"It discusses scientific life in academia, industry, and government labs as well as in different parts of the world. The authors should be congratulated for the depth of their analysis of challenges facing the modern researcher ..
Why write a dictionary of biomedical sciences? After all, several medical and science dictionaries have been published in the lastfew years. To answer that question it is first necessary to consider what is meant by ‘biomedical science’. Biomedical science involves and relates biological, medical and physical science. Biomedical scientists must be familiar with a great number of technical terms, many of which are from disciplines other than their own speciality, including anatomy, audiology, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computing science, cytology, genetics, haematology, histology, mathematics, medicine, microbiology, molecular biology, microscopy, mycology, parasitology, pharmacology, physics, physiology, radiology, statistics, virology, and so on. So the answer to the initial question is that the dictionaries published to date do not provide the mix of terminology within a single volume that is required of biomedical scientists and none have had the aims of the present dictionary.
Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them.
In dictionary format this volume on Notable Scientists includes the thoroughness and accessibility Facts on File thrives on for presenting easy to research biographies of giants in the field. This volume is about those pioneers in space and astronomy that provided the core of knowledge that scientists are still accessing and using. There are familiar names, such as, Plato , Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking, "...known as the scientist who explains to the masses the laws that govern the universe." This volume is easy to reach for as an authorized site for a "quick biography" that includes personal information, contributions to the field of science, and a picture. Besides learning about the highlights of the scientists' career, the researcher will also find the obstacles and personal tragedies that often beset the lives of these men.
"Radioactivity is like a clock that never needs adjusting," writes Doug Macdougall. "It would be hard to design a more reliable timekeeper." In Nature's Clocks, Macdougall tells how scientists who were seeking to understand the past arrived at the ingenious techniques they now use to determine the age of objects and organisms. By examining radiocarbon (C-14) dating--the best known of these methods--and several other techniques that geologists use to decode the distant past, Macdougall unwraps the last century's advances, explaining how they reveal the age of our fossil ancestors such as "Lucy," the timing of the dinosaurs' extinction, and the precise ages of tiny mineral grains that date from the beginning of the earth's history. In lively and accessible prose, he describes how the science of geochronology has developed and flourished. Relating these advances through the stories of the scientists themselves--James Hutton, William Smith, Arthur Holmes, Ernest Rutherford, Willard Libby, and Clair Patterson--Macdougall shows how they used ingenuity and inspiration to construct one of modern science's most significant accomplishments: a timescale for the earth's evolution and human prehistory.
