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Author: C. Claiborne Ray
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307813525
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
Why is glass transparent? Why do cats purr? Why do men have nipples? These are but a handful of the thousands of questions that over the years have been asked and answered in The New York Times "Science Q&A" column. At last, the best and most interesting questions-and their replies-have been collected in a book for general readers. From wild animals to outdoor vegetation, from the human body to the heavens above, The New York Times Book of Science Questions and Answers takes readers on a thoroughly entertaining and informative journey through the world we live in. Like David Feldman's bestselling books Do Penguins Have Knees? and Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, this is science at its fun-filled best. Featuring answers from a wide variety of leaders across the country in scientific research and education, and illustrated by the delightful drawings of Victoria Roberts, The Times Q&A column is one of the best read features in the Science Times, which is one of the most popular sections of the newspaper. With a daily circulation of 1.2 million people, The New York Times is a leader in conveying scientific information to the general public. This fact-filled handbook for the scientifically curious should prove invaluable as a family reference book, as a classroom resource, as an entertaining subway diversion, and even as a supplement to public libraries' Frequently Asked Questions lists.
Author: C. Claiborne Ray
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307813525
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why is glass transparent? Why do cats purr? Why do men have nipples? These are but a handful of the thousands of questions that over the years have been asked and answered in The New York Times "Science Q&A" column. At last, the best and most interesting questions-and their replies-have been collected in a book for general readers. From wild animals to outdoor vegetation, from the human body to the heavens above, The New York Times Book of Science Questions and Answers takes readers on a thoroughly entertaining and informative journey through the world we live in. Like David Feldman's bestselling books Do Penguins Have Knees? and Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, this is science at its fun-filled best. Featuring answers from a wide variety of leaders across the country in scientific research and education, and illustrated by the delightful drawings of Victoria Roberts, The Times Q&A column is one of the best read features in the Science Times, which is one of the most popular sections of the newspaper. With a daily circulation of 1.2 million people, The New York Times is a leader in conveying scientific information to the general public. This fact-filled handbook for the scientifically curious should prove invaluable as a family reference book, as a classroom resource, as an entertaining subway diversion, and even as a supplement to public libraries' Frequently Asked Questions lists.
Author: Kim Stanley Robinson
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0553897608
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 777
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Book Description
With the same unique vision that brought his now classic Mars trilogy to vivid life, bestselling author Kim Stanley Robinson boldly imagines an alternate history of the last seven hundred years. In his grandest work yet, the acclaimed storyteller constructs a world vastly different from the one we know. . . . “A thoughtful, magisterial alternate history from one of science fiction’s most important writers.”—The New York Times Book Review It is the fourteenth century and one of the most apocalyptic events in human history is set to occur—the coming of the Black Death. History teaches us that a third of Europe’s population was destroyed. But what if the plague had killed 99 percent of the population instead? How would the world have changed? This is a look at the history that could have been—one that stretches across centuries, sees dynasties and nations rise and crumble, and spans horrible famine and magnificent innovation. Through the eyes of soldiers and kings, explorers and philosophers, slaves and scholars, Robinson navigates a world where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions, while Christianity is merely a historical footnote. Probing the most profound questions as only he can, Robinson shines his extraordinary light on the place of religion, culture, power—and even love—in this bold New World. “Exceptional and engrossing.”—New York Post “Ambitious . . . ingenious.”—Newsday
Author: C. Claiborne Ray
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307429059
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
What would kill you if you fell into a black hole? Once people finally get to Mars, how will they get back? What makes the holes in Swiss cheese? Are there any carnivorous plants that are harmful to humans? Are there really caterpillars that scream to protect themselves? How do birds have sexual intercourse? Why don’t woodpeckers damage their brains? What is the function of ear wax? Why don’t you sneeze when you’re asleep? Do germs have germs? What is considered evidence for extra-terrestial intelligence? Every week, C. Claiborne Ray answers questions like these from the readers of the New York Times Science section who, as this delightful second volume demonstrates, never seem to run out of things to ask about. Here, Ray gives us 225 of the most interesting answers she has gleaned from scientists in every discipline, satisfying our desire to understand some of the strangest, most curious mysteries of the natural world. Victoria Roberts’s charmingly wacky drawings add to the fun.
Author: Judea Pearl
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465097618
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence "Correlation is not causation." This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality -- the study of cause and effect -- on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.
Author: Michael Strevens
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491385
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
“The Knowledge Machine is the most stunningly illuminating book of the last several decades regarding the all-important scientific enterprise.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex A paradigm-shifting work, The Knowledge Machine revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. • Why is science so powerful? • Why did it take so long—two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics—for the human race to start using science to learn the secrets of the universe? In a groundbreaking work that blends science, philosophy, and history, leading philosopher of science Michael Strevens answers these challenging questions, showing how science came about only once thinkers stumbled upon the astonishing idea that scientific breakthroughs could be accomplished by breaking the rules of logical argument. Like such classic works as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine grapples with the meaning and origins of science, using a plethora of vivid historical examples to demonstrate that scientists willfully ignore religion, theoretical beauty, and even philosophy to embrace a constricted code of argument whose very narrowness channels unprecedented energy into empirical observation and experimentation. Strevens calls this scientific code the iron rule of explanation, and reveals the way in which the rule, precisely because it is unreasonably close-minded, overcomes individual prejudices to lead humanity inexorably toward the secrets of nature. “With a mixture of philosophical and historical argument, and written in an engrossing style” (Alan Ryan), The Knowledge Machine provides captivating portraits of some of the greatest luminaries in science’s history, including Isaac Newton, the chief architect of modern science and its foundational theories of motion and gravitation; William Whewell, perhaps the greatest philosopher-scientist of the early nineteenth century; and Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark. Today, Strevens argues, in the face of threats from a changing climate and global pandemics, the idiosyncratic but highly effective scientific knowledge machine must be protected from politicians, commercial interests, and even scientists themselves who seek to open it up, to make it less narrow and more rational—and thus to undermine its devotedly empirical search for truth. Rich with illuminating and often delightfully quirky illustrations, The Knowledge Machine, written in a winningly accessible style that belies the import of its revisionist and groundbreaking concepts, radically reframes much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world.
Author: David Corcoran
Publisher: Union Square + ORM
ISBN: 1402793278
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 676
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Book Description
Take a journey through scientific history via 125 outstanding articles from the New York Times archives. For more than 150 years, The New York Times has been in the forefront of science news reporting. These 125 articles from its archives are the very best, covering more than a century of scientific breakthroughs, setbacks, and mysteries. The varied topics range from chemistry to the cosmos, biology to ecology, genetics to artificial intelligence—all curated by the former editor of Science Times, David Corcoran. Big, informative, and wide-ranging, this journey through the scientific stories of our times is a must-have for all science enthusiasts. Contributors include: Lawrence K. Altman, MD * Natalie Angier * William J. Broad * Gina Kolata * William L. Laurence * Dennis Overbye * Walter Sullivan * John Noble Wilford * and more
Author: Catherine Lacey
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374714347
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
NAMED A TOP 10 NOVEL OF 2017 BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL AND VOGUE, A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY ESQUIRE, HUFFINGTON POST, POP SUGAR, ELECTRIC LITERATURE AND KIRKUS, AND A 2017 NPR GREAT READ. ONE OF DWIGHT GARNER'S TOP BOOKS OF 2017 IN THE NEW YORK TIMES. A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE AND A FINALIST FOR THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS FICTION AWARD. "Like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, [The Answers] is also a novel about a subjugated woman, in this case not to a totalitarian theocracy but to subtler forces its heroine is only beginning to understand and fears she is complicit with." --Dwight Garner, New York Times Mary Parsons is broke. Dead broke, really: between an onslaught of medical bills and a mountain of credit card debt, she has been pushed to the brink. Hounded by bill collectors and still plagued by the painful and bizarre symptoms that doctors couldn’t diagnose, Mary seeks relief from a holistic treatment called Pneuma Adaptive Kinesthesia—PAKing, for short. Miraculously, it works. But PAKing is prohibitively expensive. Like so many young adults trying to make ends meet in New York City, Mary scours Craigslist and bulletin boards for a second job, and eventually lands an interview for a high-paying gig that’s even stranger than her symptoms or the New Agey PAKing. Mary’s new job title is Emotional Girlfriend in the “Girlfriend Experiment”—the brainchild of a wealthy and infamous actor, Kurt Sky, who has hired a team of biotech researchers to solve the problem of how to build and maintain the perfect romantic relationship, casting himself as the experiment’s only constant. Around Kurt, several women orbit as his girlfriends with specific functions. There’s a Maternal Girlfriend who folds his laundry, an Anger Girlfriend who fights with him, a Mundanity Girlfriend who just hangs around his loft, and a whole team of girlfriends to take care of Intimacy. With so little to lose, Mary falls headfirst into Kurt’s messy, ego-driven simulacrum of human connection. Told in Catherine Lacey’s signature spiraling, hypnotic prose, The Answers is both a mesmerizing dive into the depths of one woman’s psyche and a critical look at the conventions and institutions that infiltrate our most personal, private moments. As Mary struggles to understand herself—her body, her city, the trials of her past, the uncertainty of her future—the reader must confront the impossible questions that fuel Catherine Lacey’s work: How do you measure love? Can you truly know someone else? Do we even know ourselves? And listen for Lacey’s uncanny answers.
Author: Katie Mack
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982103566
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY * THE WASHINGTON POST * THE ECONOMIST * NEW SCIENTIST * PUBLISHERS WEEKLY * THE GUARDIAN From one of the most dynamic rising stars in astrophysics, an “engrossing, elegant” (The New York Times) look at five ways the universe could end, and the mind-blowing lessons each scenario reveals about the most important concepts in cosmology. We know the universe had a beginning. With the Big Bang, it expanded from a state of unimaginable density to an all-encompassing cosmic fireball to a simmering fluid of matter and energy, laying down the seeds for everything from black holes to one rocky planet orbiting a star near the edge of a spiral galaxy that happened to develop life as we know it. But what happens to the universe at the end of the story? And what does it mean for us now? Dr. Katie Mack has been contemplating these questions since she was a young student, when her astronomy professor informed her the universe could end at any moment, in an instant. This revelation set her on the path toward theoretical astrophysics. Now, with lively wit and humor, she takes us on a mind-bending tour through five of the cosmos’s possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay (the one that could happen at any moment!), and the Bounce. Guiding us through cutting-edge science and major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more, The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.
Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393082911
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
“A compelling appeal, at just the right time, for continuing to look up.”—Air & Space America’s space program is at a turning point. After decades of global primacy, NASA has ended the space-shuttle program, cutting off its access to space. No astronauts will be launched in an American craft, from American soil, until the 2020s, and NASA may soon find itself eclipsed by other countries’ space programs. With his signature wit and thought-provoking insights, Neil deGrasse Tyson—one of our foremost thinkers on all things space—illuminates the past, present, and future of space exploration and brilliantly reminds us why NASA matters now as much as ever. As Tyson reveals, exploring the space frontier can profoundly enrich many aspects of our daily lives, from education systems and the economy to national security and morale. For America to maintain its status as a global leader and a technological innovator, he explains, we must regain our enthusiasm and curiosity about what lies beyond our world. Provocative, humorous, and wonderfully readable, Space Chronicles represents the best of Tyson’s recent commentary, including a must-read prologue on NASA and partisan politics. Reflecting on topics that range from scientific literacy to space-travel missteps, Tyson gives us an urgent, clear-eyed, and ultimately inspiring vision for the future.
Author: Edward O. Wilson
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495550
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 131
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Book Description
“The book bursts to life with [Wilson’s] observations of nature, from fire ants and social spiders to starlings.”—Aarathi Prasad, New York Times Book Review An “endlessly fascinating” (Michael Ruse) work of scientific thought and synthesis, Genesis is Edward O. Wilson’s twenty-first-century statement on Darwinian evolution. Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Wilson demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. At least seventeen of these species—among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp—have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation. Braiding twenty-first- century scientific theory with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which Wilson is beloved, Genesis is “a magisterial history of social evolution, from clouds of midges or sparrows to the grotesqueries of ant colonies” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
