Biography: Science, Technology and Medicine

A powerful journey of sea and self, trial and hope on the islands of Shetland, where climate change is making marked impacts on the natural world. When a seed falls from a vine in the tropics and is carried by ocean currents across the Atlantic to the shores of Western Europe, it is known as a sea...

Part cultural history, part literary criticism, and part memoir, A Body Made of Glass is a definitive biography of hypochondria. Caroline Crampton’s life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a relatively rare blood cancer. After years of invasive...

A fascinating collection of essays from twenty-seven of the world’s most interesting scientists about the moments and events in their childhoods that set them on the paths that would define their lives. Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Lynn Margulis, V. S....

After a traumatic birth nearly claimed his wife’s life, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician Christopher Choukalas should have felt grateful. His twin daughters were healthy, his wife had survived, and they had started a family. But instead of joy, Choukalas found himself spiraling—spending...

After two and a half years of Isis occupation, and months of fighting between the militants and government forces, the Mosul Zoo was one of the few outdoor attractions still standing in Iraq’s second city, its inhabitants kept alive by Abu Laith, a square-set 50-something mechanic and passionate...

One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches,...

Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with perceptual and intellectual disorders: 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; whose limbs...

In this fascinating volume, today’s foremost scientists discuss their own versions and visions of Einstein: how he has influenced their worldviews, their ideas, their science, and their professional and personal lives. These twenty-four essays are a testament to the power of scientific legacy and...

One summer day, nine-year-old Keira Ball was in a terrible car accident and suffered catastrophic brain injuries. As the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat. In an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings immediately agreed that she would have wanted...

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.” Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more...

Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm, he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned...