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2) The big bang
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Presents an introduction to the big bang, explaining the basic concepts behind the theory of how the universe was formed. Includes illustrations.
4) Cell Biology
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What are cells made of? Biologists have been studying cells since the mid-1600s, when Robert Hooke viewed a slice of cork through a microscope and coined the word "cell" to describe the walled-in spaces he saw. Most cells are invisible to the naked eye. Yet they carry out the many complex processes that make life possible. As microscopes have improved, scientists have learned more and more about cells and their organelles-the structures within cells....
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How are polar bears related to pandas? For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have tried to organize and understand, or classify, the relationships among Earth's animals and plants. Early classification systems were cumbersome and inconsistent. In the late 1720s, Carl Linnaeus began developing a classification system to describe relationships among all living things, including animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria. This organization, called...
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Since prehistoric times, people have been fascinated by electricity and magnetism. Ancient people marveled at the auroras-streaks of colored light that appear in the night sky near the poles. They wondered about the ability of materials such as amber and magnetite rock to attract or repel other objects. Many people believed magic was behind these phenomena. Then, in the 1600s, scientists began to lift the fog of superstition. Electricity and magnetism...
7) Evolution
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Outraged people claimed that Darwin's theory had made humans the relatives of monkeys. Scientists were sure that species changed over time, but no one could explain how. In the 1800s, Charles Darwin's studies of thousands of specimens of living things showed that no two individuals of any species were exactly alike. He realized that over millions of years, some individuals had traits that gave them an edge to survive and reproduce. As they reproduced,...
8) Genetics
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If a black dog and a white dog have puppies, what color will the puppies be? Genetic scientists have been trying to answer this question for hundreds of years. Genetics is the science of heredity-how traits are passed from parents to offspring. One of the first breakthroughs came from Gregor Mendel, a nineteenth-century monk who spent eight years breeding thousands of pea plants. Pea plants might seem pretty different from dogs, but on a microscopic...
9) Germ Theory
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Since prehistoric times, people have wondered what causes disease. Early people blamed evil spirits. Later, disease was thought to be caused by an imbalance of bodily fluids. By trial and error, people discovered plants that cured certain ailments. But disease still spread through dirty, crowded cities. In 1546 an Italian physician proposed that tiny, invisible bodies cause disease. By the end of the nineteenth century, doctors had discovered the...
10) Plate Tectonics
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For hundreds of years, people found the fossils of ancient sea creatures at the tops of tall mountains. Scientists puzzled over this problem. A fish couldn't have swum up a mountain. And how could rocks on a mountain move up from the bottom of a sea? Geologists finally found the answers they needed in the 1960s, when they developed the theory of plate tectonics. This theory revolutionized our understanding of the earth. Plate tectonics explains how...
11) Relativity
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Since prehistoric times, people have wondered how the universe works. Early scientists studied how forces affect objects and watched how heavenly bodies move. In 1687 Isaac Newton published a set of laws that described the motion of all objects, both on Earth and in the heavens. By 1900 many physicists believed only a few questions remained to be answered. But the early 1900s brought revolutionary developments in physics. One was Albert Einstein's...
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Vivien Theodore Thomas was an African-American surgical technician who developed the procedures used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was an assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery...
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Philo Taylor Farnsworth was an American inventor and television pioneer. Although he made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of all-electronic television, he is best known for inventing the first fully functional and complete all-electronic television system, and for being the first person to demonstrate such a system to the public.
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Introduce your readers to one of the most prolific musicians of all time. Les Paul was an American jazz, country and blues guitarist, songwriter and inventor. He was the inventor of the electric guitar which made the sound of rock and roll possible. He is also credited with many recording innovations. Although he was not the first to use the technique, his early experiments with recording sound on sound, and changing speeds were among the first to...
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George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. was an American engineer. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, where he was a member of the Rensselaer Society of Engineers, in the class of 1881 with a degree in Civil Engineering. He was made a member of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Alumni Hall of Fame in 1998. He is most famous for creating the original Ferris Wheel for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition.
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Dr. James Naismith was a Canadian-American sports coach and innovator. He invented the sport of basketball in 1891 and is often credited with introducing the first football helmet. He wrote the original basketball rulebook, founded the University of Kansas basketball program, and lived to see basketball adopted as an Olympic demonstration sport in 1904 and as an official event at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, as well as the birth of both the...
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Maiman was a graduate of the University of Colorado, which awarded him a B.S. in engineering physics in 1949. Later, he received his Ph.D. in physics in 1955 from Stanford University and began work at the Hughes Research Laboratory (HRL). There he concentrated on creating a device capable of converting mixed frequency electromagnetic radiation into highly amplified and coherent light of discrete frequency. Maiman later found that the accepted calculations...
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