Technology Biography

From the start, his path was never predictable. Steve Jobs was given up for adoption at birth, dropped out of college after one semester, and at the age of 20, created Apple in his parents' garage with his friend Steve Wozniack. Then came the core and hallmark of his genius - his exacting insistence on perfection, his counterculture life approach, and his level of taste and style that pushed all boundaries.

On the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Gombe is a community where the principal residents are chimpanzees. Through Jane Goodall's eyes we watch young Figan's rise to power and old Mike's crushing defeat. We learn how one mother rears her children to succeed, and another dooms hers to failure. We witness horrifying murders, touching moments of affection, joyous births, and wrenching deaths. As Goodall compellingly tells the story of this intimately intertwined community, we are shown human emotions stripped to their essence. In the mirror of chimpanzee life, we see ourselves reflected.

Antoine Lavoisier reinvented chemistry, overthrowing the long-established principles of alchemy and inventing an entirely new terminology, one still in use by chemists. Madison Smartt Bell’s enthralling narrative comes across like a race to the finish line, as the very circumstances that enabled Lavoisier to secure his reputation as the father of modern chemistry—a considerable fortune and social connections with the likes of Benjamin Franklin—also caused his glory to be cut short by the French Revolution.

Explore the stories of more than 85 of the world's most inspirational and influential scientists with this innovative and bold book of biographies. From mathematicians to meteorologists, geologists to geneticists, each scientist is presented through a combination of stimulating words. Combining elements of biography, history, and analysis, Scientists Who Changed History explains the groundbreaking contributions made by these revolutionary men and women in a clear and informative way.

"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing". In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world.

Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere - rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives - are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator.

Every visitor of Yosemite National Park in California should say "thank you" to one man: John Muir.

John Wesley Powell was known for his explorations of the canyon land area of southern Utah and northern Arizona, still "unknown" in the 1860s.

Galileo used his telescope to discover new and marvelous mysteries in the night sky!

Srinivasa Ramanujan has been described as a rock-star mathematician. Though he died almost one hundred years ago, his work in mathematics will always be important.

Did you know the Nobel Prize is named after the man who invented dynamite? Learn all about the life of Alfred Nobel, who grew up in a desperately poor family.

Joseph Montgolfier and his brother Étienne developed the first balloon. But its first riders were a sheep, a rooster, and a duck!

Meet Doug Taron, a scientist who studies butterflies and other Insects & Arachnids at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago.

An old timer regales the audience with the story of the Stanley brothers and their famous Stanley Steamer, a steam-powered automobile.

With the help of his pea plants, Gregor Mendel cracked the secret of heredity, how traits are passed from parents to children to grandchildren.

Isaac Newton did not discover gravity; people had noticed it before! But he did figure out the rules for how it works.

Why would Geoffrey Pyke propose a strange idea like building an aircraft carrier from a mixture of ice and wood pulp?

Il est impossible aujourd'hui de passer à côté du phénomène Musk. Elon Musk, c'est l'homme qui rêve en grand et promet à l'humanité qu'elle va quitter le berceau Terre, direction Mars. En seulement quelques années, il s'est imposé dans tous les grands champs de la science contemporaine. Il révolutionne le secteur spatial avec SpaceX, il prend position sur l'intelligence artificielle, souhaite transformer les neurosciences en connectant des ordinateurs à nos cerveaux, et joue les influenceurs pour le développement des monnaies virtuelles.

When Thomas Edison began wiring New York City with a direct current electricity distribution system in the 1880s, he gave humankind the magic of electric light, heat, and power; in the process, though, he inadvertently opened a Pandora's Box of unimaginable illness and death. Dirty Electricity tells the story of Dr. Samuel Milham, the scientist who first alerted the world about the frightening link between occupational exposure to electromagnetic fields and human disease.

On July 22, 2009, a special meeting was held with 24 leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health to discuss early findings that a newly discovered retrovirus was linked to chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), prostate cancer, lymphoma, and eventually neurodevelopmental disorders in children. When Dr. Judy Mikovits finished her presentation the room was silent for a moment, then one of the scientists said, "Oh my God!" The resulting investigation would be like no other in science.