Ed Regis

"Few voices have been louder than the American government's in condemning the spread of biological weapons programs around the world. How astonishing, then, to discover that for thirty years the United States conducted its own large-scale covert biological weapons project. Ed Regis tells the story of this project from its origins in World War II to its abrupt cancellation in 1969. At its peak, the program employed 4,036 people, tested pathogens on more than 2,000 live human volunteers, and secretly conducted open-air pathogen tests on American soil. By its end, the project's scientists had weaponized three lethal biological agents and toxins and four incapacitating agents, covertly sprayed its own cities with bacterial aerosols, and had stockpiled more than two million biological bombs ready for deployment on the battlefield. Yet, surprisingly, almost nothing has been published about the program before now."--BOOK JACKET. "Based on 2,000 pages of declassified documents, and personal interviews with many of the original project's top scientists, this expose of America's last Cold War secret is both fascinating and shocking."--BOOK JACKET.

In a destitute hospital in the crowded African city of Kikwit, townspeople, nurses, and doctors are dying of a gruesome disease at the rate of more than a dozen a day. Zaire is on the brink of an explosive epidemic but the outbreak is stopped when experts from the Center for Disease Control(CDC) in Atlanta arrive in the city, reclaim the hospital, and interrupt the chain of virus transmission. With remarkable speed, the CDC's virus detectives trace the outbreak back to its first human case, travel to the viral ground zero where the Ebola virus burst out of the jungle, and trap a vast collection of animals that potentially harbor the virus--including the rats overrunning their motel rooms. It's all in a day's work for the CDC's disease cowboys, who risk their lives daily at the bottom of nature to confront the world's deadliest pathogens. Now acclaimed science writer Ed Regis takes us on a fascinating odyssey across the viral frontier, chronicling the CDC's extraordinary fifty-year history against the backdrop of the 1995 Ebola outbreak---and exploding the media-driven myth of the coming plague. Starting from a small government agency founded for the purpose of eradicating malaria from the United States in the 1940's, the CDC has grown into a disease-fighting behemoth whose sphere of action is the entire planet. Virus Ground Zero shows how the CDC's viral shock troops have helped remove one deadly virus from the face of the earth, are scheduled to do the same with another by the year 2000, and have similar lethal plans for a whole range of other microbes.

It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology - the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nanotechnology will give us complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build any substance or structure permitted by the laws of nature. Placing atoms as if they were bricks, nano-machines could turn grass clippings into prime sirloin - directly, without cows. They could turn coal into diamond, and sheets of diamond into rocket engines. Suitably reprogrammed, the tiny machines could repair all of your body's ailing cells. Science fiction? Alchemy? Craziness? Actually, scientists have already isolated individual atoms and moved them at will, even using them to spell out words on a scale so small that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica can be written on the head of a pin. Conceived by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman and pioneered by the remarkable K. Eric Drexler, who earned the first Ph.D. in the field he created at MIT more than a decade ago, nanotechnology is astoundingly near. In Nano, acclaimed science writer Ed Regis introduces us to the visionary engineers and scientists - as well as the critics - of this imminent technological revolution and shows how their work may soon begin changing the world as we know it. With fleets of molecular assemblers churning out essential commodities without human labor, the world economy would be transformed, famine and poverty banished forever. With cell-repair devices coursing through the human body, aging could be postponed, even halted, common diseases eradicated permanently. . But would this new world be a return to Eden or a rash step into a dangerous future? Programmed differently, those same molecular machines could become agents more potent than the deadliest viruses.

With current interest in extraterrestrials at a peak, this book is a collection of original and reprinted articles advancing the latest scientific ideas as to the possible existence and nature of extraterrestrial intelligent life. Usually this subject is treated only in popular media, such as science fiction novels, movies, and television. Recently, however, scientists and researchers have begun to consider in earnest whether extraterrestrials really exist, whether they have evolved from simpler forms of life, whether they have evolved intelligence, and if so whether their modes of understanding the world are comparable to and congruent with our own. The contributors to this volume cover these topics, and also consider how we might communicate with aliens, and whether we would be able to understand the alien messages we might receive. Finally the authors, who include distinguished scientists, speculate whether the aliens might have a moral code, and what might be our moral obligations in the event any extraterrestrials were ever discovered. ... Publisher description.

A collection of humorous scientific articles discussing the creation of artificial life forms, time machines, and faxing human minds.

The darkest parts of your brain house your darkest fears. Readers learn about the monsters that lurk in the shadows of their closet and beyond. They also discover the origin story of famous creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, and why people have searched for werewolves, dragons, and other creatures for centuries. Readers can also take a quiz to see if you could tackle the toughest monsters in the world and make it out alive.