The Worlds 20 Greatest Unsolved Problems

When Phebe Hedges, a woman in East Hampton, New York, walked into the sea in 1806, she made visible the historical experience of a family affected by the dreaded disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St.Vitus's dance. Doctors later spoke of Huntington’s chorea, and today it is known as Huntington's disease. This book is the first history of Huntington’s in America. Starting with the life of Phebe Hedges, Alice Wexler uses Huntington’s as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowledge among ordinary people as well as scientists and physicians. She addresses these themes through three overlapping stories: the lives of a nineteenth-century family once said to “belong to the disease”; the emergence of Huntington’s chorea as a clinical entity; and the early-twentieth-century transformation of this disorder into a cautionary eugenics tale. In our own era of expanding genetic technologies, this history offers insights into the social contexts of medical and scientific knowledge, as well as the legacy of eugenics in shaping both the knowledge and the lived experience of this disease.

The field of astrophysics is in the midst of a technological renaissance. The emphasis of this collection of essays, composed by a stellar group of astronomers and astrophysicists, is on the current state of our knowledge as a preparation for future unraveling of more mysteries of the universe, which appear most amenable to solution. Aspiring atrophysicists will be enthralled.

In this captivating collection of stories, you are taken on a journey through the shadowy corridors of history's most perplexing mysteries. "The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries" travels the earth and spans the decades, exploring cases that have puzzled experts and mystery enthusiasts alike. Delve into the curious case of the Circleville Letters, where an entire town was gripped by fear of an unseen menace, ponder over what really happened at Area 51, and read about the haunting disappearance of the Yuba County Five, a case that defies all logical explanation. Each story is meticulously crafted, inviting readers to ponder the endless possibilities that lie just beyond the edge of the known world. Prepare to be enthralled by these tales of mystery, where history, science, and legend intertwine, creating a tapestry of the unexplained. "The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries" calls you to lose yourself in a world where the line between the known and the unknown blurs, and draws you into mysteries that have captivated minds and sparked debates for decades. The fascinating stories in this book include: The Disappearance of Amelia Earhart Jack the Ripper The Voynich Manuscript The Bermuda Triangle The Dyatlov Pass Incident The Tunguska Event The Disappearance of Flight MH370 Leonardo da Vinci, the Knights Templar, and the Priory of Sion The Nazca Lines The Fate of the Roanoke Colony The Shroud of Turin The Zodiac Killer The Wow! Signal Stonehenge The Lost Colony of Paititi The Rongorongo Writing of Easter Island The Oak Island Enigma Hollywood's Dark Rose The Loch Ness Monster The Lost City of Atlantis The Location of Cleopatra's Tomb The Tale of the Smalls Lighthouse Dark Matter and Dark Energy The Taos Hum D.B. Cooper The Isdal Woman UFO Sightings The Easter Island Statues The Fate of the Roman Ninth Legion The Man in the Iron Mask The Beale Ciphers The Mary Celeste The Pioneer Anomaly The Hessdalen Lights The Placebo Effect Animal Mass Die-Offs The Mothman The Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe The Bell Witch The Chupacabra The Tamam Shud Case The Authorship of Shakespeare's Works The Scream Painting Theft The Secret of Rennes-le-Château The Disappearance of the Amber Room The Princes in the Tower The Sea Peoples The Disappearance of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse Keepers

Accompany the Fanthorpes on their intriguing investigations in Canada and worldwide, through years of research into the unexplained.

With its many beautiful colour pictures, this book gives fascinating insights into the unusual forms and behaviour of matter under extremely high pressures and temperatures. These extreme states are generated, among other things, by strong shock, detonation and electric explosion waves, dense laser beams, electron and ion beams, hypersonic entry of spacecraft into dense atmospheres of planets, and in many other situations characterized by extremely high pressures and temperatures. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on the topic, this book will inform and fascinate all scientists dealing with materials properties and physics, and also serve as an excellent introduction to plasma-, shock-wave and high-energy-density physics for students and newcomers seeking an overview.

In August 1859 Bernhard Riemann, a little-known 32-year old mathematician, presented a paper to the Berlin Academy titled: "On the Number of Prime Numbers Less Than a Given Quantity." In the middle of that paper, Riemann made an incidental remark â€" a guess, a hypothesis. What he tossed out to the assembled mathematicians that day has proven to be almost cruelly compelling to countless scholars in the ensuing years. Today, after 150 years of careful research and exhaustive study, the question remains. Is the hypothesis true or false? Riemann's basic inquiry, the primary topic of his paper, concerned a straightforward but nevertheless important matter of arithmetic â€" defining a precise formula to track and identify the occurrence of prime numbers. But it is that incidental remark â€" the Riemann Hypothesis â€" that is the truly astonishing legacy of his 1859 paper. Because Riemann was able to see beyond the pattern of the primes to discern traces of something mysterious and mathematically elegant shrouded in the shadows â€" subtle variations in the distribution of those prime numbers. Brilliant for its clarity, astounding for its potential consequences, the Hypothesis took on enormous importance in mathematics. Indeed, the successful solution to this puzzle would herald a revolution in prime number theory. Proving or disproving it became the greatest challenge of the age. It has become clear that the Riemann Hypothesis, whose resolution seems to hang tantalizingly just beyond our grasp, holds the key to a variety of scientific and mathematical investigations. The making and breaking of modern codes, which depend on the properties of the prime numbers, have roots in the Hypothesis. In a series of extraordinary developments during the 1970s, it emerged that even the physics of the atomic nucleus is connected in ways not yet fully understood to this strange conundrum. Hunting down the solution to the Riemann Hypothesis has become an obsession for many â€" the veritable "great white whale" of mathematical research. Yet despite determined efforts by generations of mathematicians, the Riemann Hypothesis defies resolution. Alternating passages of extraordinarily lucid mathematical exposition with chapters of elegantly composed biography and history, Prime Obsession is a fascinating and fluent account of an epic mathematical mystery that continues to challenge and excite the world. Posited a century and a half ago, the Riemann Hypothesis is an intellectual feast for the cognoscenti and the curious alike. Not just a story of numbers and calculations, Prime Obsession is the engrossing tale of a relentless hunt for an elusive proof â€" and those who have been consumed by it.

An in-depth look at the most intriguing puzzles in science today In this illuminating book, professors Arthur Wiggins and Charles Wynn explore what they believe are the five biggest science problems: Physics: Why do some particles have mass, while others have none? Chemistry: By what series of chemical reactions did atoms form the first living things? Biology: What is the complete structure and function of the proteome? Geology: Is accurate, long-range weather forecasting possible? Astronomy: Why is the universe expanding faster and faster? Wiggins and Wynn carefully explain each of these problems, then discuss the theories that address them. Some of the many topics covered include string theory, the human genome, chaos theory, and protein folding. Featuring humorous illustrations from renowned science cartoonist Sidney Harris, this book invites you to explore the events that led to these problems and the cutting-edge efforts being made to solve them. The authors also provide Idea Folders, which contain additional details about the unsolved problems, and Resources for Digging Deeper, such as books, periodicals, and Web sites.

Looks at numerous events throughout history that have largely remained unsolved, including thefts, fraud, disappearances and deaths.