Posts Tagged “Popular Science”
Morning Glory, Mammatus, Kelvin-Helmholz are some names given to clouds. What do they look like, how are they formed? Wired Science provides the answers.
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The Book of Clouds
John A. Day
Silver Lining Books, 2006
Call number : QC921.3.D274 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science |
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Clouds
Eric M. Wilcox
Duncan Baird Publishers, 2003
Call number : QC921.W667 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science collection |
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Why do buses come in threes : the hidden mathematics of everyday life
Robson Books, 1998
Call number : QA99.E13 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
Why is it better to buy a lottery ticket on a Thursday? Why are showers always too hot or too cold? These and many other fascinating questions are answered in this entertaining and informative book ideal for anyone wanting to remind themselves – or discover for the first time – that math is relevant to almost everything that we do. As explained here, dating, cooking, travelling, gambling and even life-saving are linked with intriguing mathematical problems. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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How long is a piece of string : more hidden mathematics of everyday life
Robson Books, 2005
Call number : QA99.E13H Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
Discover the secrets behind some of the best con tricks, the hidden workings of the taxi meter and the explanation of how epidemics start and stop. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The reluctant Mr Darwin : an intimate portrait of Charles Darwin and the making of his theory of evolution
W.W. Norton, 2006
Call number : QH31.D2.Q1 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
Charles Darwin took 20 years to write his theory of natural selection: he produced On the Origin of Species only on learning that he was about to be scooped. Was he a chronic procrastinator? Or was he afraid of the reaction of his peers, who had scorned earlier books on the “transmutation” of species? A bit of both came into play, but as acclaimed science journalist Quammen (Song of the Dodo) shows, during those two decades, Darwin was busy conducting scientific research that would bolster his observations of the finches and mockingbirds of the Galapagos Islands. He raised pigeons and theorized that domestic varieties could be traced back to a species of wild dove. He floated asparagus seeds in saltwater to explain how plants moved from one continent to another. Quammen commences his portrait with Darwin’s homecoming from his five-year trip on the Beagle and then focuses on how he gained enough confidence and evidence to publish a book that would displace humankind from its privileged position as a special creation. This often slyly witty book stands out among the flood of books being published for Darwin’s bicentenary.Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Review from Publishers Weekly.
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Man who knew too much : Alan Turing and the invention of the computer
Leavitt, David.
W.W. Norton, 2006
Call number : QA29.T8L439 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
A “skillful and literate” (”New York Times Book Review”) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer.
To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating “treatment” that may have led to his suicide.
With a novelist’s sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity–his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor–and elegantly explains his work and its implications. Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. and summary from Publisher.
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Remarkable mathematicians : from Euler to von Neumann
James, I. M. (Ioan Mackenzie)
Mathematical Association of America, 2002
Call number : QA28.J27 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
Ioan James introduces and profiles sixty mathematicians from the era when mathematics was freed from its classical origins to develop into its modern form. The subjects, all born between 1700 and 1910, come from a wide range of countries, and all made important contributions to mathematics, through their ideas, their teaching, and their influence. James emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their mathematical achievements. The book is organized chronologically into ten chapters, each of which contains biographical sketches of six mathematicians. The men and women James has chosen to portray are representative of the history of mathematics, such that their stories, when read in sequence, convey in human terms something of the way in which mathematics developed.
Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. and summary from Publisher.
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Life in cold blood
David Attenborough
Harper, 2008
Call number : QL644.A883 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
Admirably illustrated, this book completes David Attenborough’s great exploration of the world’s main animal groups. He shows us the lives of amphibians and reptiles in all the fascinating detail we have come to expect from him. A treasure trove for everyone–from the child seeing flying dragons or man-eating crocodiles for the first time to the professional zoologist realizing that there is still much to learn. Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. and summary by Philip Rainbow, Natural History Museum, London
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Life in cold blood [DVD]
David Attenborough
BBC Video, 2008
Call number : B576895 Media Resource Library
Now, using the very latest in filming technology from the BBC’s world-renowned Natural History Unit – including ultra-high-speed, thermal, miniature and on-board cameras – David reveals the surprising and intimate lives of the cold-blooded reptiles and amphibians, discovering the secret of their success. After all, they have ruled the Earth for nearly 200 million years and, today, there are well over 14,000 species.
From the largest and most dangerous reptiles on Earth demonstrating tender and sensual courtship, to tortoises and horned chameleons jousting dramatically, flashing anolis lizards and waving jacky dragons, the Life In Cold Blood team capture previously unseen behaviour bringing their unknown lives to the screen as never before.
Tiny scarlet frogs engage in sumo wrestling, baby worm-like caecilians feast on their mother’s skin, mother salamanders viciously defend their broods against marauders and spectacled caiman are filmed taking care of crèches of up to 100 young.
Summary from BBC
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Musicophilia : tales of music and the brain
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
Call number : ML3830.S121 Library 2
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species. Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. Here, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and Oliver Sacks tells us why Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales
Oliver Sacks
Simon & Schuster, 1998
Call number : RC351.S121 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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Uncle Tungsten : memoirs of a chemical boyhood
Oliver Sacks
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001
Call number : RC339.52.S23S121 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
Long before Oliver Sacks became a neurologist and one of our finest science writers, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals — and also by chemical reactions, the louder and smellier the better. His curiosity was encouraged and abetted by brilliantly quirky relatives: Auntie Len, who taught him that the beauty of numbers can be found in the spiral face of a sunflower; Uncle Dave, who invited the boy to his light-bulb factory; and two older brothers who entertained him by making ammonium dichromate “volcanoes.” But Sacks’s childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, when he was evacuated from London and sent to live in a boarding school that rivaled Dickens’s grimmest creations. He was sustained through those difficult years by his passion for learning and for finding patterns in the world around him. Overflowing with humor, sadness, sensuous recollection, and the almost physical rapture of discovery, Uncle Tungsten re-creates the wonder of science as it is first experienced and chronicles the birth of an extraordinary and original mind. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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An anthropologist on Mars : seven paradoxical tales
Oliver Sacks
Vintage Books, 1996
Call number : RC351.S121A Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
The author profiles seven neurological patients, including a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome and an artist whose color sense is destroyed in an accident but finds new creative power in black and white. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The X in sex : how the X chromosome controls our lives
David Bainbridge
Harvard University Press, 2004
Call number : QH600.5.B162 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
An enlightening and entertaining tour of the cultural and natural history of this intriguing member of the genome, The X in Sex traces the journey toward our current understanding of the nature of X. From its chance discovery in the nineteenth century to the promise and implications of ongoing research, David Bainbridge shows how the X evolved and where it and its counterpart Y are going.Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The rough guide to genes & cloning
Jess Buxton & John Turney
Rough Guides, 2007
Call number : QH442.2.B991 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science Collection
What exactly is a gene? How does cloning actually work? Are designer babies a bad idea? Could we ever clone a human? The Rough Guide To Genes & Cloning answers all these questions and more. From the inside story of cells and their structure and the sleuths who cracked the genetic code to DNA cloning, twins and Dolly the sheep. Illustrated throughout with helpful pictures and diagrams, this Rough Guide turns the microscope on the things that make us what we are.Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The man who loved China : the fantastic story of the eccentric scientist who unlocked the mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Simon Winchester
Harper, 2008
Call number : Q143.N44W759 Lee Wee Nam Library, Popular Science
This volume narrates the story of Joseph Needham (1900-1995), a British biochemist whose affair with a Chinese student visiting Cambridge U. led to a lifelong fascination with China and a strong appreciation for the contributions of the Chinese civilization to science and technology. The narrative describes Needham’s travels across China during World War II and his writing of the 17 volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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The Drunkard’s walk :how randomness rules our lives
Leonard Mlodinow
Pantheon Books, 2008
Call number : QA273.M685 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
An irreverent look at how randomness influences our lives, and how our successes and failures are far more dependent on chance events than we recognize. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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On being certain : believing you are right even when you’re not
Robert A. Burton
St. Martin’s Press, 2008
Call number : BD171.B974 Library 2
Neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we know something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. Bringing together cutting-edge neuroscience, experimental data, and fascinating anecdotes, the author explores the inconsistent and sometimes paradoxical relationship between our htoughts and what we actually know.Cover image from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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Predictably irrational : the hidden forces that shape our decisions
Dan Ariely
Harper, 2008
Call number : HB74.P8.A698 Library 2
Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money. Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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Welcome to your brain : why you lose your car keys but never forget how to drive and other puzzles of everyday life
Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang
Bloomsbury, 2008
Call number : QP376.A112 Lee Wee Nam Library, Science Collection
We use our brains at every moment of our lives, and yet few of us have the first idea how they work. Much of what we think we know comes from folklore: that we only use 10 percent of our brains, or that drinking kills brain cells. These and other brain myths are wrong, as neuroscientists have proven. Even more surprising, what scientists have discovered about this complex organ is virtually unknown to the world outside their laboratories.Cover image & summary from: Syndetics Solutions, Inc.
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