Libros de Biografías y estudios de científicos, página 4 de 25

A narrative description of the context of natural history study and collecting in later 17th century England It is constructed around the biography of the central figure of Robert Plot but with his activities placed in a broader European context

Science A Four Thousand Year History rewrites science s past Instead of focussing on difficult experiments and abstract theories Patricia Fara shows how science has always belonged to the practical world of war politics and business Rather than glorifying scientists as idealized heroes she tells true stories about real people men and some women who needed to earn their living who made mistakes and who trampled down their rivals in their quest for success Fara sweeps through the centuries from ancient Babylon right up to the latest hi tech experiments in genetics and particle physics illuminating the financial interests imperial ambitions and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today She also ranges internationally illustrating the importance of scientific projects based around the world from China to the Islamic empire as well as the more familiar tale of science in Europe from Copernicus to Charles Darwin and beyond Above all this four thousand year history challenges scientific supremacy arguing controversially that science is successful not because it is always right but because people have said that it is right

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

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

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

Focusing on the entanglement of art technology and culture The Quantum Revolution illuminates the contemporary scientific imagination as a new way of understanding everyday life

Like Louis Theroux channelling Margaret Atwood New Statesman A tour of the lurid fringes of the tech world The Times A moreish page turner of a book Herald Imagine if it was possible to have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise eat meat without killing animals have babies without the need to bear them and choose the time of our painless death Life would be better right All over the globe people are trying to make this a reality They want to use technology to solve the thorniest problems of humanity But what if these problems are the very things that make us human Join Jenny Kleeman on an entertaining thought provoking adventure to a place where sex robots and vegan meat are no longer science fiction right here right now

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

Machine Readable Me considers how and why data that is gathered about us is increasingly limiting what we can and can t do in our lives and crucially what the alternatives are

WINNER OF THE 800 CEO READ BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015 In the vein of Susan Cain s QUIET and Malcolm Gladwell s DAVID AND GOLIATH HOW TO FLY A HORSE is a smart empowering book that dispels the myths around genius and creativity There is a myth about how something new comes to be that geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole Symphonies are composed complete Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks Businesses are built by magic touch The myth is wrong Anyone can create Acclaimed technology pioneer Kevin Ashton takes us behind the scenes of creation to reveal the true process of discovery and how new comes to be From Archimedes to Apple from Kandinsky to the Coke can from the Wright brothers who set out to fly a horse to Woody Allen he exposes the seemingly unremarkable individuals gradual steps multiple failures and countless ordinary and often uncredited acts that led to our most astounding breakthroughs

In recent decades we have witnessed an explosion in the number of visual images we encounter as our lives have become increasingly saturated with screens From Google Images to Instagram video games to installation art this transformation is confusing liberating and worrying all at once since observing the new visuality of culture is not the same as understanding it Nicholas Mirzoeff is a leading figure in the field of visual culture which aims to make sense of this extraordinary explosion of visual experiences As Mirzoeff reminds us this is not the first visual revolution the 19th century saw the invention of film photography and x rays and the development of maps microscopes and telescopes made the 17th century an era of visual discovery But the sheer quantity of images produced on the internet today has no parallels In the first book to define visual culture for the general reader Mirzoeff draws on art history theory and everyday experience to provide an engaging and accessible overview of how visual materials shape and define our lives

Ever wonder why soap bubbles become invisible right before they pop Or why lenses are so blue they look purple How is it possible to image black holes at the heart of distant galaxies The answer to all these questions is Interference This book tells the story of the science of optical interferometry mankind s most sensitive form of measurement and of the scientists who tamed light to make outstanding discoveries from lasers and holograms to astronomy and quantum physics In the past several years interferometry has been used to discover exoplanets orbiting distant stars to take the first image of a black hole to detect the first gravitational waves and to create the first programmable quantum computer This list of achievements points to the fertile and active field of interferometry for which this book provides a convenient and up to date guide for a wide audience interested in the science of light

This text revolves around a new and unusual view on the most fundamental puzzle of physics It focusses on the key aspect that makes the role of the time dimension fundamentally different causality It deals on the one hand with general relativity and on the other hand with quantum theory The implicit and intuitive way by which causality is usually taken for granted is just made explicit and less self evident shedding a new light on the gravity quantum conflict The case is made that gravity is a necessary condition for a causal universe But upon turning to the pure unitary quantum physics explaining the nature of matter one is dealing with the strictly a causal time expressed through the thermal quantum field theory machinery When this a causal microscopic and causal macroscopic world meet one encounters the wavefunction collapse that itself may be rooted in the quantum gravity conflict Modern ideas are discussed resting on eigenstate thermalization showing how this may lie eventually at the origin of irreversible thermodynamics with its famous second law setting also a direction of time The case is anchored in the sophisticated modern mathematical machinery of both general relativity and quantum physics which is normally barely disseminated beyond the th

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation multispecies feminist theorist Donna J Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices The Chthulucene Haraway explains requires sym poiesis or making with rather than auto poiesis or self making Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF string figures science fact science fiction speculative feminism speculative fabulation so far Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway s reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time

Peter Russell argues that global communications and the internet are helping to link the minds of humanity together to form a single global brain and consciousness with remarkable potential

A global energy revolution is unfolding before our eyes ever growing numbers of electric vehicles on our roads laptops that last all day on a single charge and solar panels on our roofs all reliant on lithium ion batteries This revolution is happening at breath taking speed with the potential to completely transform key industries and the way we live For the first time in history we can now actually store this green energy we talk so much about Often referred to as the new oil lithium allows large amounts of energy to be squeezed into a very small space Demand is soaring and the lithium business is full of drama bitter rivalries shady deals and exceptionally talented visionaries such as Elon Musk who is building lithium battery giga factories across the world This book travels from the salt lakes of the Tibetan plateau where Chinese government linked companies extract lithium to Argentina Chile and Bolivia which hold the world s biggest resources of the mineral It reveals superpowers struggle to secure strategic supplies and the astonishing efforts of lone wolf inventors and entrepreneurs Lithium also explores the environmental impact of lithium extraction the limits to battery electrification and lithium battery recycling as the way forward

Even in the third decade of the twenty first century it is still harder for women to make a career in science than men Two centuries ago however at the beginning of the nineteenth century when science as we know it was just getting started the situation was far worse Then the very notion of a female scientist would have been regarded as something of an oxymoron From bestselling and award winning science writers John and Mary Gribbin Against the Odds highlights the achievements of women who overcame hurdles and achieved scientific success although not always as much as they deserved in spite of male prejudice as society changed over about 150 years from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century There is Eunice Newton Foote who discovered the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect Chien Shiung Wu who discovered the law which allows matter to exist in the Universe today and Barbara McClintock who discovered how genes turn on and off With a foreword from astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell this book is not only a cautionary tale about the stifling effects of prejudice against women in science but a celebration of those who achieved success against the odds and an inspiration for the next generation

Este libro se publica con motivo de la exposición homónima cuyo propósito es difundir la obra de Thaddaeus Haenke (Chribská, 1761-Cochabamba, 1816), un naturalista originario de Bohemia que formó parte de la expedicion Malaspina-Bustamante a finales del siglo XVIII y permanecio en la America hispana hasta el final de su vida. Su intensa actividad cientifica verdaderamente multidisciplinar: sobresalio especialmente en el ambito de la botanica, pero se dedico tambien al estudio de la zoologia, geologia, medicina y la astronomia, entre otras areas del saber, caracterizandose por un interes cientifico enciclopedico. Ademas, este joven ilustrado se intereso por las culturas indigenas, la arquitectura prehispanica y la musica. Lamentablemente, su valiosa obra esta insuficientemente estudiada y es poco conocida entre el gran publico. Esta exposicion reune casi una treintena de obras de Haenke nunca expuestas hasta ahora, entre las que se incluyen dibujos, una partitura y cuadernos de campo conservados en el Archivo del Real Jardin Botanico-CSIC y en el Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. Junto a ellas, tres piezas del Museo Naval de Madrid contribuyen a contextualizar su produccion en el marco de las expediciones cientificas del siglo XVIII y de los avances de las ciencias nauticas y cartograficas. Esta publicacion reune el catalogo de obras expuestas y un conjunto de estudios que profundizan en la figura de Haenke, su relevancia y metodo de trabajo, y sobre los contextos en que se desarrollo. Con ello se pretende difundir las aportaciones de Thaddaeus Haenke y de la expedicion Malaspina-Bustamante en que desarrollo buena parte de su actividad, y contribuir a comprender mejor las formas en que el conocimiento cientifico era construido en la epoca de la Ilustracion.

In The Glass Cage Pulitzer Prize nominee and bestselling author Nicholas Carr shows how the most important decisions of our lives are now being made by machines and the radical effect this is having on our ability to learn and solve problems In May 2009 an Airbus A330 passenger jet equipped with the latest glass cockpit controls plummeted 30 000 feet into the Atlantic The reason for the crash the autopilot had routinely switched itself off In fact automation is everywhere from the thermostat in our homes and the GPS in our phones to the algorithms of High Frequency Trading and self driving cars We now use it to diagnose patients educate children evaluate criminal evidence and fight wars But psychological studies show that we perform best when fully involved in a task while the principle of automation that humans are inefficient is self fulfilling The glass cockpit is becoming a glass cage In this utterly engrossing expose bestselling writer Nicholas Carr reveals how automation is affecting our ability to solve problems forge memories and acquire skills Rather than rejecting technology Carr argues that we must urgently rethink its role in our lives using it to enhance rather than diminish the extraordinary abilities that make us human

We live in the suburban era Well over half of all Americans and two thirds of Canadians live in suburbs Tracts of suburban bungalows ring Sydney and Melbourne Suburban apartments rise on the outskirts of Paris Prague Singapore and Beijing Nearly everyone has a strong opinion about suburbs Folks who love dense cities scorn suburbia while people who like big yards dislike bustling sidewalks and subways Social scientists argue whether contemporary suburbs are losing their luster or if a supposed back to the city trend is a mirage a debate that has been exacerbated by uncertainty over the effects of COVID 19 Suburbs A Very Short Introduction tackles two central questions What is the history behind a suburbanizing world What does the suburban trend mean for society politics and culture Two chapters describe the ways that the new technologies of streetcars trains automobiles and internet have allowed the compact cities of Britain and the United States to grow into sprawling metropolitan regions The following chapters explore the vertical suburbs of Europe and East Asia improvised or do it yourself suburbs in both North America Latin America and suburbs as places of employment The book concludes by exploring criticism and praise of suburbs in popular