Harvard University Press
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Hitting the Books: How the interplay of science and technology brought about iPhones
In The Genesis of Technoscientific Revolutions, Venkatesh Narayanamurti and Jeffrey Y. Tsao explore the symbiotic relationship between scientific research and technological advancement.
Hitting the Books: Domestication brought about our best fuzzy friends
In Our Oldest Companions: The Story of the First Dogs, Pat Shipman explores the early days of domestication and how transforming wolves into dogs made something more out of humanity.
Hitting the Books: How Florence Nightingale changed medicine using stats and 'rose charts'
Maladies of Empire by Jim Downs explores how many aspects of modern medicine are borne on the backs of humanity's most abhorrent impulses, though in the excerpt below, Downs illustrates how one woman's unyielding tenacity and fastidious record keeping helped launch the field of preventative medicine.
Hitting the Books: Is the hunt for technological supremacy harming our collective humanity?
In his new book, Erik J Larson investigates the efforts to build computers that process information like we do and why we're much farther away from having human-equivalent AIs than most futurists would care to admit.
Hitting the Books: AI doctors and the dangers tiered medical care
Frank Pasquale’s 'New Laws of Robotics' shows how the promise of faster, more efficient medical diagnoses from AIs can also be a double-edged sword, cutting off access to the quality care provided by human doctors.
Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners
In his latest book, Spacefarers: How Humans Will Settle the Moon, Mars, and Beyond, Christopher Wanjek examines humanity’s obsession with space travel, why our dreams of living among the stars haven’t yet come to fruition and what it will take to finally get our interstellar efforts off the ground. Excerpted from SPACEFARERS: HOW HUMANS WILL SETTLE THE MOON, MARS, AND BEYOND by Christopher Wanjek, published by Harvard University Press. As hostile an environment as Antarctica is, the icy continent still has one thing that the Moon and Mars doesn’t, and that’s air.
Hitting the Books: Modern surveillance and 'the science of happiness'
Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
