Hitting the Books
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Hitting the Books: The mad science behind digging really huge holes
How to Take Over the World has designs for every wannabe supervillain, from pulling the internet's plug to bioengineering a dinosaur army — even achieving immortality if the first few plans fail to pan out.
Hitting the Books: How Ronald Reagan torpedoed sensible drug patenting
Alexander Zaitchik's new book, Owning the Sun, is a fascinating look at the long, infuriating history of public research being exploited for private profit.
Hitting the Books: How Mildred Dresselhaus' research proved we had graphite all wrong
In Carbon Queen, author Maia Weinstock illuminates the life and foundational scientific achievements of MIT's first female institute professor, National Medal of Science winner Mildred Dresselhaus.
Hitting the Books: The case against tomorrow's robots looking like people
In the excerpt below from 'Human-Centered AI' professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, Ben Shneiderman, examines the pitfalls of our innate desire to humanize the mechanical constructs we build.
Hitting the Books: Lab-grown meat is the future, just as Winston Churchill predicted
In The Genesis Machine, authors Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel delve into the history of synthetic biology, examine today's state of the art and imagine what a future might look like where life itself can be manufactured molecularly.
Hitting the Books: How crop diversity became a symbol of Mexican national sovereignty
In this excerpt from her new book, Endangered Maize, author Helen Anne Curry examines Mexico's efforts to maintain its cultural and genetic independence in the face of globalized agribusiness.
Hitting the Books: 'Miracle Rice' fed China's revolution but endangered its crop diversity
In his new book, Eating to Extinction, BBC food journalist Dan Saladino scours the planet in search of animals, vegetables and legumes most at-risk of extinction, documenting their origins and declines, as well as the efforts being made to restore them.
Hitting the Books: The decades-long fight to bring live television to hearing impaired viewers
In "Turn on the Words!" Harry G. Lang documents the efforts of accessibility pioneers over the course of more than a century to bring closed captioning to the American people.
Hitting the Books: What autonomous vehicles mean for tomorrow's workforce
In "The Work of the Future," an interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers exam the disconnect between improvements in technology and the benefits derived by workers from those advancements
Hitting the Books: The first man to listen to the birth of stars
In his new book, The Invisible World: Why There's More to Reality than Meets the Eye, University of Cambridge Public Astronomer, Matthew Bothwell tells the story of how we discovered an entire, previously unseen universe beyond humanity's natural sight.
Hitting the Books: Amiga and the birth of 256-color gaming
In his new book, legendary game designer and programmer Warren Davis recalls his halcyon days imagining and designing some of the biggest hits to ever grace mall arcades.
Hitting the Books: AI can help us design the greener, cleaner homes of tomorrow
In 'SuperSight' author David Rose delves into the current state of the art of augmented reality, how the technology is already transforming myriad industries and what it might help us accomplish in the future.
Hitting the Books: How the Silicon Valley mindset damages rural American communities
'Reimagining Sustainable Cities' examines the steps taken in recent years in response to sustainability issues, offering community-based solutions to ensure that 21st century urban development is equitable for once.
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: How Amazon laundered the 'myth of the founder' into a business empire
Alessandro Delfanti, associate professor at the University of Toronto, examines the dichotomy between Amazon's public persona and its union-busting, worker-surveilling behavior in fulfillment centers around the world.
Hitting the Books: An ode to the joy of antibiotics
Dr. Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen delve into the fascinating histories of some of humanity's deadliest diseases and the society-saving scientists who the developed cures to counter them.
Hitting the Books: Why we can't 'beam ourselves up' Star Trek-style
Gene Roddenberry called out a slew of modern day technologies back in the relative dark ages of 1966, but one continues to evade our understanding: teleportation! In Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe, Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson explain why.
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: The genetic fluke that enabled us to drink milk
In her latest book, Life as We Made It, author Beth Shapiro takes readers on a journey of scientific discovery, explaining how symbiotic relationships between humans and the environment around us have changed — but not always for the better.
Hitting the Books: How Amazon's aggressive R&D push made it an e-commerce behemoth
In his latest book, The Exponential Age, author Azeem Azhar examines how the ever-increasing pace of technological progress is impacting, influencing — and often rebuilding — our social, political and economic mores from the ground up.