In 1895 Alfred Nobel rewrote his will and left his fortune made in dynamite and munitions to generations of thinkers. Since 1901 women have been honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research twenty times, including Marie Curie twice. Spanning more than a century and ranging across the world, this inventive story collection is inspired by these women whose work has altered history and saved millions of lives. From a transformative visit to the Grand Canyon to a baby washing up on a Queensland beach, a climate protest during a Paris heatwave to Stockholm on the eve of the 1977 Nobel Prize ceremony, Ordinary Matter explores the nature of ingenuity and discovery, motherhood and sacrifice, illness and legacy. Sometimes the extraordinary pivots on the ordinary.

Jenny McPhee's critically acclaimed debut, The Center of Things, was hailed by O, The Oprah Magazine as "a smart novel of love, lust, and life's miraculous randomness." The New York Times Book Review called it "an engaging novel about big ideas." In her delightful new novel, No Ordinary Matter, McPhee turns her razor-sharp pen on the offbeat worlds of soap operas, mistaken identities, private detectives, and sibling rivalries as she deftly navigates the territory between coincidence and fate. Veronica Moore writes for a daytime drama while secretly composing a musical and has fallen in love with Alex Drake, who plays a neurologist on her show. Lillian Moore is a neurologist who is pregnant from a one-night stand. Veronica and Lillian have hired Brian Byrd, P. I., to uncover the mystery surrounding their father's death. Before they know it, unexpected answers come crawling out of the woodwork. The sisters meet monthly at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where they entangle their futures and unravel their pasts, setting the stage for a series of revelations that will change the course of everyone's lives. This fast-paced narrative is full of situations worthy of the steamiest of soaps, and yet McPhee renders this fantastical world delightfully ordinary. No Ordinary Matter is as addictive as a soap opera, as high-kicking as a Broadway show, as insightful as an MRI, and as satisfying as a buttery croissant. With its sly charm and witty sophistication, McPhee's new novel is another sparkling gem from a rising literary star.

Hiring a private detective to investigate the mysterious auto accident that took their father's life twenty-five years earlier, a pregnant neurologist and a soap-opera writer find their quest challenged when the father of the neurologist's baby lands a role on the writer's show. 35,000 first printing.

Shortlisted for the 2017 AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship Ordinary Matters is the first major interdisciplinary study of the ordinary in modernist women's literature and photography. It examines how women photographers and writers including Helen Levitt, Lee Miller, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson envision the sphere of ordinary life in light of the social and cultural transformations of the period that shaped and often radically re-shaped it: for example, urbanism, instrumentalism, the Great Depression and war. Through a series of case studies that explore such topics as the street, domestic things, gesture and the face, Sim contends that the paradigmatic shifts that define early twentieth-century modernity not only inform modernist women's aesthetics of the everyday, but their artistic and ethical investments in that sphere. The everyday has been noted as a “keynote of the New Modernist Studies” (Todd Avery). Ordinary Matters comprises a vital contribution to recent scholarship on the topic and will be of value to scholars working in British and American modernism, multimedia modernisms, photography, twentieth-century literature, and critical and cultural histories of the everyday.

“Takes readers on illuminating scientific adventure, beginning sixty-six million years ago, that connects dinosaurs, comets, DNA, and the future of the planet.” —Huffington Post In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times–bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven’s Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the furthest reaches of space and life here on Earth. Sixty-six million years ago, an object the size of a city descended from space to crash into Earth, creating a devastating cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of the other species on the planet. What was its origin? In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall proposes it was a comet that was dislodged from its orbit as the Solar System passed through a disk of dark matter embedded in the Milky Way. In a sense, it might have been dark matter that killed the dinosaurs. Working through the background and consequences of this proposal, Randall shares with us the latest findings—established and speculative—regarding the nature and role of dark matter and the origin of the Universe, our galaxy, our Solar System, and life, along with the process by which scientists explore new concepts. In Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Randall tells a breathtaking story that weaves together the cosmos’ history and our own, illuminating the deep relationships that are critical to our world and the astonishing beauty inherent in the most familiar things. “Randall has woven a beautiful account of how life on Earth is intimately connected to the cosmos.” —The Daily Telegraph (UK)

An art teacher sends four of her students on a guerrilla mission. A young runner struggles to make sense of his best friend's death. A health-food company adopts a farcical promotional strategy. A factory worker spends her days applying radioactive paint to watches, while dreaming of a future with her new suitor. With a keen eye for detail and rich emotional insight, Laura Elvery reveals the fears and fantasies of everyday people searching for meaning. Ranging from tender poignancy to wry humor, this beguiling collection marks the debut of one of a rising star.

Advances made by physicists in understanding matter, space, and time and by astronomers in understanding the universe as a whole have closely intertwined the question being asked about the universe at its two extremesâ€"the very large and the very small. This report identifies 11 key questions that have a good chance to be answered in the next decade. It urges that a new research strategy be created that brings to bear the techniques of both astronomy and sub-atomic physics in a cross-disciplinary way to address these questions. The report presents seven recommendations to facilitate the necessary research and development coordination. These recommendations identify key priorities for future scientific projects critical for realizing these scientific opportunities.

For over ten years, the dark side of the universe has been headline news. Detailed studies of the rotation of spiral galaxies, and 'mirages' created by clusters of galaxies bending the light from very remote objects, have convinced astronomers of the presence of large quantities of dark (unseen) matter in the cosmos. The most striking fact is that they seem to compromise about 95% of the matter/energy content of the universe. As for ordinary matter, although we are immersed in a sea of dark particles, including primordial neutrinos and photons from fossil cosmological radiation, both we and our environment are made of ordinary, 'baryonic' matter. Authors Mazure and Le Brun present the inventory of matter, baryonic and exotic, and investigating the nature and fate of matter's twin, anti-matter. They show how technological progress has been a result of basic research, in tandem with the evolution of new ideas, and how the combined effect of these advances might help lift the cosmic veil.

This book brings together reviews from leading international authorities on the developments in the study of dark matter and dark energy, as seen from both their cosmological and particle physics side. Studying the physical and astrophysical properties of the dark components of our Universe is a crucial step towards the ultimate goal of unveiling their nature. The work developed from a doctoral school sponsored by the Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation. The book starts with a concise introduction to the standard cosmological model, as well as with a presentation of the theory of linear perturbations around a homogeneous and isotropic background. It covers the particle physics and cosmological aspects of dark matter and (dynamical) dark energy, including a discussion of how modified theories of gravity could provide a possible candidate for dark energy. A detailed presentation is also given of the possible ways of testing the theory in terms of cosmic microwave background, galaxy redshift surveys and weak gravitational lensing observations. Included is a chapter reviewing extensively the direct and indirect methods of detection of the hypothetical dark matter particles. Also included is a self-contained introduction to the techniques and most important results of numerical (e.g. N-body) simulations in cosmology. " This volume will be useful to researchers, PhD and graduate students in Astrophysics, Cosmology Physics and Mathematics, who are interested in cosmology, dark matter and dark energy.

At least eighty percent of the mass of the universe consists of some material which, unlike ordinary matter, neither emits nor absorbs light. This book collects key papers related to the discovery of this astonishing fact and its profound implications for astrophysics, cosmology, and the physics of elementary particles. The book focuses on the likely possibility that the dark matter is composed of an as yet undiscovered elementary particle, and examines the boundaries of our present knowledge of the properties such a particle must possess.