the most iconic of all our presidents. Worse still, people today often see this founding father as the "old an...

Asperger's has never been clearly defined, bordering autism on one side and high intelligence and verbal eccentricity on the other. The disease is a kind of cultural lightning rod. First, it's a condition onto which we project the very real and well-founded fears of social isolation inherent in mental illness. But also attached to it is a kind of admiration and envy and (among those who suffer from Asperger's) a kind of elitism, a sense of being one of the elect, in a world mainly peopled ...

This is a book about the why and how of doing experiments on rocks, minerals, magmas, and fluids. It could have as logically been subtitled "Experimental petrology" as "Experimental geochemistry," but we chose geochemistry to emphasize the broad and overlapping nature of current experimental work. We have tried to aim the book at a general readership which we hope will include advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and anyone else interested in learning something about experim...

Water Stress Management contains the invited lectures and selected oral and poster presentations of the 11th International Symposium on the Properties of Water (ISOPOW), which was held in Queretaro, Mexico 5-9 September 2010. The text provides a holistic description and discussion of state-of-the-art topics on the role of water in Biological, Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Food systems within a frame of an integrated approach and future trends on the subject. Different points-of-vie...