If your kidneys - or loved ones' - don't work well, you may be angry, sad, scared. Or, you feel all three ways at the same time. This is 100% normal! When you can move past fear to HOPE, you can make the rest of your life as good as it can be. At the non-profit Medical Education Institute (MEI), we are here to help you. We've learned from tens of thousands of people with kidney disease and their loved ones. We use that knowledge to help YOU live as well as you can for as long as you can. I...

Science and Spectacle relates the construction of the telescope to the politics and culture of post-war Britain. From radar and atomic weapons, to the Festival of Britain and, later, Harold Wilson's rhetoric of scientific revolution, science formed a cultural resource from which post-war careers and a national identity could be built. The Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope was once a symbol of British science and a much needed prestigious project for the Department of Scientific and Ind...

For over twenty years, the name John Agar on a marquee meant action to moviegoers—from World War II land, sea, and air battles, to the frontier West, to the new frontier of 1950s science fiction, where he stood fast against some of the era’s most memorable movie monsters.Agar’s rise to fame was meteoric: during World War II, the eighty-three-dollar-a-month buck sergeant met and later married “America’s Sweetheart,” Shirley Temple, and was soon offered a screen test and dramatic ins...

'NBC University Theater’ initially started in Chicago with a remit to bring adaptations of classic novels, usually Anglo-American, to a radio audience.Additionally, if listeners signed up they received college credit to a radio-assisted correspondence course. A study guide, The Handbook of the World's Great Novels, was available for 25 cents.In its later years it also included short stories and plays and went on to win the distinguished Peabody award.Unlike many oth...

“[A] fascinating book...about the way four geniuses at Cambridge University revolutionized modern science.“ *—NewsweekThe* Philosophical Breakfast Club recounts the life and work of four men who met as students at Cambridge University: Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones. Recognizing that they shared a love of science (as well as good food and drink) they began to meet on Sunday mornings to talk about the sta...

100 years ago, Einstein's theory of relativity shattered the world of physics. Our comforting Newtonian ideas of space and time were replaced by bizarre and counterintuitive conclusions: if you move at high speed, time slows down, space squashes up and you get heavier; travel fast enough and you could weigh as much as a jumbo jet, be squashed thinner than a CD without feeling a thing - and live for ever. And that was just the Special Theory. With the General Theory came evenstranger idea...

Engineering is part of almost everything we do - from the water we drink and the food we eat, to the buildings we live in and the roads and railways we travel on. In this Very Short Introduction, David Blockley explores the nature and practice of engineering, its history, its scope, and its relationship with art, craft, science, and technology. He considers the role of engineering in the modern world, demonstrating its need to provide both practical and socially acceptable solutio...

'The most important invention in the whole of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself.'Those words are at the heart of this remarkable book - a history of the Industrial Revolution and the steam engine, as well as an account of how inventors first came to own and profit from their ideas and how invention itself springs forth from logic and imagination.Rocket. It was the fortuitously named train that inaugurated steam locomotion in 1829, jump-starting two centuries of...

What is 'nothing'? What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty space - a void - exist? This Very Short Introduction explores the science and the history of the elusive void: from Aristotle who insisted that the vacuum was impossible, via the theories of Newton and Einstein, to our very latest discoveries and why they can tell us extraordinary things about the cosmos.Frank Close tells the story of how scientists have explored the elusive void, and the rich discoveries that the...

Booker focuses his attention on the mother of all environmental scares: global warming.This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history.Christopher Booker interweaves the science ...

A fascinating look at the perils and promise of geoengineering and our potential future on a warming planetThe risks of global warming are pressing and potentially vast. The difficulty of doing without fossil fuels is daunting, possibly even insurmountable. So there is an urgent need to rethink our responses to the crisis. To meet that need, a small but increasingly influential group of scientists is exploring proposals for planned human intervention in the climate...

'With a dazzling command of science and a relentless faith in people, George Monbiot writes about social change with his eyes wide open' Naomi Klein'A manifesto for change ... The combination of practical detail and creative thinking is immensely impressive' P. D. Smith, GuardianWe know that climate change is happening. We know that it could, if the worst predictions come true, destroy the conditions which make human life possible....