"The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings,
of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World and Europe.
For instance, where you would normally expect to see the Sahara indicated,
the Atlas gives you "Sea of Sand", derived from Arab. es-sahra "desert, sea of sand".
The 'True Names' of 1500 cities, countries, rivers, oceans and mountain ranges
are displayed on these two fascinating maps,
each of which includes a comprehensive index of derivations."
http://www.kalimedia.com/Atlas_of_True_Names.html
In a 
When Duke professor Erich Jarvis wanted to find the key to human communication, he turned to birds. Strange, but true. Jarvis has been studying songbirds’ brains for insight into human linguistics, and his research has led to a startling discovery: Birds use two distinct neural pathways to learn songs—one in the front of the brain and one in the back. Guess what? Humans learn to speak in the same way. Jarvis believes this is an evolutionary clue suggesting that, when we shared an ancestor 300 million years ago, our brains were hardwired for language. Theoretically, once Jarvis and other neuroscientists fully understand this genetic blueprint, they can alter it and, in the process, make it easier to learn new languages and possibly even repair brain damage.
Instead of spending his days in a lab, UCLA professor Nathan Wolfe has thrown himself into the heart of the jungle. Trekking right along with hunters in Cameroon, he’s attempting to learn how they’re exposed to diseases by asking them to donate blood samples (their own and their prey’s). Wolfe’s method is difficult, but his idea is simple: HIV, Ebola, and other human viruses originated from human-animal contact, so it’s possible that these hunters—who come in close contact with their catch—are the ones inadvertently triggering the outbreaks. Wolfe’s work will go a long way toward predicting where emerging diseases could occur and stopping the next HIV or Ebola epidemic before it starts.
A few years ago, as an economics PhD student at Harvard, Emily Oster chose to focus her attention on the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Traditionally, that was the turf of sociologists, anthropologists, and public health officials. But the 26-year-old Oster wasn’t afraid to hop the scientific fence and join the other side. She also hasn’t been afraid to suggest things we haven’t heard before—namely, that treating herpes and other STDs (instead of AIDS) can significantly reduce HIV transmissions. Oster also believes that while the HIV numbers commonly used by the UN, popular press, and researchers are about three times too high, the disease is spreading faster than ever in Africa. By casting her economist’s eyes on the issue, Oster has forced the old turf-guarders to reevaluate their approaches to AIDS in Africa and come up with new solutions.
Jeffrey Schwartz became the first modern man to lay eyes on a young George Washington. Yes, that George Washington. Although he normally works on forensic cases reconstructing faces from bones, Schwartz re-created Washington by working from the outside in. Using only clues from statues, portraits, dentures, and clothing, Schwartz plugged his “evidence” into a three-dimensional computer program, which allowed him to combine and manipulate the clues to arrive at his reproduction. Schwartz created renderings of the founding father at ages 19, 45, and 57, and from the looks of it, George Washington might have been the George Clooney of his day. The lasting ramifications of Schwartz’s applications and research will be seen almost immediately, as other forensic anthropologists follow his method to see what distant past heroes (and villains) really looked like.
Pulling a typical all-nighter in med school, Pardis Sabeti achieved a not-so-typical feat—she confirmed the effects of genetics on the evolution of human diseases. By inputting different DNA sequences into an algorithm she created, Sabeti was able to find genes still linked to their neighbors—suggesting that their success within the gene pool is due to natural selection, not pure chance.
Nima Arkani-Hamed thinks big. He has a theory that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes—meaning the largest thing we can wrap our minds around is actually pretty tiny. He didn’t pull the “multiverse” out of thin air, though. After becoming a Harvard professor at age 30, Arkani-Hamed first made a name for himself by suggesting that our universe is five-dimensional. Then he moved on to the multiverse, theorizing that our own universe has a hidden feature called “split supersymmetry,” which means that half of all particles have partner particles. The theory will be tested soon in Switzerland’s brand-new Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and if the LHC finds Arkani-Hamed’s partner particles, it could prove that the multiverse is real—and that our place in it is that much smaller.
Hunting for aliens isn’t necessarily the most respected academic endeavor in the world, but Margaret Turnbull pursued it anyway. More precisely, she set out to catalog the stars most likely to develop intelligent alien civilizations. Turnbull’s system was painstakingly tedious. She started with the 120,000 cataloged stars, narrowed down her list to 17,129 (excluding the ones that were too hot, too close together, or too erratic), and then parsed that list down to 100 candidates. Her final criteria? An ideal star would be at least 3 billion years old and have a high iron content (the better to spin off life-yielding planets with).
