History

This book conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail....

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine....

An oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem....

Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth’s deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you’ve got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal....

The dramatic inside story of the first four historic flights that launched SpaceX - and Elon Musk - from a shaky startup into the world's leading-edge rocket company....

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is essential listening for understanding the history, philosophy, and evolution of science....

Here for the first time, in rich human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed....

If there is one belief that has united the left and the right, psychologists and philosophers, ancient thinkers and modern ones, it is the tacit assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives....

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

From the best-selling author of 1177 B.C., a comprehensive history of archaeology - from its amateur beginnings to the cutting-edge science it is today....

The acclaimed Pulitzer Prize finalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Galileo’s Daughter crafts a luminous chronicle of the life and work of the most famous woman in the history of science.

James Gleick explains the theories behind the fascinating new science called chaos. Alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, it is being hailed as the 20th century's third revolution....

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann....

An eye-opening investigation into the history of diabetes research and treatment by the award-winning journalist and best-selling author of Why We Get Fat....

Science is a force for good in the world—at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything, it’s the only thing—no matter the cost....

More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals....

From the New York Times-bestselling author comes a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts....

This is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease....

From the masters of storytelling-meets-science, Patient Zero tells the long and fascinating history of disease outbreaks—how they start, how they spread, the science that lets us understand them, and how we race to destroy them before they destroy us....

James Gleick has long been fascinated by the making of science....

By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize....

In the winter of 1918, at the height of World War I, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide....

We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world - from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses - the harder they find it is to locate life’s edge....

A sweeping history of tragic genius, cutting-edge science, and the discovery that changed billions of lives - including your own....

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,” writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it.

Hoof Beats transforms our understanding of both horses and humanity's ancient past and asks us to consider what our relationship with horses means for the future of humanity and the world around us.

In Charged, James Morton Turner unpacks the history of batteries to explore why solving "the battery problem" is critical to a clean energy transition. As climate activists focus on what a clean energy future will create the history of batteries offers a sharp reminder of what building that future will consume. With new insight on the consequences for people and communities on the front lines, Turner draws on the past for crucial lessons that will help us build a just and clean energy future, from the ground up.

Are we alone in the universe? It's a fundamental question for Earth-dwelling humankind. Are there other worlds like ours, out there somewhere? In Hidden in the Heavens, Jason Steffen, a former scientist on NASA's Kepler mission, describes how that mission searched for planets orbiting Sun-like stars—especially Earth-like planets circulating in Earth-like orbits.

How many times have we looked for something and found something else? A partner, a job, an object? The same thing often happens to scientists: they design an experiment and discover the unexpected, which usually turns out to be very important. This fascinating phenomenon is called serendipity, which takes its name from the mythical Serendip, a place from which, according to a Persian fable, three princes set off to explore the world, making chance discoveries along the way.