The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution PDF Download

Author: Susan Hockfield
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393634752
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
"Entertaining and prescient…Hockfield demonstrates how nature’s molecular riches may be leveraged to provide potential solutions to some of humanity’s existential challenges." —Adrian Woolfson, Science A century ago, discoveries in physics came together with engineering to produce an array of astonishing new technologies that radically reshaped the world: radios, televisions, aircraft, computers, and a host of still-evolving digital tools. Today, a new technological convergence—of biology and engineering—promises to create the tools necessary to tackle the threats we now face, including climate change, drought, famine, and disease World-renowned neuroscientist and academic leader Susan Hockfield describes the most exciting new developments and the scientists and engineers who helped to create them. Virus-built batteries. Cancer-detecting nanoparticles. Computer-engineered crops. Together, they highlight the promise of the technology revolution of the twenty-first century to overcome some of the greatest humanitarian, medical, and environmental challenges of our time.

Author: Peter M. Hoffmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 0465022537
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Life, Hoffman argues, emerges from the random motions of atoms filtered through the sophisticated structures of our evolved machinery. People are essentially giant assemblies of interacting nanoscale machines.

Author: Michael G. Rossmann
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461409802
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 685

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Book Description
This book will contain a series of solicited chapters that concern with the molecular machines required by viruses to perform various essential functions of virus life cycle. The first three chapters (Introduction, Molecular Machines and Virus Architecture) introduce the reader to the best known molecular machines and to the structure of viruses. The remainder of the book will examine in detail various stages of the viral life cycle. Beginning with the viral entry into a host cell, the book takes the reader through replication of the genome, synthesis and assembly of viral structural components, genome packaging and maturation into an infectious virion. Each chapter will describe the components of the respective machine in molecular or atomic detail, genetic and biochemical analyses, and mechanism. Topics are carefully selected so that the reader is exposed to systems where there is a substantial infusion of new knowledge in recent years, which greatly elevated the fundamental mechanistic understanding of the respective molecular machine. The authors will be encouraged to simplify the detailed knowledge to basic concepts, include provocative new ideas, as well as design colorful graphics, thus making the cutting-edge information accessible to broad audience.

Author: Amy Webb
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1541797930
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Named one of The New Yorker's BEST BOOKS OF 2022 SO FAR The next frontier in technology is inside our own bodies. Synthetic biology will revolutionize how we define family, how we identify disease and treat aging, where we make our homes, and how we nourish ourselves. This fast-growing field—which uses computers to modify or rewrite genetic code—has created revolutionary, groundbreaking solutions such as the mRNA COVID vaccines, IVF, and lab-grown hamburger that tastes like the real thing. It gives us options to deal with existential threats: climate change, food insecurity, and access to fuel. But there are significant risks. Who should decide how to engineer living organisms? Whether engineered organisms should be planted, farmed, and released into the wild? Should there be limits to human enhancements? What cyber-biological risks are looming? Could a future biological war, using engineered organisms, cause a mass extinction event? Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel’s riveting examination of synthetic biology and the bioeconomy provide the background for thinking through the upcoming risks and moral dilemmas posed by redesigning life, as well as the vast opportunities waiting for us on the horizon.

Author: Evelyn Fox KELLER
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674039440
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
What do biologists want? How will we know when we have 'made sense' of life? Explanations in the biological sciences are provisional and partial, judged by criteria as heterogenous as their subject matter. This text accounts for this diversity.

Author: Ron Milo
Publisher: Garland Science
ISBN: 1317230698
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
A Top 25 CHOICE 2016 Title, and recipient of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title (OAT) Award. How much energy is released in ATP hydrolysis? How many mRNAs are in a cell? How genetically similar are two random people? What is faster, transcription or translation?Cell Biology by the Numbers explores these questions and dozens of others provid

Author: Kevin Kelly
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781857023084
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 666

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Book Description
A synthesis of research and theory, this work chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the adaptability and autonomy of living organisms becomes the model for human made systems and machines. The author combines ideas from the Choas Theory, cybernetics, current thinking on evolution and research into computerized artificial life with his own experience of on-line culture to show that industrial culture is now obsolete. This book presents the prospects of imminent revolution as Kelly identifies new frontiers of thinking about biological systems that will change the way the natural world is percieved.

Author: Sonia Contera
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691206449
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"Increasingly, scientists are gaining control over matter at the nanometer scale. Spearheaded by physical scientists operating at the interfaces of physics and biology (such as the author herself), advances in nanoscience and technology are transforming how we think about life and treat human health. This is due to a convergence of size. To do medicine, one must understand and be able to reach the nanoscale environment of healthy cells in tissues and organs, as well as other nano-sized building blocks that constitute a living organism, such as proteins and DNA. The ground-breaking advances being made at the frontiers of nanoscience and -technology, specifically in the areas of biology and medicine, are the subject of this short, popular-level book. Chapter 1 describes how nanotechnology and quantitative methods in biology are progressively being deployed to embrace life in all its multiscale, hierarchical intricacy and multiplicity. Chapters 2 through 4 review how bioinspired and biomimetic nanostructures and nanomachines are being created and integrated into strategies aimed at solving specific medical problems. In particular, Chapter 2 summarizes how scientists are seeking to build artificial nanostructures using both biological molecules and the organizational principles of biology. Chapter 3 gives an account of how nanotechnology is being used to develop drug-delivery strategies that specifically target cancer cells and tumors to improve the efficacy of current cancer chemotherapies. Chapter 4 reviews the science of one of the most potentially transformative scientific fields: tissue engineering. In a concluding chapter (Chapter 5), Contera reviews how nanotechnology, biology, and medicine will continue fusing with other sciences and technologies - incorporating more mathematical and computational modelling, as well as AI and robotics. Nanoscale devices will be used to learn biology; and biology will be used to inspire increasingly sophisticated "transmaterial" devices that mimic some of the characteristics of biology and incorporate new features that are not available in the biological world. The effects on human health and longevity will be profound. In a more personal epilogue, Contera describes the crossroads at which we find ourselves. Accessing our own biology evokes a mixture of possibility and dread. However, Contera maintains that we can create a positive transmaterial world for the benefit of humankind, and she describes ways in which scientists are proactively engaging with the public, politicians, industry, and entrepreneurs, as well as the media and the arts, to communicate the power and risks of new advances and to influence the ways in which new technologies will affect our future"--

Author: Bernhard Schölkopf
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262195096
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
A detailed overview of current research in kernel methods and their application to computational biology.

Author: Chris Kempes
Publisher: Seminar
ISBN: 9781947864184
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Why do computers use so much energy? What are the fundamental physical laws governing the relationship between the precise computation run by a system, whether artificial or natural, and how much energy that computation requires? This volume integrates concepts from diverse fields, cultivating a modern, nonequilibrium thermodynamics of computation.