The Art of Making Children by
Advances in assisted reproductive technology are producing a new world whose boundaries and implications have yet to be fully explored and understood. New advances are announced and hit the headlines with dizzying regularity, triggering the hopes and aspirations of some, and the fears of others. What is possible? What are the implications? What should be permissible? Who should decide?Medically assisted reproductive techniques were developed to treat sterility and infertility. However, in parallel this has created a demand for applications outside the fields for which these technologies were originally intended. This book explores the issues that surround medically assisted reproduction by addressing them from the perspective of four key areas: the mystery of procreation and the enigma of origin and where we come from; the question of difference and alterity in procreation (be it the breaking down of the notion that one comes from two in heterologous procreation to the aspirations for same-sex procreation, or the blurring of chronology and generations through cryoconservation); the place of destiny, including how to think about individual destinies in an age of increasingly accessible gene sequencing paired with a growing link between procreation and prediction; and an exploration of how clinicians and professionals can respond to the subjective experiences of those who resort to medically assisted reproduction, and the singularity of each person's response to the difficult and complex questions it raises.
Benders' Dictionary of Nutrition and Food Technology by
Provides succinct, authoritative definitions of over 6100 terms in nutrition and food technology. Also includes nutrient composition data for foods and an appendix with nutrient intake and other useful data.
The Big Idea: How Breakthroughs of the Past Shape the Future by
Ingeniously organized and eminently browsable, this richly visual volume is divided into six big sections--medicine, transportation, communication, biology, chemistry, and the environment. This remarkable depiction of history tells the story of every Big Idea in our history, seen through the lens of where science is taking us today--and tomorrow.
The Book of Why by
A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence
"Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality--the study of cause and effect--on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why .
The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Provides an authoritative and accessible look at the lives of the men and women who have shaped science.
National Geographic Science of Everything by
National Geographic answers all the questions about how things work--the science, technology, biology, chemistry, physics, and mechanics--in an indispensible book that reveals the science behind virtually everything.
The Penguin Dictionary of Science by
Covers both fundamental and esoteric concepts within every field of scientific inquiry, from chemistry and astronomy to molecular biology and human anatomy. Definitions are succinct and backed by hundreds of illustrations and diagrams.
Stealing Fire by
It's the biggest revolution you've never heard of, and it's hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising short cut. They're harnessing rare and controversial states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition.
New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution--from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson's Necker Island, Red Bull's training center, Nike's innovation team, and the United Nations' Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that altered states provide.
Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces--psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology--we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of what's actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.
The Military-Entertainment Complex by
With the rise of drones and computer-controlled weapons, the line between war and video games continues to blur. In this book, the authors trace how the realities of war are deeply inflected by their representation in popular entertainment. War games and other media, in turn, feature an increasing number of weapons, tactics, and threat scenarios from the War on Terror.
While past analyses have emphasized top-down circulation of pro-military ideologies through government public relations efforts and a cooperative media industry, The Military-Entertainment Complex argues for a nonlinear relationship, defined largely by market and institutional pressures. Tim Lenoir and Luke Caldwell explore the history of the early days of the video game industry, when personnel and expertise flowed from military contractors to game companies; to a middle period when the military drew on the booming game industry to train troops; to a present in which media corporations and the military influence one another cyclically to predict the future of warfare.
In addition to obvious military-entertainment titles like America's Army , Lenoir and Caldwell investigate the rise of best-selling franchise games such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, and Ghost Recon . The narratives and aesthetics of these video games permeate other media, including films and television programs. This commodification and marketing of the future of combat has shaped the public's imagination of war in the post-9/11 era and naturalized the U.S. Pentagon's vision of a new way of war.
The process of asexual reproduction observed, for example, in bacteria and other unicellular micro-organisms which divide by simple fission, so that the daughter cells are genetically identical to each other and to the parent (except when mutation occurs). In higher organisms, genetically identical individuals may be produced by cloning.
The investigation of physical conditions in space and on stars, planets, and other celestial bodies through the use of artificial satellites, space probes, and spacecraft with human crews.
An optical telescope launched into orbit around the Earth in 1990 in the space shuttle Discovery, allowing observation of a volume of the universe 350 times as large as that observable from Earth.
A reusable manned vehicle that takes off like a rocket but lands on a runway like an aircraft and which is designed to travel into space.