Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555849
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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
Author: Ted Anton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555849
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555849
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446
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
The Uncertain Image
Author: Ulrik Ekman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429787979
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429787979
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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.
Living Surfaces
Author: Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262378477
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262378477
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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
The Cambridge History of the American Essay
Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836
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.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009080415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836
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.
Program Earth
Author: Jennifer Gabrys
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950172
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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.
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950172
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 445
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.
MAP and TOP
Author: E.J. Brandas
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468476505
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Advances in technology are making the business and manufacturing environment increasingly complex. Standards can help us cope with this complexity. Given the strategic importance of computers in the economies of the industrial world, it is fitting that one of the most significant commercial stories of our time is the standardization of computer communications. Quite frankly, when we joined with other computer users to launch this effort we didn't predict its scope and we should have done. public visibility. In restrospect, I guess The computer assisted technologies looming on the horizon offer some of the greatest functional and productivity tools available to improve business operations. However, the absence of a standardized electronic link permeating most business organizations poses a severe impediment to the efficient deployment of this technology. The feasibility of using computer controlled devices to design, test, and manufacture products - as part of a massive network - is well within our technological grasp. However, unless the world agrees upon a global set of standards that will make multi-vendor computer systems interoperable, successful implementation of these technologies becomes less and less attractive.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1468476505
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
Book Description
Advances in technology are making the business and manufacturing environment increasingly complex. Standards can help us cope with this complexity. Given the strategic importance of computers in the economies of the industrial world, it is fitting that one of the most significant commercial stories of our time is the standardization of computer communications. Quite frankly, when we joined with other computer users to launch this effort we didn't predict its scope and we should have done. public visibility. In restrospect, I guess The computer assisted technologies looming on the horizon offer some of the greatest functional and productivity tools available to improve business operations. However, the absence of a standardized electronic link permeating most business organizations poses a severe impediment to the efficient deployment of this technology. The feasibility of using computer controlled devices to design, test, and manufacture products - as part of a massive network - is well within our technological grasp. However, unless the world agrees upon a global set of standards that will make multi-vendor computer systems interoperable, successful implementation of these technologies becomes less and less attractive.
DON'T DIE
Author: Zero
Publisher: Zero
ISBN: 1940556155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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.
Publisher: Zero
ISBN: 1940556155
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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.
SimCity Classic
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780929750439
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
Grade level: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, p, e, i, s, t.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780929750439
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
Grade level: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, p, e, i, s, t.