So here, Jim Al-Khalili and his crack team of experts bin the crystal ball and use cutting-edge science to get a glimpse of what's in store.From whether teleportation is really possible (spoiler: it is), to what we'll do if artificial intelligence takes over, What's Next? takes on the big questions. And along the way, it'll answer questions like: Will we find a cure to all diseases? An answer to climate change? Will bionics make us into superheroes?Touching on everything from genetics to transport, and nanotechnology to teleportation, What's Next? is a fascinating, fun and informative look at what's in store for the human race.

    With each step, the landscape he traversed became richer, suggesting deeper and deeper aspects of astronomy, history, biology, and literature, and making the path universal in scope. His insights inspire us to turn out local paths-- whether through cities, suburbs, or rural areas-- into portals to greater understanding of our interconnectedness with nature and history.

    A modern classic by an accomplished mathematician and best-selling author has been updated to encompass and explain the recent headline-making advances in the field in non-technical terms.

    The book's lexicon is limited to the thousand most common words in the English language, excluding physics, energy, galaxy, or even universe. Through the eyes of a fictional scientist (Student-People) hunting for dark matter with one of the biggest telescopes (Big-Seers) on Earth (Home-World), cosmologist Roberto Trotta explores the most important ideas about our universe (All-there-is) in language simple enough for anyone to understand. A unique blend of literary experimentation and science popularization, this delightful book is a perfect gift for any aspiring astronomer. The Edge of the Sky tells the story of the universe on a human scale, and the result is out of this world.

    Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

    Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are just one of ten billion trillion planets in the Universe, and it’s highly likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations. What’s more, each of those civilizations must have faced the same challenge of civilization-driven climate change.Written with great clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars builds on the inspiring work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, whose work at the dawn of the space age began building the new science of astrobiology; Jack James, the Texas-born engineer who drove NASA’s first planetary missions to success; Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist who first envisioned the Earth’s biosphere; and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who invented Gaia theory. Frank recounts the perilous journey NASA undertook across millions of miles of deep space to get its probes to Venus and Mars, yielding our first view of the cosmic laws of planets and climate that changed our understanding of our place in the universe.Thrilling science at the grandest of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest question of all: What can the likely presence of life on other worlds tell us about our own fate?

    But where should you start? Americans are slowly becoming ill from impaired glucose metabolism that manifests itself as a debilitating illness or chronic condition. You may try to manage one problem after another– diuretics to treat blood pressure, statins to lower cholesterol, metformin and insulin to treat diabetes--without fully realizing that the root of these issues is insulin resistance which revs up inflammation, damages the immune system, and disrupts the whole hormonal/chemical system in the body.It's time to feel better and get healthy by following a simple step-by-step plan to a healthy lifestyle. Rob Thompson, MD and Dana Carpender create the ultimate dream team in your journey to wellness.The Insulin Resistance Solution offers a step-by-step plan and 75 recipes for reversing even the most stubborn insulin resistance.The Program:- Reduce Your Body's Demand for Insulin: This is the stumbling block of many other plans/doctor recommendations. Even "healthy" and "moderate" carb intake can continue to fuel insulin resistance.- Fat is Not the Enemy: Stop Worrying about Fat, Cholesterol, and Salt- Exercise--the RIGHT way:- Use Carb Blockers: Eat and Supplement to Slow Glucose Digestion and Lower Insulin Levels- Safe, Effective Medication

    K. C. Cole's "Fun with Physics" is a profile of astrophysicist Janet Conrad that blends her personal life with professional activity. In "Desperate Measures," the doctor and writer Atul Gawande profiles the surgeon Francis Daniels Moore, whose experiments in the 1940s and '50s pushed medicine harder and farther than almost anyone had contemplated. Also included is a poem by the legendary John Updike, "Mars as Bright as Venus." The collection ends with Diane Ackerman's "ebullient" essay "We Are All a Part of Nature."Together these twenty-three articles on a wide range of today's most current topics in science -- from biology, physics, biotechnology, and astronomy, to anthropology, genetics, evolutionary theory, and cognition‚ represent the full spectrum of scientific writing from America's most prominent science authors, proving once again that "good science writing is evidently plentiful" (Scientific American).

    In First You Build a Cloud, K. C. Cole provides cogent explanations through animated prose, metaphors, and anecdotes, allowing us to comprehend the nuances of physics-gravity and light, color and shape, quarks and quasars, particles and stars, force and strength. We also come to see how the physical world is so deeply intertwined with the ways in which we think about culture, poetry, and philosophy. Cole, one of our preeminent science writers, serves as a guide into the world of such legendary scientific minds as Richard Feynman, Victor Weisskopf, brothers Frank Oppenheimer and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Philip Morrison, Vera Kistiakowsky, and Stephen Jay Gould.

    In particular, McGilchrist suggests, the left hemisphere's obsession with reducing everything it sees to the level of minute, mechanistic detail is robbing modern society of the ability to understand and appreciate deeper human values. Accessible to readers who haven't yet read "The Master and His Emissary" as well as those who have, this is a fascinating, immensely thought-provoking essay that delves to the very heart of what it means to be human.

    He provides readers with non-trivial insights into research fields they may not have encountered previously . . . I think everyone who has ever considered the possibility that other intelligent civilizations exist elsewhere within our galaxy will enjoy Where Is Everybody? They will find much to agree with, and much to argue about, in this very accessible volume.� �SCIENCE During a Los Alamos lunchtime conversation that took place more than 50 years ago, four world-class scientists agreed, given the size and age of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations simply had to exist. The sheer numbers demanded it. But one of the four, the renowned physicist and back-of-the-envelope calculator Enrico Fermi, asked the telling question: If the extraterrestrial life proposition is true, he wondered, "Where IS everybody?" In this lively and thought-provoking book, Stephen Webb presents a detailed discussion of the 50 most cogent and intriguing answers to Fermi's famous question, divided into three distinct groups: - Aliens are already here among us. Here are answers ranging from Leo Szilard's suggestion that they are already here, and we know them as Hungarians, to the theorists who claim that aliens built Stonehenge and the Easter Island statues. - Aliens exist, but have not yet communicated. The theories in this camp range widely, from those who believe we simply don't have the technologies to receive their signals, to those who believe the enormities of space and time work against communication, to those who believe they're hiding from us. - Aliens do not exist. Here are the doubters' arguments, from the Rare Earth theory to the author's own closely argued and cogently stated skepticism. The proposed solutions run the gamut from the crackpot to the highly serious, but all deserve our consideration. The varieties of arguments -- from first-rate scientists, philosophers and historians, and science fiction authors -- turn out to be astonishing, entertaining, and vigorous intellectual exercises for any reader interested in science and the sheer pleasure of speculative thinking. Stephen Webb is a physicist working at the Open University in England and the author of Measuring the Universe.

    A strong gravitational wave will briefly change that distance by less than the thickness of a human hair. We have perhaps less than a few tenths of a second to perform this measurement. And we don’t know if this infinitesimal event will come next month, next year or perhaps in thirty years.In 1916 Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves: miniscule ripples in the very fabric of spacetime generated by unfathomably powerful events. If such vibrations could somehow be recorded, we could observe our universe for the first time through sound: the hissing of the Big Bang, the whale-like tunes of collapsing stars, the low tones of merging galaxies, the drumbeat of two black holes collapsing into one. For decades, astrophysicists have searched for a way of doing so…In 2016 a team of hundreds of scientists at work on a billion-dollar experiment made history when they announced the first ever detection of a gravitational wave, confirming Einstein’s prediction. This is their story, and the story of the most sensitive scientific instrument ever made: LIGO.Based on complete access to LIGO and the scientists who created it, Black Hole Blues provides a firsthand account of this astonishing achievement: a compelling, intimate portrait of cutting-edge science at its most awe-inspiring and ambitious.

    McPhee embarks on a fascinating journey across the basement of the continent -- the land masses forming Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and thereabouts -- with a professor and geochronologist acting as a guide.

    Whether with friends, family, or on social media, we expend lots of energy, lots of sharp words, and lots of strong feelings. But very few know how to have a good religious argument a rational, respectful, and productive exchange of differing views.Bishop Robert Barron, one of the leading Catholic figures in the world and among the most active on social media, has enjoyed thousands of fruitful religious arguments. In this book based on talks delivered at Facebook and Google, he explains why religion at its best opens up the searching mind, and how we all believer and unbeliever alike can share better discussions about God.

    How would these people feel when their prophecy remained unfulfilled? Would they admit the error of their prediction, or would they readjust their reality to make sense of the new circumstances?"We've all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We're familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed thru the most devastating attacks. But human resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with a whole heart; suppose further a commitment to this belief, suppose irrevocable actions have been taken because of it; finally, suppose evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that the belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of such beliefs than ever before. Indeed, s/he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting others to this view. How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about? This is the question on which this book focuses. We hope that, by the end of the volume, we will have provided an adequate answer to the question, an answer documented by data."When Prophecy Fails is a classic text in social psychology authored by L. Festinger, H. Riecken and S. Schachter. It chronicles the experience of a UFO cult that believed the end of the world was at hand. In effect, it's a sociopsychological study of a modern group that predicted the destruction of the world & the adjustments made when the prediction failed to materialize. "The authors have done something as laudable as it is unusual for social psychologists. They espied a fleeting social movement important to a line of research they were interested in and took after it. They recruited a team of observers, joined the movement & watched it from within under great difficulties until its crisis came and went. Their report is of interest as much for the method as for the substance."--Everett C. Hughes, The American Journal of Sociology.