A reference guide to Jewish history and culture that includes coverage of historical events from the Old Testament to the present, profiles of key Jewish figures, and information about the arts, sciences, politics, and sports.

What’s in a word? Did you know that a lens is named for the lentil seed it resembles? That a straight line actually comes from the words stretched linen? or that a hippopotamus is literally a “river horse”? That oxygen means “giving birth to sharpness” because Lavoisier, who named it, mistakenly thought it was in all acids? (And acid, by the way, comes from the Latin word for vinegar). That alcohol is the word for an ancient Arabic cosmetic? That petroleum in Latin is “olive oil from a rock”? That a nucleus is a "little nut” or that deoxyribonucleic acid simply means . . . ? Well, read the book and see. The vocabulary of Science has always been a forbidding one, bristling with many-syllabled words and odd, unfamiliar terms. Now Professor Asimov has opened up this language to the ordinary reader by conducting an informal exploration into the roots and histories of hundreds of scientific terms. The result is a really fascinating book that combines a vast quantity of scientific information with an equal amount of language history. Even the longest tongue-twisters have simple origins if you go back far enough; and Professor Asimov makes each discovery of the origins of a word a sort of detective story that can’t fail to stimulate the reader’s interest. This is a perfect book to dip into again and again. Not only is it entertaining in its own right, but it is also a wonderful introduction to what should become the popular indoor sport of word-chasing. A complete index to the more than 1500 terms covered makes it a unique reference book as well.

The second volume of Weird Science features classic stories written by Al Feldstein, and illustrated by such master artists as Wally Wood, Joe Orlando, Jack Kamen, Harvey Kurtzman and Feldstein himself. This stunning collection reprints issues Weird Science #7-12, a total of 24 complete breathtaking EC science fiction stories, originally published in 1951 and 1952.

Included: "Venus and the Seven Sexes," by William Tenn; "Babel II," by Damon Knight; "Useful Phrases for the Tourist," by Joanna Russ; "Conversational Mode," by Grahame Leman; "Heresies of the Huge God," by Brian W. Aldiss; "(Now+n), (Now-n)," by Robert Silverberg; "Slow Tuesday Night," by R. A. Lafferty; "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper," by Avram Davidson; "Oh, To Be a Blobel!," by Philip K. Dick; "Hobson's Choice," by Alfred Bester; "I Plinglot, Who You?," by Frederik Pohl

Aliens in all shapes and sizes--some fearsome, some outlandish, and some just plain fun--fill the pages of these hand-picked classic stories by sci-fi grand master Robert Silverberg, each featuring a new introduction by the acclaimed author. Every day we are discovering new worlds in far-reaching galaxies which may or may not sustain life as we know it. In Alien Archives: Eighteen Stories of Extraterrestrial Encounters , sci-fi Grand Master Robert Silverberg collects his finest short stories and novellas about one of the genre's most enduring themes. Spanning fifty years of writing from the Science Fiction Grand Master, this collection of alien encounters features new introductions to all fifteen stories, including the Hugo Award-nominated "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" and HBO adapted "Amanda and the Alien." In these pages lie tales of a young man venturing into the occupied territory of an alien conquered United States to rescue his brother, three visitors from a very strange alien world arriving on Earth and meeting a tragic fate, and a dangerous life-form from a far-off world finding that suburban California holds some beings that are even more dangerous than it is. With Alien Archives , Silverberg puts us in contact with extraterrestrial beings of all shapes, sizes, and personalities--some fearsome, some outlandish, and some just plain fun. The Associated Press says, "Done Silverberg's way, science fiction is a fine art." With sheer force of imagination and incredible storytelling skills, Alien Archives confirms that Silverberg's classic work continues to resonate for readers today.

Having studied how boys and girls develop differently, Michael Gurian turns his attention to adult men in this entertaining, informative, and groundbreaking book on the male brain. Following two decades of neurobiological research, "What Could He Be Thinking? answers the questions women and the world are asking about husbands, fathers, boyfriends, and coworkers. Mixing neurobiology with Gurian's very readable writing style, anecdotes from everyday life, and a new vision of the male psyche, the book will satisfy the tremendous curiosity women and our culture have about the roots of male behavior. Women know intuitively that men are different from them. What women are now just coming to realize is that the men they are married to, having sex with, working with, parenting with, and trying to fathom, act and think in very male ways, not only because they are socialized to do so, but because they are built to - neurobiologically. The new field of brain science has revealed wonderful secrets about a man's mind. In this book, women who are eager to understand the men in their lives can discover the new brain science in an entertaining way, as they get answers to the prime question every woman asks at some time in her life: What could he be thinking? The book provides fascinating information about the male brain, male habits, male tendencies and the nuances of men's' actions and thoughts. It is a provocative, exciting vision into the minds of men.

Called "one of our best science popularizers" by Publishers Weekly , Amir D. Aczel tackles the cause of one of last century's most destructive events--the scientific discovery of nuclear power. Drawing on his rich storytelling skills, Aczel presents the fascinating and suspenseful story of the scientists who first uncovered the potential of uranium. Uranium Wars takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of 1920s Europe where the scientific elite of the day were embroiled in a fierce rivalry to achieve nuclear fission. Leading us to an understanding of both the processes that take place inside a uranium nucleus and its destructive power are the brilliant men and women at the heart of the race--mammoth figures such as Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, and Lise Meitner. Enmeshed in the story of scientific intrigue is the complex and ongoing story of uranium itself, which Aczel presents as a dynamic, dual natured force, capable of providing both abundant usable energy and generating unfathomable destructive power. From the nuclear programs in the Middle East to plans for nuclear reactors at home, the element uranium is never far from today's headlines.

A group of men are exiled to Hawksbill Station because they are revolutionaries, anarchists, or political dissenters

Climbing on The Beast, an exciting new amusement park ride, Ashley longs for just one more ride, but when her car returns, Ashley has disappeared, and her closest friend must also get on The Beast in order to rescue her

Collects HULK: FUTURE IMPERFECT #1-2, INCREDIBLE HULK (1968) #460-461, CAPTAIN MARVEL (1999) #27-30, SPIDER-MAN 2099 (2014) #9-10, FUTURE IMPERFECT #1-5, MAESTRO #1-5, MAESTRO: WAR AND PAX #1-5, MAESTRO: WORLD WAR M #1-5, EXILES (2001) #79-80, ABOMINATIONS #1-3, and material from HULK: BROKEN WORLDS #1 and SECRET WARS: BATTLEWORLD #4. In an imperfect future, the world finds itself in the gamma-powered grip of the Maestro - the monster once known as the Hulk! Experience the full story of the strongest tyrant there is - beginning with the all-time-classic saga from Peter David and George Pérez pitting a time-torn Hulk against his evil future self! Then the Maestro smashes Genis-Vell, son of the Kree Captain Marvel, and the Spider-Man of 2099! On the Battleworld of SECRET WARS, the Maestro rules the realm called Dystopia! And in a titanic trilogy, learn exactly what twisted the Hulk into the despot he would become - and what horrible deeds he committed on the path to conquest!

A major character from Peter Parker's past returns and Hobgoblin starts terrorizing the skies; meanwhile, "Weblog," an off-beat Spidey tale, is introduced, starting at the very beginning of Spider-Man's career and going all the way through to the distantfuture.

A brilliant, shattering, and convincing account of United States-backed suppression of political and human rights in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and the role of the media in misreporting these policies The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism relentlessly dissects the official views of establishment scholars and their journals. The "best and brightest" pundits of the status quo emerge from this book thoroughly denuded of their credibility.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky's always tightly scheduled life ratcheted several levels higher in intensity. In the months that followed, he gave a great many public talks and countless interviews, many of them with the foreign media, who turned to him as one of the small handful of American intellectuals who stood opposed to the Bush administration's aggressive military response to the attacks. With unflagging conviction, Chomsky must have repeated a thousand times his argument that we cannot address terrorism of the weak against the powerful without also confronting "the unmentionable but far more extreme terrorism of the powerful against the weak". The argument, supported with an ever-expanding array of historical case studies, documents, and analyses, fell on deaf ears in Washington and in the mainstream American media, but resonated with large audiences in the United states and abroad who turned once agin to Chomsky for the voice of reason and consience that he has provided for decades. Chomsky's voice also reached Japan, where I live, in the form of a translation of his book 9-11 (subtitled in Japanese, "America Is Not Qualified to Retaliate!"), which was rushed into publication at the end of November. Inspired by the book, a producer at an independent Japanese film company and the author began to make plans to produce a documentary about Chomsky and his perspective on terrorism and American power. This book is an outgrowth of that effort

Here are the original versions of some of Asimov's famous Grow Old With Me, his first novel, which was greatly expanded at Doubleday's request and published as Pebble in the Sky; the original novella version of his novel The End of Eternity; and the original short story version of Belief and the ending of the final revised novelette version of Belief. (The first two thirds of the story are same in both versions.) Asimov also supplies extensive introductions and afterwords to each story.

Time travel doesn't work. You can't go backward or forward; you're stuck at "now". What you can do is travel sideways, to the same "now" in another timeline where history turned out differently. So far, only our home timeline has figured out how to do that. We use it to conduct discreet trading operations in less advanced timelines, selling goods just a little bit better than the locals can make. It's profitable, but families who work as Time Traders have to be careful to fit in, lest the locals become suspicious. Justin's family are Time Traders. The summer before he's due to start college, he goes with them to a different Virginia, in a timeline where the American states never became a single country, and American history has consisted of a series of small wars. Despite his unease, he accompanies Randolph Brooks, another Time Trader, on a visit to the tiny upland town of Elizabeth, Virginia. He'll only be away from his parents for a few days. Beckie Royer thanks her stars that she's from California, the most prosperous and advanced country in North America. But just now she's in Virginia with her grandmother, who wants to revisit the tiny mountain town where she grew up. The only interesting thing there is a boy named Justin--and he'll be gone soon. Then war between Virginia and Ohio breaks out anew. Ohio sets a tailored virus loose on Virginia. Virginia swiftly imposes a quarantine, trapping Beckie and Justin and Randolph Brooks in Elizabeth. Even Crosstime Traffic can't help. All the three of them can do is watch as plague and violence take over the town. It's nothing new in history, not in this timeline or any other. It's part of the human condition. And just now, this part of the human condition sucks.

"The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question: where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero--the keystone of our entire system of numbers--on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters: academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves--who finally reveal where our numbers come from. "--

Our fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miraculous cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised? Now updated with a new afterword, Genes, Cells and Brains asks why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge and reveals the questionable enterprise that has grown out of bioethics. The authors, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose, examine the establishment of biobanks, the rivalries between public and private gene sequencers, and the rise of stem cell research. The human body is becoming a commodity, and the unfulfilled promises of the science behind this revolution suggest profound failings in genomics itself.

Are mathematical equations the best way to model nature? For many years it had been assumed that they were. But in the early 1980s, Stephen Wolfram made the radical proposal that one should instead build models that are based directly on simple computer programs. Wolfram made a detailed study of a class of such models known as cellular automata, and discovered a remarkable fact: that even when the underlying rules are very simple, the behavior they produce can be highly complex, and can mimic many features of what we see in nature. And based on this result, Wolfram began a program of research to develop what he called “A Science of Complexity.”The results of Wolfram's work found many applications, from the so-called Wolfram Classification central to fields such as artificial life, to new ideas about cryptography and fluid dynamics. This book is a collection of Wolfram's original papers on cellular automata and complexity. Some of these papers are widely known in the scientific community; others have never been published before. Together, the papers provide a highly readable account of what has become a major new field of science, with important implications for physics, biology, economics, computer science and many other areas.