Libros de Divulgación Científica, página 37 de 181

Existe un acuerdo general entre los especialistas de que el siglo XXI será el siglo de la Biología, así como el siglo XX ha sido el siglo de la Física. Pero, sin duda, el siglo XX no sólo fue el siglo de la Física, sino también el siglo de los genes. En esta reconstrucción histórica de la genética desde 1900, los autores analizan los descubrimientos que en el siglo XX han abierto el camino hacia los avatares del siglo XXI. Los patrones de explicación en genética se han modificado a través del tiempo, debido principalmente al desarrollo de técnicas experimentales, al uso de diferentes organismos y a los nuevos conocimientos o formulación de nuevas teorías. El avance científico ha sido gradual y continúa hasta el presente. Es necesario impulsar discusiones a fondo y difundir el conocimiento acerca de los organismos transgénicos, las terapias génicas, sus posibles riesgos, y aprender de lo que las ideologías eugenésicas han ocasionado en el pasado.

The evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks explores the latest research on intimacy and desire to consider how new technologies and fundamental human behaviors interact He details how existing artificial intelligences can already learn and exploit human social needs and are getting better at what they do

If you want to see what that future might look like Duncan s book is a fun place to start NPR Intensely readable downright terrifying and surprisingly uplifting Vanity Fair 5 books not to miss A fascinating work of imaginative futurology USA Today One of Time magazine s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer a riveting read One of David Baldacci and Elizabeth Acevedo s best summer reads on USA Today s Today programme A refreshing variation on the will intelligent robots bring Armageddon genre this colourful mixture of expert futurology and quirky speculation does not disappoint Kirkus Reviews What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now What do they say about us their creators Will they usher in a fantastic new future or destroy us What do some of our greatest thinkers from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen geneticist George Church and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain anticipate about our human robot future For even as robots and AI intrigue us and make us anxious about the future our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology it s also about what robots tell us about being human From present day Facebook and Amazon bot

Enter Ormerod s vital manual Pandora Sykes A statistic packed investigation into a worldwide phenomenon It is no exaggeration to say this book is essential reading for anyone METRO Who better to help us wade through the muddy waters of the great Insta sham ELLE Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life tackles head on the pressure cooker of comparison and unreachable levels of perfection that social media has created in our modern world It uncovers how our relationship with social media has rewired our behavioural patterns destroyed our confidence and shattered our attention spans The book is a rallying cry that will provide you with the knowledge tactics and weaponry you need to find a more healthy way to consume social media and reclaim your happiness

In this lively and entertaining book Donald R Prothero explores the astonishing connections between climate and life through the ages telling the remarkable stories of the scientists who made cruc

Who benefits from smart technology Whose interests are served when we trade our personal data for convenience and connectivity Smart technology is everywhere smart umbrellas that light up when rain is in the forecast smart cars that relieve drivers of the drudgery of driving smart toothbrushes that send your dental hygiene details to the cloud Nothing is safe from smartification In Too Smart Jathan Sadowski looks at the proliferation of smart stuff in our lives and asks whether the tradeoff exchanging our personal data for convenience and connectivity is worth it Who benefits from smart technology Sadowski explains how data once the purview of researchers and policy wonks has become a form of capital Smart technology he argues is driven by the dual imperatives of digital capitalism extracting data from and expanding control over everything and everybody He looks at three domains colonized by smart technologies collection and control systems the smart self the smart home and the smart city The smart self involves more than self tracking of steps walked and calories burned it raises questions about what others do with our data and how they direct our behavior whether or not we want them to The smart home collects data about our habits that offe

Many of the revolutionary effects of science and technology are obvious enough Bertrand Russell saw in the 1950s that there are also many negative aspects of scientific innovation Insightful and controversial in equal measure Russell argues that science offers the world greater well being than it has ever known on the condition that prosperity is dispersed power is diffused by means of a single world government birth rates do not become too high and war is abolished Russell acknowledges that is a tall order but remains essentially optimistic He imagines mankind in a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends but believes human society will ultimately choose the path of reason This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Preface by Tim Sluckin

An extraordinarily brave and moving memoir from one of the world s most famous whistle blowers activists and trans women In 2013 Chelsea Manning was sentenced to thirty five years in military prison for the largest leak of classified documents in history The next day Chelsea declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition In this radically candid memoir Chelsea recounts how her challenging youth led her to join the US Army She writes of the fierce pride she took in her work the risks of the military s queer underground and the wider culture of silence and unaccountability She describes fifty nine days locked in an iron cage after her fateful decision and the community of solidarity she later discovered in prison Above all we see the phenomenal courage and resilience it took to survive and become a global advocate for transparency A terrific read full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning GUARDIAN Brilliantly told THE TIMES Searing uplifting redemptive NEW YORK TIMES A full and expansive account of Manning s life one which is often harrowing but funny and poignant too DAZED

Why are we more nostalgic in the digital age than ever before

Advances in technology often rely on a world of photons as the basic units of light Increasingly one reads of photons as essential to enterprises in Photonics and Quantum Technology with career and investment opportunities Notions of photons have evolved from the energy packet crowds of Planck and Einstein the later field modes of Dirac the seeming conflict of wave and particle photons to the ubiquitous laser photons of today Readers who take interest in contemporary technology will benefit from learning what photons are now considered to be and how our views of photons have changed in learning about the various operational definitions that have been used for photons and their association with a variety of quantum state manipulations that include Quantum Information astronomical sources and crowds of photons the boxed fields of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics and single photons on demand the photons of Feynman and Glauber and the photon constituents of the Standard Model of Particle Physics The narrative points to contemporary photons as causers of change to atoms as carriers of messages and as subject to controllable creation and alteration a considerable diversity of photons not just one kind Our Changing Views of Photons A Tutorial Memoir pres

Ray Kurzweil one of the world s leading AI researchers innovators and futurists offers a provocative exploration of the most important project in human machine civilisation reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines

A leading philosopher seeks to recover common sense as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory political thought and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines Here Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry environmentalism and ecology animal studies media and technology studies the history and philosophy of science feminism and capitalism On the other hand the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead Instead it lies in Stengers s recovery of the idea of common sense as a meeting place a commons where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today when climate disaster looms all around us when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity ar

A critical examination of the figure of the neural network as it mediates neuroscientific and computational discourses and technical practices Neural Networks proposes to reconstruct situated practices social histories mediating techniques and ontological assumptions that inform the computational project of the same name If so called machine learning comprises a statistical approach to pattern extraction then neural networks can be defined as a biologically inspired model that relies on probabilistically weighted neuron like units to identify such patterns Far from signaling the ultimate convergence of human and machine intelligence however neural networks highlight the technologization of neurophysiology that characterizes virtually all strands of neuroscientific and AI research of the past century Taking this traffic as its starting point this volume explores how cognition came to be constructed as essentially computational in nature to the point of underwriting a technologized view of human biology psychology and sociability and how countermovements provide resources for thinking otherwise

A brilliantly original exploration of humanity s intimate relationship with technology from the emergence of our species to the emergence of AI and beyond

A compelling biography of Mark Weiser a pioneering innovator whose legacy looms over the tech industry s quest to connect everything and who hoped for something better When developers and critics trace the roots of today s Internet of Things our smart gadgets and smart cities they may single out the same creative source Mark Weiser 1952 99 the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so called father of ubiquitous computing But Weiser who died young at age 46 in 1999 would be heartbroken if he had lived to see the ways we use technology today As John Tinnell shows in this thought provoking narrative Weiser was an outlier in Silicon Valley A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy he relished debates about the machine s ultimate purpose Good technology Weiser argued should not mine our experiences for saleable data or demand our attention rather it should quietly boost our intuition as we move through the world Informed by deep archival research and interviews with Weiser s family and colleagues The Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles Weiser s struggle to initiate a new era of computing Working in the shadows of the dot com boom Weiser and his collaborators made Xerox PARC headquarters the site of a grand experiment Throug

With humor easy to understand language and fun illustrations marine scientist Ellen Prager and meteorologist Dave Jones use frequently asked and zany questions about the ocean and atmosphere to combat misinformation and make science engaging and understandable for all

Why do we feel excited afraid and frustrated by algorithms The Feel of Algorithms brings relatable first person accounts of what it means to experience algorithms emotionally alongside interdisciplinary social science research to reveal how political and economic processes are felt in the everyday People s algorithm stories might fail to separate fact and misconception and circulate wishful erroneous or fearful views of digital technologies Yet rather than treating algorithmic folklore as evidence of ignorance this novel book explains why personal anecdotes are an important source of algorithmic knowledge Minna Ruckenstein argues that we get to know algorithms by feeling their actions and telling stories about them The Feel of Algorithms shows how taking everyday algorithmic emotions seriously balances the current discussion which has a tendency to draw conclusions based on celebratory or oppositional responses to imagined future effects An everyday focus zooms into experiences of pleasure fear and irritation highlighting how political aims and ethical tensions play out in visions practices and emotional responses This book shows that feelings aid in recognizing troubling practices and also calls for alternatives that are currently ignored or suppre

A fascinating look at the cutting edge science and technologies that are on the cusp of changing everything from where we ll live how we ll look and who we ll be by the popular science broadcaster and bestselling author Jay Ingram Where will we live How will we get around What will we look like These are just some of the questions bestselling author and popular science broadcaster Jay Ingram answers in this exciting examination of the science and technologies that will affect every aspect of human life In these pages Ingram explores the future of our technological civilization He reports on cutting edge research in organ and limb regeneration advances in prosthetics the merging of the human and the synthetic and gene editing Vertical farming and lab grown food might help feed millions and alleviate pressure on the planet Cities could accommodate green space and the long awaited flying car Finally he speculates on the future of artificial general intelligence even artificial superintelligence as well as our place on Earth and in the universe The potential impact of these developments in science and technology will be powerful and wide ranging complicated by ethics and social equity And they will inevitably revolutionize every aspect of life and eve