Space exploration isn’t just a technological story, Carolyn Collins Petersen asserts. Literature and art helped fuel interest, education, and funding. Jules Vernes’ From the Earth to the Moon, one of many examples, inspired future rocket designers. Many Trekkies now work at NASA. In Space Exploration: Past, Present, Future, Peterson examines what it takes to build a space-faring civilization.
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Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong, distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers.
Swamps and marshes once covered vast stretches of the North American landscape. The destruction of these habitats, long seen as wastelands that harbored deadly disease, accelerated in the twentieth century. Today, the majority of the original wetlands in the US have vanished, transformed into farm fields or buried under city streets.
After a chance encounter with an obscure Middle Eastern red, journalist Kevin Begos embarks on a ten-year journey to seek the origins of wine. What he unearths is a whole world of forgotten grapes, each with distinctive tastes and aromas, as well as the archaeologists, geneticists, chemists — even a paleobotanist — who are deciphering wine down to molecules of flavor.
Heredity is redefined in this sweeping, resonating overview of a force that shaped human society — a force set to shape our future even more radically.
Why don't our kids do what we want them to do? Parents often take the blame for misbehavior, but this obscures a broader trend: In our modern, highly connected age, children have less self-control than ever. About half of the current generation of children will develop a mood or behavioral disorder or a substance addiction by age 18. Contemporary kids need to learn independence and responsibility, yet our old ideas of punishments and rewards are preventing this from happening.
A Turing Prize-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence
It's 2050, and self-learning Helper androids have proven invaluable servants to humans, making their lives easier, even saving them. But to their horror, retired SEAL Patrick Jensen and his wife Leah discover that rogue programmers and Russian mobsters are reprogramming the trusted robots to murder their wealthy owners. The crooks then skillfully disguise the lifelike robots as their dead masters, directing the robot mimics to plunder the victims’ estates of billions of dollars.
Until the late 1960s, tens of thousands of American children suffered crippling birth defects if their mothers had been exposed to rubella, popularly known as German measles, while pregnant; there was no vaccine and little understanding of how the disease devastated fetuses. In June 1962, a young biologist in Philadelphia, using tissue extracted from an aborted fetus from Sweden, produced safe, clean cells that allowed the creation of vaccines against rubella and other common childhood diseases. Two years later, in the midst of a devastating German measles epidemic, his colleague developed the vaccine that would one day wipe out homegrown rubella.