NACA to NASA to Now: The Frontiers of Air and Space in the American Century tells the story of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and its successor, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The NACA and NASA facilitated the advance of technology for flight in air and space throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. This book explores how and why aerospac…
Is race a biological fact or a fiction? At the beginning of 2018, scientists working with ancient DNA in the UK and the United States offered two very different public responses to this long-asked question. In the UK in February 2018, Channel 4 aired the documentary The First Brit: Secrets of the 10,000 Year Old Man, in which geneticists at the Natural History Museum a…
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference. In this Very Short Introduction, the renowned philosopher Roger Scruton explores the concept of beauty, asking what makes an object--either in art, in nature, or the human form--beautiful, and ex…
At the same time, archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have begun to explore the deep-time origins and early development of social inequality, articulating trends and patterns through analysis of material attributes such as size and complexity of household dwellings, access to storage space and variation in quantity and type of grave goods, on the basis that the pervasiveness of inequ…
In the eighteenth century Russia was a newcomer to the familiar concert of European nations, an exciting or worrying outsider among the established powers. In 1703 Tsar Peter Alekseevich, Peter I, the Great, founded a new city, St Petersburg, at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Thereby, in the famous words of Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, he …
From making fire to building the gadgets of the 21st century, uncover the stories behind the remarkable ideas and devices that have shaped our world in 1,000 Inventions and Discoveries. This revised and updated edition brings this comprehensive review of humanity's greatest ideas up to date. Innovations in science, space, technology, transportation, medicine, mathematics, and language are cove…
Papilionidae, Pieridae, Lycaenidae, and Nymphalidae. Close to 750 species inhabit the United States and Canada, most notably the Monarch and Regal Fritillary can be found in Nebraska. Approximately 3% of butterfly species are threatened with extinction. This decline in butterfly populations is attributed primarily to habitat loss due to urbanization and agriculture. As populations continue to d…
In 2020, a group of European researchers got a European Union (EU) grant to do a project called TRANSFORM. The objective of TRANSFORM was to integrate the principle of responsible research and innovation (RRI) into the research and innovation policies of three European regions: Lombardy, Brussels, and Catalonia. This book tells the story of how TRANSFORM translated RRI into practice, all the wa…
e had planned to hold the sixth conference in Vienna in September 2020, see-ing this as an opportunity to celebrate the tenth-year anniversary of IAMSR confer-ences. Our vision was to invite eminent scholars to present their perspectives onthe trends in the field of workplace spirituality over the past ten years and to strate-gically think about the future of the field for the next ten years. W…
The world’s polar regions are now central to geopolitical and strategic com-petition. Spillover effects from rapid political, social, and environmental change present unprecedented challenges for governance, environmental protection, and maritime operations in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Both geographic areas can be distinguished by specific terms—namely, the “Arctic” and…