New Scientist is a science magazine for everyone, young and old, amateur and professional. With a circulation approaching 160,000 and a worldwide readership of more than half a million, it is among the most popular of all popular science magazines.

Frank Falcinelli has worked in Michelin two-star restaurants in France, with chefs Charlie Palmer and David Burke in New York, and was a partner and chef in the New York hot spot Moomba. He lives in Brooklyn with his French bulldog, Frankies mascot Merlin.

Frank Castronovo trained with such culinary superstars as Jacques Pepin and France's Paul Bocuse. In 2003, he opened Frankies 457 Spuntino with childhood friend Frank Falcinelli. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Peter Meehan is a food writer and former New York Times restaurant columnist. His most recent book is Momofuku, co-authored with the chef David Chang.

Robert Greene is the author of three bestselling books: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War. He attended U.C. California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a degree in classical studies. He has worked in New York as an editor and writer at several magazines, including Esquire; and in Hollywood as a story developer and writer. Greene has lived in London, Paris and Barcelona; he speaks several languages and has worked as a translator. He currently lives in Los Angeles.

Curtis James Jackson III (born July 6, 1975), better known by his stage name 50 Cent, is an American rapper. He rose to fame with the release of his albums Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2003) and The Massacre (2005). Both albums achieved multi-platinum success, selling over 21 million copies combined. He is the author of From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens. He lives in New York.

Arthur Agatston, MD, is a preventive cardiologist and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He has authored numerous articles on echocardiography, valvular heart disease, and noninvasive imaging of the coronary arteries. Dr. Agatston has also acted as an expert consultant to the Clinical Trials Committee of the National Institutes of Health. He is best known as the author of the best-selling book, The South Beach Diet. He has also written The South Beach Diet Supercharged, The South Beach Diet Quick and Easy Cookbook, The South Beach Diet Dining Guide, The South Beach Diet Parties and Holidays Cookbook, and The South Beach Heart Program. He maintains a cardiology practice and research foundation in Miami Beach.

Dr. Olivier Ameisen was once the personal physician of the prime minister of France. He came to the United States to join the prestigious cardiology team at New York's Weill-Cornell Medical Center. He currently lives in Paris and is conducting studies related to his discovery.

James Barr graduated from the University of Oxford with a First in modern history.  Setting the Desert on Fire: T.E. Lawrence and Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-1918 (Norton, February 2008), the gripping tale of how the mercurial Lawrence of Arabia changed the Middle East forever, is his first book.

Richard Brookhiser is the author of Right Place, Right Time, What Would the Founders Do?: Our Questions, Their Answers, Founding Father-Rediscovering George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, America. He is a senior editor of National Review, and a contributor to Time. He wrote and hosted Rediscovering George Washington, a film by Michael Pack, which aired on PBS and appears frequently on the History Channel. Brookhiser lives in New York City.

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University. His book The Gorbachev Factor won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize of the Political Studies Association of the UK for best political science book of the year and the Alec Nove Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies. He lives in England.

Helen Brown hails from New Zealand, where she worked as a journalist, TV presenter, and scriptwriter. Now living in Melbourne, Australia, with her family, Helen has been voted Columnist of the Year several times. Cleo rose to the top of the bestseller lists in its first weeks in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia and has been translated into more than eight languages. In the United Kingdom Cleo remained on the top of the bestseller list for multiple weeks.

Veronica Buckley was born and educated in New Zealand, and later studied at the Universities of London and Oxford. Christina, Queen of Sweden, was the subject of her much-praised first biography. She lived in Paris while researching The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, and now lives in Vienna.

Wendy Burden is a confirmed New Yorker who, to her constant surprise, lives in Portland, Oregon.  She is the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which qualifies her to comment freely on the downward spiral of blue blood families.  She has worked as an illustrator, a zookeeper, and a taxidermist; and as an art director for a pornographic magazine from which she was fired for being too tasteful. She was also the owner and chef of a small French restaurant, Chez Wendy. She has yet to attend mortuary school, but is planning on it.

Matthew Carr is a writer, broadcaster and journalist who has reported on a number of violent conflicts. He is the author of The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism from the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al Qaeda (The New Press, April 2007), and now Blood and Faith (The New Press, September 2009).

David Cesarani, one of Britain's leading historians, is Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway, London University, and author of the award-winning Becoming Eichmann. He has published widely on Jewish history and the history of Zionism. He lives in London.

David Chang is a Korean-American chef who is known for his unique combination of Asian food and French technique. After graduating Trinity College, Chang worked briefly in the financial services before embarking upon his career as a chef. Chang attended the French Culinary Institute and opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in Manhattan's East Village in 2003. In 2006, Chang opened his second restaurant, Momofuku Ssam Bar. Chang was honored as both GQ and Bon Appetit's 2007 Chef of the Year. His cookbook Momofuku will be released this fall.

Jean Chatzky is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author and motivational speaker. Jean is the financial editor for NBC's Today, a contributing editor for More, a columnist for The New York Daily News, and a contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show.  She also hosts a daily show on the Oprah & Friends channel, exclusively on XM Radio.She is the author of five books, including Pay It Down: From Debt to Wealth on $10 A Day, a New York Times and Business Week best seller. Jean lives with her family in Westchester, New York.

Brian Cox is a professor of particle physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. He divides his time between Manchester in the UK and the CERN laboratory in Geneva, where he heads an international project to upgrade the giant ATLAS and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider. He has received many awards for his work promoting science, including being elected an International Fellow of the Explorers Club in 2002, an organization whose members include Neil Armstrong and Chuck Yeager. He is also a popular presenter on TV and radio, with credits which including a six-part series on Einstein for BBC Radio 4, 3 BBC Horizon programs on Gravity, Time and Nuclear Fusion, and a BBC4 documentary about the LHC at CERN, "The Big Bang Machine". He was the Science Advisor on Danny Boyle's movie, the science-fiction thriller Sunshine.

Art Daily is a Senior Partner in Holland & Hart LLP, the largest law firm in the Rocky Mountain West. He specializes in real estate law and represents many well-known clients in the Aspen area.  

Allison Daily graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988 with a business degree. She is the director of Pathfinders Valley Angels, a nonprofit organization that serves Aspen-area cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.

John Dickie lectures in Italian studies at University College, London. His first book, Cosa Nostra, was an award-winning history of the Sicilian mafia, has been translated into twenty languages and has sold nearly half a million copies around the world. His second book, Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food, was published by Free Press in January.

Jay Dobyns is a highly decorated agent who has worked for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for over twenty years. For his work on "Operation Black Biscuit," he was awarded the ATF Distinguished Service Medal, and also a prestigious Top Cops award from the National Association of Police Officers.

Katherine Dunn attended Portland State and Reed College. In addition to writing novels, she has had a varied career as a journalist, house painter, bartender, teacher, radio personality, boxing correspondent for the Associated Press, and writer of an advice column. She has a son named Eli.

Ryan D'Agostino is Articles Editor at Esquire. His work has also appeared in the New Yorker, New York magazine, the New York Observer, the New York Times. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

A former staff correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek, William Echikson was the Dow Jones bureau chief in Brussels from 2001-2006. The author of three previous books, he has written for Gourmet, the Wine Spectator and the New Yorker. He is now Director of European Union communications for Google.

Deborah Fallows has lived in Shanghai and Beijing and traveled throughout China for three years with her husband, writer James Fallows. She is a Harvard graduate, and has a Ph.D. in linguistics. She and her husband live in Washington, D.C.

Suzanne Finnamore's first novel, Otherwise Engaged, published by Knopf (hardcover) and Vintage (paperback) is still in print and has been translated in twelve languages. Her second novel, The Zygote Chronicles (Grove), was a Washington Post Book of the Year and was nominated in 2002 for Social Issues. She has written for Child, Ms., Mademoiselle, Redbook, Salon, O, Glamour, The San Francisco Chronicle, Working Mother. Her third novel, Split: A Memoir of a Flagrant Divorce, was published in April.  

Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer, conservationist, and author. A contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement, he is also a familiar voice on ABC Radio, NPR, and the BBC. He lives in Adelaide, Australia.

Stephen Foster is the author of Walking Ollie: Or Winning the Love of a Difficult Dog (Perigee, July 2008), and most recently, Fetching Dylan (Perigee, June 2009).

Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D, is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and principal investigator of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is professor of war studies at King's College, London. In 2001, he was appointed head of the School of Social Sciences and Public Policy at King's and, in 2003, Vice Principal for research. Before joining King's, he held research appointments at Nuffield College, Oxford, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of several books of history, including Kennedy's Wars and A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (Public Affairs, May 2008), a rigorously balanced study of US policy in the region since 1979.

Steven Gaines is the author of twelve books, including a New York Times bestselling social and cultural portrait of the Hamptons, Philistines at the Hedgerow.

Mikal Gilmore has written for Rolling Stone magazine since the 1970s. His first book, Shot in the Heart, was a National Book Critics Circle, Los Angeles Times Book Award-winning memoir, and sold in eleven foreign territories.

Marcelo Gleiser is Appleton Professor Natural Philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College, where he runs and active cosmology group. Gleiser is the author of The Dancing Universe and The Prophet and the Astronomer and shares a blog on NPR called 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. He lives in New Hampshire.

Lauren Goldstein Crowe has covered the fashion and luxury goods industries as a Senior Writer at Time magazine in London, at Fortune magazine in New York, and as a writer of freelance articles for Paris Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, the New York Times, British Vogue, the Financial Times and the Times, and has appeared as a fashion expert on CNN and Bloomberg Television and on numerous radio programs in the US. 

Sagra Maceira de Rosen is currently a founding partner in Hemisphere One Partners, a recently established private equity firm that invests in retail and luxury brands, and was previously a highly ranked equity analyst at JP Morgan in London and the head of its Global Luxury Goods and Retail research team.

Lynne Greenberg is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College. Her academic writing focuses on seventeenth-century British poetry. She has a J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School and a Ph.D. from CUNY - The Graduate School and University Center. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate School and former Professor of Geography at Johns Hopkins and Oxford Universities. The author of numerous books, he was awarded the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1995 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

Guardian (London) journalist Charlotte Higgins has been the paper's classical music editor and arts correspondent. Her first book, LATIN LOVE LESSONS: Put a Little Ovid in Your Life, is a new guide to romance based on some of civilization's oldest and wisest counselors: Catullus, Virgil, Ovid and Horace.

Andrew Hodges is the author of Alan Turing: The Enigma, which the New Yorker recently described as "one of the finest scientific biographies ever written". He is an active researcher of fundamental physics, a colleague of Sir Roger Penrose, and a lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford University. One to Nine: The Inner Life of Numbers wil be published by Norton in June.

Meredith Hooper's writing ranges from award-winning non-fiction books for all ages to academic articles. Her highly-acclaimed fiction and information titles for children have been published in many languages. During the last fifteen years, she has specialized in writing about Antarctica. She has been selected as a writer on US and Australian Antarctic programs. She is a trustee of the International Polar Foundation and was awarded the Antarctica Service Medal by the US National Science Foundation in 2000. The Ferocious Summer: Adelie Penguins and the Warming of Antarctica will be published by Greystone Books in April.

Jamie Ivey is the author of the Gourmand Award-winning Extremely Pale Rose: A Very French Adventure. The adventure now continues with La Vie en Rose (St Martin's Press, April 2008).

Randy Jackson is a longtime music industry veteran and Grammy Award-winning rock bassist and record producer. He is also one-third of the judging panel on American Idol, one of the most successful shows in the history of American television, and executive producer of the MTV series Randy Jackson Presents: America's Best Dance Crew.

Christopher Kelly, a professor of ancient history and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge, lives in Cambridge, England, and Chicago, Illinois.

Miles Kington, the prolific and celebrated British humor writer, joined the staff of Punch in 1967 at the age of 26, later becoming its Literary Editor.  In 1981, he began writing a column in the London Times, and six years later joined The Independent, where he wrote a daily column for the next 22 years.  In addition to his popular columns, Kington's other pursuits ranged from playing the double bass and writing jazz reviews to translating books from the French and making radio and TV programs, including two of the BBC's Great Railway Journey's of the World.  The author of several bestselling books in the U.K., most notably the Let's Parler Franglais! Series, he died on January 30, 2008. 

Leon Kreitzman is a consultant and biologist and the author of 24 Hour Society and Seasons of Life.

Martin Kutscher, M.D. is board certified in Pediatrics and in Neurology, with Special Competency in Child Neurology. Dr. Kutscher is a graduate of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his pediatrics at Temple University's St. Christopher's Hospital for Children as well as a pediatric neurology fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is currently an Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and of Neurology at the New York Medical College and maintains his own medical practice of more than twenty years that is currently limited to pediatric behavioral neurology. Dr. Kutscher lectures internationally and is the author of several recent books, including ADHD: Living Without Brakes and Kids in the Syndrome Mix of ADHD and most recently, Organizing the Disorganized Child. Visit him online at syndromemix.com.

David Lane has lived in Rome since 1972, has written for the Guardian and the Financial Times, and has been the Economist's business and finance correspondent for Italy since 1994.

David Lawday spent twenty years as a correspondent for the Economist. He lives in Paris.

Vicki Leon is a writer, traveler, and historian who has built a wide readership with her Uppity Women series. She lives in Morro Bay, California.

Shawn Levy is the film critic for The Oregonian and the author of The Last Playboy, Ready, Steady, Go!, Rat Pack Confidential, and King of Comedy. His most recent book is his biography Paul Newman: A Life. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and three children.

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. She received her BA from Harvard University and her PhD in Social Psychology from Stanford University. Dr. Lyubomirsky and her research have been the recipients of many honors, including the 2002 Templeton Positive Psychology Prize and a multi-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. She lives in Santa Monica, CA with her family.

Ed Macy left the British Army in January 2008, after twenty-three years of service. He had amassed a total of 3,930 helicopter flying hours, 645 of them inside an Apache. Macy was awarded the Military Cross for his courage during the Jugroom Fort rescue--one of the first ever in Army Air Corps history. Apache is his first book.

Kenan Malik is a visiting senior fellow in the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey. The author of several previous books, he is also a presenter on BBC Radio 4.

Mark McCrum is the author of Going Dutch in Beijing: How to Behave Properly When Far Away from Home (Holt, April 2008), and most recently The Whatchamacallit. He has visited six of the seven continents and written several books. He has lunched with the king of the Zulus, a strict teetotaler whose manners were impeccable.

Michael Medved is the host of one of the most popular talk-radio programs in the country, reaching more than four million listeners, and is the bestselling author of ten other books, including Right Turns, Hollywood vs. America, and What Really Happened to the Class of '65? A member of USA Today's board of contributors, he lives with his family in the Seattle area.

Woodson Merrell, M.D., is one of America's preeminent Integrative Medicine physicians. He is Chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, Manhattan campus of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Polly Moore, author of The 90 Minute Baby Sleep Program, received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, where she specialized in sleep research. She continued her research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center and is now Director of Sleep Research at California Clinical Trials in San Diego. She is a hands-on expert in the subject of baby sleep - with two small children of her own - and gives talks to new parents on the subject. She and her family live in San Diego, California.

Thomas Moore is the author of numerous popular spiritual books including the New York Times best seller, Care of the Soul. He is a Roman Catholic and a Jungian psychotherapist. Moore was born in Detroit, Michigan to an Irish Catholic family. As a youth he joined the Servites, a Roman Catholic lay order where he studied philosophy and music. He earned an M.A. in theology from the University of Windsor and a Ph.D. in religion from Syracuse University. From 1974 to 1990 he practiced as a psychotherapist, first in Dallas, TX and later in New England. After the success of Care of the Soul and its companion volume Soul Mates, he became a full-time professional writer.

Mary McDonagh Murphy is an independent documentary director and writer whose work has appeared on PBS. For twenty years she was a producer at CBS News, where she won six Emmy Awards. She has written for Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Post, and Publishers Weekly. She lives in Scarborough with her husband and their two children.

Susie Orbach is the co-founder of the Women's Therapy Centre in London and New York. A former Guardian (UK) columnist, she was visiting professor for ten years at the London School of Economics and is the convener of www.any-body.org. She is a consultant and co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The author of a number of books, including On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, the bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, and now Bodies, she lectures extensively worldwide.

Noelle Oxenhandler holds graduate degrees in Philosophy and Creative Writing. She has been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years and is a contributing editor for Tricycle Magazine. She is a regular guest teacher for the Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and is on the permanent faculty at Sonoma State University in California, where she teaches creative non-fiction. She is the author of The Wishing Year: An Experiment in Desire and The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark. She is the mother of a teenage daughter and lives in northern California.

Matthew Parker, author of Panama Fever: The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time--the Building of the Panama Canal (Doubleday, April 2008), also wrote the acclaimed Monte Cassino: The Hardest-Fought Battle of World War II.

Mariana Pasternak grew up in Romania and immigrated to the United States as a political refugee. The mother of two daughters, she has been a biomedical engineer and has held other positions involving computer-based research and development. For the past twenty years, she has been working as a realtor in Connecticut, where she lives.

Elizabeth Pisani is an epidemiologist and has worked on HIV for the last decade, during which time she has done research for and advised the Ministries of Health of China, Indonesia, East Timor and the Philippines. She has also provided analyses and policy advice to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, US Centers for Disease Control, among other organizations. She wrote the UN's first two biennial reports on the state of AIDS in the world. Her scientific publications can be found in The British Medical Journal, AIDS, Sexually Transmitted Infections, The International Journal of Drug Policy, and other journals. Her first book, The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of Aids (http://www.wisdomofwhores.com) will be published by Norton in June.