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2 novels found

The Devil in the Freezer

(us) Richard Preston

138K0

In October 2001, less than a month after the "9/11" incident, the United States suffered its first major bioterrorism incident: anthrax attack. In "The Devil in the Freezer," Richard Preston takes us inside the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, once the headquarters for U. S. Bioweapons development and now the center of the nation's biodefense. For Peter Yellin, a top virologist at the U. S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, his most urgent task was developing a drug to fight smallpox. The smallpox virus claimed more than 1 billion lives and changed the course of world history. In 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the earth, which was one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine. Currently, smallpox strains are contained in high-security freezers at two locations: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and a virology institute in Siberia. But the demon in the freezer has been unleashed. Biologists in clandestine laboratories are almost certainly using genetic engineering to create a new supervirus, a smallpox virus that is resistant to all vaccines.

First Light: Exploring the Edge of the Universe (translation Documentary)

(us) Richard Preston

185K0

Preston, the author of "Blood Plague", won the American Physical Society Science Writing Award for his first nonfiction work. Explore the light from the edge of the universe and solve the mystery of the origin and evolution of the universe. Recommended article by Yu Heng, associate professor of the Department of Astronomy at Beijing Normal University. First light is a technical term that refers to opening the hood of a new telescope to allow starlight to fall on the mirror and sensor for the first time. "First Light" is also a non-fiction work that tells the story of how astronomers search for light from the edge of the universe. Two hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first generation of stars in the universe was born, which is the edge of our observable universe. Those first lights can help us decipher the mysteries of the universe's origin and evolution. The core of the story is the 5-meter-diameter Haier telescope, commonly known as the "Big Eye." A century ago, the design and construction of the "Big Eye" started the legend of the Palomar Observatory and profoundly influenced the development of astronomy in the second half of the 20th century. First Light stars James Gunn, considered by many professionals to be the finest astronomer of our time. Since the 1990s, Gunn has launched the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, using a 2.5-Meter telescope to scan the northern hemisphere starry sky with the goal of drawing a color three-dimensional electronic map of the universe. Under his leadership, this became the most successful sky survey program in history and continues to this day. The project captured hundreds of millions of images of celestial objects and the spectra of millions of celestial objects and made them available to the world. This directly changed the way astronomers work, and astronomy has since entered the era of big data.