Technology Biography

The inspiring autobiography of NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who helped launch Apollo 11. Katherine Johnson’s story was made famous in the best-selling book and Oscar-nominated film Hidden Figures. Now, in Reaching for the Moon, she tells her own story for the first time, in a lively autobiography that will inspire young listeners everywhere.

This riveting biography from the American Bar Association visits the spectacular life of Edwin Land, breakthrough inventor. At the time of his death, he stood third on the list of our most prolific inventors, behind only Thomas Edison and one of Edison's colleagues. Land's most famous achievement was the creation of a revolutionary film-and-camera system that could produce a photographic print moments after the picture was taken.

Bem-vindo à internet e hoje a jornalista Marie Declercq vai ser ser sua guia pelos cantos mais inusitados da rede mundial de computadores, onde todo mundo tem uma coisa em comum: a busca de comunidade para chamar de sua. Neste Original Aubible em dez episódios, você será guiado pela Marie para explorar dez comunidades criadas em torno de interesses difentes e a importância delas para que a gente não se sinta sozinho.

One day in 1996, the neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel took a call from his program officer at the National Institute of Mental Health, who informed him that he had been awarded a key grant. Also, the officer said, he and his colleagues thought Kandel would win the Nobel Prize. "I hope not soon," Kandel's wife, Denise, said when she heard this. Sociologists had found that Nobel Prize winners often did not contribute much more to science, she explained.

When three heroic men traveled aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft bound for the moon, the entire world sat glued to their television sets in suspense. But few knew just how much it took to get that far. To put a man on the moon, thousands of people diligently worked behind the scenes. Countless preparations had to be made and no detail, however small, could be overlooked - the lives of the crewmen were at stake.

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

Basándose en las miles de páginas de los cuadernos manuscritos de Leonardo y nuevos descubrimientos sobre su vida y su obra, Walter Isaacson teje una narración que conecta el arte de Da Vinci con sus investigaciones científicas, y nos muestra cómo el genio del hombre más visionario de la historia nació de habilidades que todos poseemos y podemos estimular, tales como la curiosidad incansable, la observación cuidadosa y la imaginación juguetona. Su creatividad, como la de todo gran innovador, resultó de la intersección entre la tecnología y las humanidades.

Travelling at almost 18,000 miles per hour - 10 times faster than a rifle bullet - Yuri Gagarin circles the globe in just 106 minutes. From his windows, he sees the Earth as nobody has before, crossing a sunset and a sunrise, crossing oceans and continents, witnessing its beauty and its fragility. While his launch begins in total secrecy, within hours of his landing, he has become a world celebrity - the first human to leave the planet. Beyond tells the thrilling story behind that epic flight on its 60th anniversary.

G. Wayne Miller has dramatically and meticulously reconstructed an amazing true story: how a group of renegade Minnesota surgeons, led by Dr. Walt Lillehei, made medical history by becoming the first doctors to operate deep inside the human heart.

In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses - led by John von Neumann - gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization of the theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth by mathematician Alan Turing. This group of brilliant engineers worked in isolation, almost entirely independent from industry and the traditional academic community. But because they relied exclusively on government funding, the government wanted its share of the results....

For twelve years the Golden State Killer terrorized California, stalking victims and killing without remorse. Then he simply disappeared, for the next forty-four years, until an amateur DNA sleuth opened her laptop. In I Know Who You Are, Barbara Rae-Venter reveals how she went from researching her family history as a retiree to hunting for a notorious serial killer—and how she became the nation’s leading authority on investigative genetic genealogy, the most dazzling new crime-fighting weapon to appear in decades.

Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called "the Pope" by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics.

In 1938, a young German rocket enthusiast named Wernher von Braun had dreams of building a rocket that could fly him to the moon. In Ray, North Dakota, a young farm girl named Mary Sherman was attending high school. In an age when girls rarely dreamed of a career in science, Mary wanted to be a chemist. A decade later, the dreams of these two disparate individuals would coalesce in ways neither could have imagined.

Long before Oliver Sacks became a distinguished neurologist and best-selling writer, he was a small English boy fascinated by metals - also by chemical reactions (the louder and smellier the better), photography, squids and cuttlefish, H.G. Wells, and the periodic table. In this endlessly charming and eloquent memoir, the he chronicles his love affair with science and the magnificently odd and sometimes harrowing childhood in which that love affair unfolded.

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the 20th century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it.

Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was also ignored by most working scientists, his ideas opposed by even his closest friends.

What can you learn from a CIA spy who spent his career artfully manipulating regular people to steal high-value secrets? Plenty! In this explosive book, former intelligence officer Peter Warmka unveils detailed methodologies that he and other threat actors use to breach the security of their targets, whether they’re high-profile individuals or entire organizations.

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography is one of the greatest autobiographies of all time, but it was incomplete. Franklin ended his life's story in 1757, when he was 51. He lived another 33 eventful years, serving as America's advocate in London, Pennsylvania's representative in the Continental Congress, and America's wartime ambassador to France. Now, at last, we get the rest of the story, in Franklin's own words.

World-famous zoologist Dian Fossey is remembered for her inspiring work studying the mountain gorillas of central Africa’s isolated Virunga Mountains. Her tireless devotion to understanding - and actively protecting - these shy and gentle primates introduced them to an admiring public and promoted values of conservation in the African nations they inhabit. In 1966, Dian Fossey left home for Africa to conduct field research on mountain gorillas. It was her second trip to Africa, but it wouldn’t be her last.

Isaac Newton was always a loner, preferring to spend his time contemplating the mysteries of the universe. When the plague broke out in London in 1665 he was forced to return home from college. It was during this period of so much death that Newton gave life to some of the most important theories in modern science, including gravity and the laws of motion.