The connection between mind and brain has been one of the most persistent problems in modern Western thought; even recent advances in neuroscience haven't been able to solve it satisfactorily. Historian Larry Sommer McGrath's "Making Spirit Matter" s...

For mathematician Francis Su, a society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without experiencing some of humanity's most beautiful ideas. In this profound book, w...

Harold C. Urey (1893-1981) was one of the most famous American scientists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1934 for his discovery of deuterium and heavy water, Urey later participated in the Manhattan Project and NASA's lunar expl...

In this concise book, R. Shankar, a well?known physicist and contagiously enthusiastic educator, explains the essential concepts of Newtonian mechanics, special relativity, waves, fluids, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics. Now in an expanded...

Few American cities possess a history as long, rich, and fascinating as Boston's. A site of momentous national political events from the Revolutionary War through the civil rights movement, Boston has also been an influential literary and cultural ca...

When we see a bird, do we actually notice it? Many of us don't. But in Britain, there are more than a million members of the RSPB and, thanks to social media, there is also a growing number of bird photographers. From the giant raptors of our skies t...

Although Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was one of the most famous scientists in the world at the time of his death at the age of ninety, today he is known to many as a kind of "almost-Darwin", a secondary figure relegated to the footnotes of Darw...

Databases have revolutionized nearly every aspect of our lives. Information of all sorts is being collected on a massive scale, from Google to Facebook and well beyond, to produce new knowledge. But as the amount of information in databases explodes,...

Item #176: A fire drill. No, not an exercise in which occupants of a building practice leaving the building safely. A drill which safely emits a bit of fire, the approximate shape and size of a drill bit. Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street c...

"There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it". With this provocative and apparently paradoxical claim, Steven Shapin begins his bold, vibrant exploration of the origins of the modern scientific worldview, now upd...