Helix books

"Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century - from his work on the atomic bomb to his solution to the puzzle of the Challenger disaster. Feynman helped to shape the world as we know it. Nobel laureate, iconoclastic icon, caring family man, amateur artist, and professional musician (in a Rio de Janeiro samba band), Feynman was a man of many dimensions.". "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is a treasury of the best of Feynman's short works - from interviews and speeches to lectures and printed articles."--BOOK JACKET.

Shamans, spirit mediums, mysterious cave paintings, enigmatic earthworks, and temples - the religious and spiritual lives of our forebears have always seemed inaccessible to archaeologists. Now, however, science is finally beginning to lift the veil. Brian Fagan draws upon a wealth of scientific disciplines - from botany, zoology, and geology to neuropsychology, palynology (the study of spores and pollen), and nuclear physics - to explore this new "archaeology of the mind." Armed with new recording technologies that expose the paintings' finest detail and new radiocarbon dating methods, Fagan describes a revolution in our understanding of the world's first artists. Fagan describes how space-age radar has revealed a network of ancient roadways linking the great pueblos of Chaco Canyon, and how the CAD-mapping of Stonehenge has sparked an intense debate about the original purpose of the site. His story culminates with a vivid depiction of the Aztec civilization of highland Mexico, where a marriage of archaeology, science, and ethnohistory is offering new interpretations of one of the world's last pre-industrial civilizations.

"Ezekiel Rawlins now has a steady job as senior head custodian of Sojourner Truth High School, a nice house with a garden, a loving woman, and children. He counts the blessings of leading a law-abiding life, but is "nowhere near happy." Easy mourns the loss of his best friend, Mouse. Though Easy tries to leave the street life behind, he still finds himself trading favors and investigating cases of arson, murder, and missing people. People who can't depend on the law to solve their problems seek out Easy." "A bomb is set in the high school where Easy works. A man's daughter runs off with his employee. A beautiful woman turns up dead and the man who loved her is wrongly accused. Easy is the man people turn to in search of justice and retribution. He even becomes party to a killing that the police might call murder."--BOOK JACKET.

In April 1963, Richard P. Feynman gave a series of remarkable lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. These three consecutive talks were classic Feynman - full of wit and wisdom - but their subject matter was wholly unexpected: Feynman spoke not as a physicist but as a concerned fellow citizen, revealing his uncommon insights into the religious, political, and social issues of the day. Now, at last, these lectures have been published under the collective title The Meaning of It All. Here is Feynman on mind reading and the laws of probability and statistics; on Christian Science and the dubious effect of prayer on healing; and on human interpersonal relationships. Here is the citizen-scientist on the dramatic effect simple engineering projects could have on the plague of poverty; the vital role creativity plays in science; the conflict between science and religion; the efficacy of doubt and uncertainty in arriving at scientific truths; and why honest politicians can never be successful.

Where did the first humans originate? How and when did humans get onto North America, the tip of South America, and Australia? Was there a single human ancestress whose mitochondria survive within us today? Because history cannot be repeated, we may never have answers to these far-reaching questions. Yet, population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza proposed that the evolutionary past of humankind can be reconstructed by analyzing current genetic data. Now, in The Great Human Diasporas, coauthored with his son, Cavalli-Sforza presents in a single volume for the non-specialist the fruits of over forty years of research. After providing a thorough grounding in evolutionary theory, Cavalli-Sforza takes readers back to the heady times of 1961-62 when he and a few colleagues were able to bring together genetic data on blood groups for fifteen populations spread out on five continents. By computing the genetic distance between pairs of populations, these scientists were able to develop an evolutionary tree that looks surprisingly like the ones reconstructed today, even with fifteen times more information. Using this crude tree, scientists could trace the approximate routes modern humans took in colonizing the earth 100,000 years ago and discover when populations split off from each other to form new groups. In the course of his work, Cavalli-Sforza joined forces with archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and molecular biologists. He shows how both archaeological and genetic data were used to track human migrations during the spread of agriculture; he probes such topics as the existence of a single ancestral language and the relationship between biological and linguistic evolution; and he brings us up to date with his current work as chief sponsor of the human genome diversity project, an ambitious attempt to analyze the most significant individual variations in human genomes.