Exploring their impact and legacy with leading scientists of today including Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Wolpert, Susan Greenfield, Roger Penrose and Richard Dawkins, Melvyn Bragg illuminates the core issues of science past and present, and conveys the excitement and importance of the scientific quest.

    She is the girl with the blue tattoo.The story behind the distinctive tattoo is the stuff of legends. Some believed it was placed on her face during her captivity, following the brutal murders of her family members and the kidnapping of her and her sister. Others believe it was placed on her after her return.Rumors swelled. Her tattoo became a symbol of Native barbarianism and the triumph of American goodness, but like many stories of that era, the truth is far more complicated.This short book details the murders, her captivity, the aftermath, and her baffling return to her captors. Unravel the mystery of the woman who would become famous for all the wrong reasons and discover what her life story says about cultural identity, the power of resiliency, and what happens when fact and fiction bend and twist to muddy the waters.Read on to find out the truth!

     During fourteen years, from 1955 to 1969, the Soviet Union and the United States of America were engaged in a dramatic race against each other to conquer space. This period encompassed dramatic victories, humbling defeats, and more than one tragedy. This is a story of human courage and ingenuity at its best and political maneuvering at its worst, of almost unbelievable technological progress undertaken with the object not just of advancing human knowledge but also of proving the superiority of one country over another. Inside you will read about... ✓ From Missiles to Rockets ✓ Russia Takes the Lead ✓ Early American Failures ✓ The First Men in Space ✓ Fatalities on Both Sides ✓ The Moon Landing And much more! The space race culminated in man setting foot upon the moon, but each milestone on the way to that final goal was bitterly contested. Two powerful nations pledged a substantial part of their national resources to beat the other in a scientific and technological race to be the first to achieve new records. In terms of contests between major powers, there has never been anything quite as dramatic, public, and sustained as the space race; it remains one of the most fascinating and engaging episodes of the Cold War.

     THE PLAYERS The Drug: Procrit An anti-anemia drug, this miraculous blood booster was one of the first biotech blockbusters. Developed by Amgen and licensed to a Johnson & Johnson company, the drug was sold by the two companies under the brand names Procrit, Epogen, and Arenesp.The Underdog: Mark Duxbury, Drug Salesman Duxbury was the gung-ho salesman for the new biotech division of J&J, an irrepressible character full of jokes. In the early 1990s, he set out to spread the benefits of Procrit, and became a true believer and top seller. But he and his peers were told to steal business from J&J's partner, Amgen. Then came the marketing studies, the off-invoice rebates, doctor payments, and off-label claims. Duxbury tried to stop some of these ruthless programs, but was fired on trumped-up charges. He tried anything to warn the public: testifying in a secret arbitration, joining a class action effort, and filing a whistleblower suit. But he was thwarted at nearly every turn-until the surprising end.The Best Friend: Dean McClellan, Drug Legend Dean McClellan was Duxbury's friendly rival. He tried to beat his buddy's record and wound up selling $170 million worth of the drug, becoming a legend. When Duxbury got fired, McClellan tried to distance himself. But as news of Procrit's deadly power started to surface, McClellan agreed to hand over thousands of damning documents and help his friend blow the whistle on J&J.The Crusader: Jan Schlichtmann, Esq. Remember Jan Schlichtmann, protagonist of the best-selling book and Oscar nominated movie, A Civil Action? When he learned of Duxbury's mission, he felt the old fire rising in his belly and signed on. Now, he's gambling on yet another long shot, trying to fight on behalf of not just millions of cancer patients, but for every American who overpays for health-care.

    For five years in his mid-twenties, he sailed on the BEAGLE around the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains, trekking across deserts. With every new landfall, he had new adventures: he rode through bandit country, was thrown into jail by revolutionaries, took part in an armed raid with marines, survived two earthquakes, hunted and fished. He suffered the terrible cold and rain of Tierra del Fuego, the merciless heat of the Australian outback and the inner pangs of heartbreak. He also made the discoveries that finally led him to formulate his theory of Natural Selection as the driving force of evolution. The five-year voyage of the BEAGLE was the basis for all Darwin's later work; but it also turned him from a friendly idler into the greatest scientist of his century. Kevin Jackson is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. His most recent book is Constellation of Genius: 1922 and All That Jazz (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2013). He lives in Cambridge, England.

    But as it is often said nothing ever really happened unless it is written down. There are so many stories to tell of the agonies and triumphs of both doctors and patients, who have peopled this venerable institution through the ages. I wrote the stories because I firmly believe that healing is a mutual process; that the healer is very often himself healed as he goes about caring for the ailing person. So the stories bite both ways.”

    Eyes wide open. I was standing at an open window, staring at the dizzying curve of Riverside Drive, five floors below. I’d stopped, somehow, poised, about to jump.Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was twelve when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night, she both longed for and dreaded sleep.Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead. Efforts to abate her malady with drinking failed miserably. She became promiscuous, looking for nighttime companionship. Could a bed partner save her from flinging herself down a flight of stairs or out an open window? Exhaustion stalked her, and rest and love were seemingly out of reach.This is the journey Frazier illuminates in her intimate memoir. While highlighting her quest to beat her sleep terrors and insomnia, this is ultimately a story of health, hope, and redemption.

    Each case includes an extended discussion, definition of terms, clinical pearls, and USMLE format review questions. This interactive learning system helps you understand essential concepts instead of memorizing facts.

    Featuring 130 figures as well as 10 additional ‘top ten’ lists, the book will offer new angles on famous faces as well as introduce you to some unsung heroes. While the narrative takes the reader through feminisms struggle from the first wave to the fourth, the table offers a key to understanding how these women and the battles they fought speak to each other across time and continents: if you’re inspired by Sheryl Sandberg, prepared to be equally wowed by Frances Harper and Alison Bechdel. With unique illustrations and pull-out quotes peppered throughout, this is an essential guide to Feminism and a place to turn to for courage and inspiration from history’s heroic women.

    It’s what I won a Pulitzer Prize for, years ago. I go to epidemics, wars, places where people are struggling to cope with disasters, and I carefully log the accounts and events, trying to represent the lives and experiences of others. The position of “outsider” is emotionally safe, even as agonizing events unfold. But I could not distance myself from the extraordinary sequence of events that fell on America, and especially my home town of New York City, in 2001. A decade later I am still trying to understand how the attacks on the World Trade Center and the anthrax mailings affected me, and those I love. I heard the first jet slam into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and from the rooftop of my apartment building watched the second commercial jet veer towards lower Manhattan, change its trajectory, and slice across the upper floors of the south tower. I was standing on the Manhattan anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge when the first tower crumbled like a deflated accordion, spewing dust and debris in every direction and crushing the life out of thousands of people within. And a month later, as people started falling ill from inhalation of anthrax spores, one of the nation’s top bioterrorism experts called me to warn that I was a likely target: Stop opening your mail. The flow of these events, from the hijacking of four commercial jets on September 11th to the November death of an anthrax-infected Connecticut villager, took most of the world population from a remarkably united emotional and political place, to a deeply divided, frustrated, angry position. The arc of the response matters: It ultimately determined the course of historic events worldwide and tore America asunder, the people having lost trust in their government and without it, most forms of social cohesion. By the end of the winter of 2002 the arc had completed, from spectacular unity and confidence in governance to deep division and accusations of American arrogance. Through the frustrated anthrax investigations and drumbeats of war, the global community, especially Americans, moved in just a few months’ time from collectivism to fragmentation.This book is structured in two parts. The first, THE END OF THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, is written in the present tense, describing almost hourly the events that unfolded primarily in Washington DC and New York City over 120 days in the fall and winter of 2001 and 2002. Each day is a chapter that opens with the actual diary entry that I sent on that date to a list of friends all over the world. The entry is followed by a detailed breakdown of the day’s events, unfolding like a novel.Part two, NEW WORLD ORDER, details the repercussions of these events, transformations of critical government institutions, public health disasters, and what, in particular, the specter of terrorism meant for the American people. Revelations abound in this book, including:• The bizarre chemistry of The Plume that rose from the burning crushed World Trade Center for four months, endangering the health of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.• Evidence that al-Qaeda may have been behind the anthrax mailings.• Devastating spending and restructuring followed the attacks, leaving the nation less prepared for terrorism ten years later, and broke.• Each incident following the opening of anthrax-laden letters reveals countless errors and misjudgments.• There was no “weapons-grade anthrax” in those letters – a finding with profound health and political implications.

    • Assess for yourself the stunning visual evidence presented in some 200 photographs. • Examine previously unpublished testimony from expert informants. • Discover new research undertaken by von Däniken after the opening up of previously inaccessible regions, such as the jungle city “Buritaca 200” in Colombia.

    Italian investigative journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris and French-born information scientist Dr. Jacques F. Vallée have teamed up to uncover the details of a New Mexico crash in 1945, fully two years before the well-known incident at Roswell and the famous sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1947.Over several site investigation surveys Harris and Vallée reconstructed the historic observations by three witnesses, two of whom are still living, who described to them the circumstances of the crash, with details of the recovery of a nearly-intact flying vehicle and its occupants by an Army detachment. Combining their long experience in field research around the world, the authors have documented the step-by-step efforts by the military to remove the object, an avocado-shaped craft weighting several tons, from the property where it crash-landed during a storm.Surprisingly, the literature of the field only includes a few passing mentions about the case, and only one (foreign) TV documentary has mentioned it, but the correlation between the crash of the extraordinary object and the explosion of the first atom bomb at White Sands, less than 20 miles away, has been missed. Harris and Vallée suggest that the correlation is significant for physical, geographic and biological reasons, quite apart from the obvious strategic implications.The witnesses were able to observe not only the actual crash of the object on their property but every step of the military efforts to lift it and take it away. Fearing retaliation, they remained silent for some 60 years about what they had seen and done over those nine days at the site while the recovery was proceeding. When placed in the context of the history of chemical and physical analysis of retrieved UFO debris--an area where Harris and Vallée have long collaborated—the devices observed by the witnesses raise a number of very important scientific questions.The Honorable Paul Hellyer, former Minister of National Defence of Canada, has stated: “Paola Harris and Jacques Vallée have spent much effort doing field research on location (…) It is now time that their discovery be revealed to the world.”Christopher Mellon, former deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, called the data “fresh reason to believe that our government is concealing physical proof of alien technology. Read the book, and if persuaded, join the millions of other Americans seeking a straight answer.”And Professor Paul Hynek added that the research “reveals a new UFO history.”

     A riveting, powerful telling of the story of the grassroots movement of activists, many of them in a life-or-death struggle, who seized upon scientific research to help develop the drugs that turned HIV from a mostly fatal infection to a manageable disease. Ignored by public officials, religious leaders, and the nation at large, and confronted with shame and hatred, this small group of men and women chose to fight for their right to live by educating themselves and demanding to become full partners in the race for effective treatments. Around the globe, 16 million people are alive today thanks to their efforts. Not since the publication of Randy Shilts's classic And the Band Played On has a book measured the AIDS plague in such brutally human, intimate, and soaring terms. In dramatic fashion, we witness the founding of ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group), and the rise of an underground drug market in opposition to the prohibitively expensive (and sometimes toxic) AZT. We watch as these activists learn to become their own researchers, lobbyists, drug smugglers, and clinicians, establishing their own newspapers, research journals, and laboratories, and as they go on to force reform in the nation s disease-fighting agencies. With his unparalleled access to this community David France illuminates the lives of extraordinary characters, including the closeted Wall Street trader-turned-activist, the high school dropout who found purpose battling pharmaceutical giants in New York, the South African physician who helped establish the first officially recognized buyers club at the height of the epidemic, and the public relations executive fighting to save his own life for the sake of his young daughter. Expansive yet richly detailed, this is an insider's account of a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights. Powerful, heart-wrenching, and finally exhilarating, How to Survive a Plague is destined to become an essential part of the literature of AIDS.

    This has been perpetrated by the systematic, ongoing falsification of history in much the same way as perpetrated by the powers that be in the suspiciously prophetic novel ‘1984’, by George Orwell. We have all been deceived on a monumental scale by a tiny clique of people who by their own birthright and bloodlines absolutely believe that they have the divine right to rule over us by whatever method best suits their purposes. In order to achieve this they have lied, deceived, murdered and even committed genocide down the millennia in an attempt to bring their ultimate goal to fruition. Find out about the use of drugs, vaccinations, micro-chipping, mind control, trans-humanism and 24/7 distractions such as non-stop sports, entertainments and the invasive ‘celebrity culture’ that attempts to pervade our whole lives.

    Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.