Programmable Planet

Programmable Planet PDF Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555849
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2024 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction, Society of Midland Authors A new science is reengineering the fabric of life. Synthetic biology offers bold new ways of manufacturing medicines, clothing, foods, fragrances, and fuels, often using microbe fermentation, much like brewing beer. The technology can help confront climate change, break down industrial pollutants, and fight novel viruses. Today, researchers are manipulating life forms and automating evolution to create vegetarian “meat,” renewable construction materials, and cancer treatments. In the process, they are changing our concept of what life science can achieve. Is this a new industrial and information revolution—or dangerous tinkering that could unleash unintended consequences? Programmable Planet is a grand tour through the world of synthetic biology, telling the stories of the colorful visionaries whose ideas are shaping discoveries. Ted Anton explores the field from its beginning in fighting malaria in Africa to the COVID vaccines and beyond. Covering medical and agricultural triumphs and blunders, he examines successes in energy production, plant gene editing, and chemical manufacturing, as well as the most controversial attempts at human gene enhancement. This book reports from the front lines of research, showing policy makers’ struggle to stay abreast of the technologies they aim to regulate. Even-handed, lively, and informative, Programmable Planet gives a glimpse of the promise and problems of a new biology-based industry.

Programmable Planet

Programmable Planet PDF Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555849
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

Get Book Here

Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2024 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction, Society of Midland Authors A new science is reengineering the fabric of life. Synthetic biology offers bold new ways of manufacturing medicines, clothing, foods, fragrances, and fuels, often using microbe fermentation, much like brewing beer. The technology can help confront climate change, break down industrial pollutants, and fight novel viruses. Today, researchers are manipulating life forms and automating evolution to create vegetarian “meat,” renewable construction materials, and cancer treatments. In the process, they are changing our concept of what life science can achieve. Is this a new industrial and information revolution—or dangerous tinkering that could unleash unintended consequences? Programmable Planet is a grand tour through the world of synthetic biology, telling the stories of the colorful visionaries whose ideas are shaping discoveries. Ted Anton explores the field from its beginning in fighting malaria in Africa to the COVID vaccines and beyond. Covering medical and agricultural triumphs and blunders, he examines successes in energy production, plant gene editing, and chemical manufacturing, as well as the most controversial attempts at human gene enhancement. This book reports from the front lines of research, showing policy makers’ struggle to stay abreast of the technologies they aim to regulate. Even-handed, lively, and informative, Programmable Planet gives a glimpse of the promise and problems of a new biology-based industry.

SimEarth

SimEarth PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780929750323
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description


The Uncertain Image

The Uncertain Image PDF Author: Ulrik Ekman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429787979
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
Citizens of networked societies are almost incessantly accompanied by ecologies of images. These ecologies of still and moving images present a paradox of uncertainties emerging along with certainties. Images appear more certain as the technical capacities that render them visible increase. At the same time, images are touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, manipulabilities, and contingencies multiply. With the emergence of big data, the image is becoming a dominant vehicle for the construction and presentation of the truth of data. Images present themselves as so many promises of the certainty, predictability, and intelligibility offered by data. The focus of this book is twofold. It analyses the kinds of images appearing today, showing how they are marked by a return to modern photographic emphases on high resolution, clarity, and realistic representation. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which the uncertainty of images is increasingly underscored within such reiterated emphases on allegedly certain visual truths. This often involves renewed encounters with noise, grain, glitch, blur, vagueness, and indistinctness. This book provides the reader with an intriguing transdisciplinary investigation of the uncertainly certain relation between the cultural imagination and the techno-aesthetic regime of big data and ubiquitous computing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Creativity.

Program Earth

Program Earth PDF Author: Jennifer Gabrys
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950172
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As Jennifer Gabrys points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

Living Surfaces

Living Surfaces PDF Author: Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262378477
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective. What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene. With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.

Middle Atmosphere Program

Middle Atmosphere Program PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Air
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


The Cambridge History of the American Essay

The Cambridge History of the American Essay PDF Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description
From the country's beginning, essayists in the United States have used their prose to articulate the many ways their individuality has been shaped by the politics, social life, and culture of this place. The Cambridge History of the American Essay offers the fullest account to date of this diverse and complex history. From Puritan writings to essays by Indigenous authors, from Transcendentalist and Pragmatist texts to Harlem Renaissance essays, from New Criticism to New Journalism: The story of the American essay is told here, beginning in the early eighteenth century and ending with the vibrant, heterogeneous scene of contemporary essayistic writing. The essay in the US has taken many forms: nature writing, travel writing, the genteel tradition, literary criticism, hybrid genres such as the essay film and the photo essay. Across genres and identities, this volume offers a stirring account of American essayism into the twenty-first century.

Eros, Magic, & the Murder of Professor Culianu

Eros, Magic, & the Murder of Professor Culianu PDF Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810113961
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Anton (writing, DePaul U.) synthesizes the research he has done since the beginning on the still-unsolved May 1991 murder of Chicago Divinity School professor Ioan Culianu, a protege of pioneering mythologist Mircea Eliade. Culianu had been taunting the communist government of his native Romania, and Anton suggests the murder was political. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Longevity Seekers

The Longevity Seekers PDF Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226020959
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
“[A] beautifully told story of twenty-first-century researchers in pursuit of the secrets of longevity . . . a book both engaging and illuminating.” —Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author People have searched for the fountain of youth everywhere from Bimini to St. Augustine. But for a steadfast group of scientists, the secret to a long life lies elsewhere: in the lowly lab worm. By suppressing the function of just a few key genes, these scientists were able to lengthen worms’ lifespans up to tenfold, while also controlling the onset of many of the physical problems that beset old age. As the global population ages, the potential impact of this discovery on society is vast—as is the potential for profit. With The Longevity Seekers, science writer Ted Anton takes readers inside this tale that began with worms and branched out to snare innovative minds from California to Crete, investments from big biotech, and endorsements from TV personalities like Oprah and Dr. Oz. Some of the research was remarkable, such as the discovery of an enzyme in humans that stops cells from aging. And some—like an oft-cited study touting the compound resveratrol, found in red wine—proved highly controversial, igniting a science war over truth, credit, and potential profit. As the pace of discovery accelerated, so too did powerful personal rivalries and public fascination, driven by the hope that a longer, healthier life was right around the corner. Anton has spent years interviewing and working with the scientists at the frontier of longevity science, and this book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the state-of-the-art research and the impact it might have on global public health, society, and even our friends and family

DON'T DIE

DON'T DIE PDF Author: Zero
Publisher: Zero
ISBN: 1940556155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
On his final day alive, Scribe convenes a reunion of his closest friends. Though they’d been separated since a harrowing climb on Mt. Kilimanjaro, Scribe hopes the gathering will inspire an actionable plan for humanity in the face of existential challenges. Through a series of conversations, debates, and negotiations, the participants develop a blueprint for the way forward. Writing as “Zero,” author Bryan Johnson is an entrepreneur and explorer of the new frontiers of being human. Johnson took stock of his health and realized that a decade of chronic depression and poor cognitive control earlier in life had affected every measure of his well-being. He decided it was time to fight back. In DON’T DIE, Johnson catalogs the social and philosophical strategies necessary for the fight, both individually and as a species. Johnson’s controversial ideas and methods have attracted both detractors and devoted followers around the globe.