In a devastating exposé in the tradition of Silent Spring and Fast Food Nation, investigative journalist Randall Fitzgerald warns how thousands of man-made chemicals in our food, water, medicine, and environment are making humans the most polluted species on the planet. A century ago in 1906, when Congress enacted the...

This is a book about the Universal Serial Bus, or USB. The USB was designed by the computer industry to replace the ailing and ancient RS-232 serial-port technology. The USB is bigger, faster, and better. It's built to handle the demands of audio and video. It's built to be hot pluggable. It's built to be...

From prehistoric times, mankind has looked up at the night sky, and puzzled at the changing positions of the stars. How far away they are is a question that has confounded scientists for centuries. Over the last few hundred years, many scientific careers – and considerable resources – have been devoted to measuring their positions...

Increasingly, large product-development organizations are turning to lean thinking, agile principles and...

In the award-winning AMC television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, a mysterious and massive machine shows up one day in the offices of the advertising agency Stirling Cooper. The machine is a Xerox photocopier, and the workplace is about to change forever. Previously, document duplication was done with a mimeograph, a hand-cranked...

Human civilization in the 21st century can be defined by diversity and duality. One-fifth of the world’s population is Chinese, another fifth Muslim. A hundred million of us are homeless children living in extreme poverty. More than two percent of the human population is mentally retarded. There are over 10,000 spoken languages. Yet, a...

The twentieth century began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s rules of inheritance and ended with the complete sequence of the human genome, one of the most monumental scientific accomplishments of all time. What lies in the future? What will the twenty-first century, the century of genomics, bring? Will geneticists a hundred years from...

You don’t want good pictures from your new Canon PowerShot G10/G11—you demand outstanding photos. After all, the PowerShot G10 and G11 are the most pocketsized digital cameras that Canon has ever introduced. They boast 10 and 14 megapixels of resolution, blazing fast automatic focus, and a dozen and a half Special Scene modes that...

With the same sharp eye, quick with, and narrative drive that marked his bestsellers The Game, The Dirt, and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, Neil Strauss takes us on a white-knuckled journey through America's heart of darkness as he scrambles to escape the system. It's one man's story of a dangerous...

Ancient Greece and Rome aren't usually remembered for their sense of humour. However, in reality the ancient Greeks and Romans often refused to take themselves seriously. Strange and outlandish activities abounded - including somebody accidentally exposing himself while dancing sideways at his wedding (those wearing bed sheets didn't...

Less than a hundred years ago, science seriously debated whether a cosmic array of stars and galaxies extended beyond the Milky Way. Discoveries and theories have revealed a universe of increasing enormity, complexity, and mystery. Beginning with an overview of the scientific method, "The Big Bang" follows the pioneering...

By any measure, the Pythagorean theorem is the most famous statement in all of mathematics, one remembered from high school geometry class by even the most math-phobic students. Well over four hundred proofs are known to exist, including ones by a twelve-year-old Einstein, a young blind girl, Leonardo da Vinci, and a future president of the...