Download or read book As the Future Catches You written by Juan Enriquez and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2005-10-25 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you think the world has changed dramatically in the last five years, you haven’t seen anything yet. You will never look at the world in the same way after reading As the Future Catches You. Juan Enriquez puts you face to face with unprecedented political, ethical, economic, and financial issues, dramatically demonstrating the cascading impact of the genetic, digital, and knowledge revolutions on all our lives. Genetics will be the dominant language of this century. Those who can “speak it” will acquire direct and deliberate control over all forms of life. But most countries and individuals remain illiterate in what is rapidly becoming the greatest single driver of the global economy. The choice is simple: Either learn to surf new and powerful waves of change—or get crushed trying to stop them. The future is catching us all. Let it catch you with your eyes wide open.

Download or read book Right Wrong written by Juan Enriquez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and entertaining guide to ethics in a technological age. Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren't shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.

Download or read book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down written by Anne Fadiman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.

Download or read book Evolving Ourselves written by Juan Enriquez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening, mind-bending exploration of how mankind is reshaping its genetic future, based on the viral TED Talk series “Will Our Kids Be a Different Species?” and “The Next Species of Human.” Are you willing to engineer the DNA of your unborn children and grand-children to be healthier? Better looking? More intelligent? Why are rates of autism, asthma, and allergies exploding at an unprecedented pace? Why are humans living longer and having far fewer kids? Futurist Juan Enriquez and scientist Steve Gullans conduct a sweeping tour of how humans are changing the course of evolution for all species—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. For example: • What if life forms are limited only by the bounds of our imagination? Are designer babies and pets, de-extinction, even entirely newspecies fair game? • As humans, animals, and plants become ever more resistant to disease and aging, what will become the leading causes of death? • Man-machine interfaces may allow humans to live much longer. What will happen when we transfer parts of our “selves” into clones, into stored cells and machines? Though these harbingers of change are deeply unsettling, the authors argue we are also in an epoch of tremendous opportunity. Future humans, perhaps a more diverse, resilient, gentler, and intelligent species, may become better caretakers of the planet—but only if we make the right choices now. Intelligent, provocative, and optimistic, Evolving Ourselves is the ultimate guide to the next phase of life on Earth. Chosen by Nature magazine as a Fall 2016 season highlight.

Download or read book Saved by Science written by Mark J. Poznansky and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we accelerate the development of vaccines? How do we feed three billion people when 12 million died of hunger in 2019? Does synthetic biology hold the answer? With all the advances in science in the last century, why are there still so many infectious diseases? Why haven’t we found cures for difficult cancers? Why hasn’t any major progress been made in the treatment of mental illness? And how do we intend to stop, and not only that but reverse, global warming and the climate crisis? In Saved by Science, scientist Mark Poznansky examines the many crises facing humanity while encouraging us with the promise of an emerging solution: synthetic biology. This is the science of building simple organisms, or “biological apps,” to make manufacturing greener energy production more sustainable, agriculture more robust, and medicine more powerful and precise. Synthetic biology is the marriage of the digital revolution with a revolution in biology and genomics; some have even called it “the fourth industrial revolution.” Accessible and informative, Saved by Science provides readers with hope for the future if we trust in and support the future of science.

Download or read book The Untied States of America written by Juan Enriquez and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 2005 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a compelling synthesis of factoids illustrated with mind-bending stories, ideas, photographs, and maps, the author conducts a provocative conversation about the future shape of America.

Download or read book How Attention Works written by Stefan Van Der Stigchel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we filter out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we need to know. We are surrounded by a world rich with visual information, but we pay attention to very little of it, filtering out what is irrelevant so we can focus on what we think we need to know. Advertisers, web designers, and other “attention architects” try hard to get our attention, promoting products with videos on huge outdoor screens, adding flashing banners to websites, and developing computer programs with blinking icons that tempt us to click. Often they succeed in distracting us from what we are supposed to be doing. In How Attention Works, Stefan Van der Stigchel explains the process of attention and what the implications are for our everyday lives. The visual attention system is efficient, Van der Stigchel writes, because it doesn't waste energy processing every scrap of visual data it receives; it gathers only relevant information. We focus on one snippet of information and assume that everything else is stable and consistent with past experience; that's why most people miss even the most glaring continuity errors in films. If an object doesn't meet our expectations, chances are we won't see it. Van der Stigchel makes his case with examples from real life, explaining, among other things, the limitations of color perception (and why fire trucks shouldn't be red); the importance of location (security guards and radiologists, for example, have to know where to look); the attention-getting properties of faces and spiders; what we can learn from someone else's eye movements; why we see what we expect to see (magicians take advantage of this); and visual neglect and unattended information.

Download or read book As the Future Catches You written by Juan Enriquez and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Nothing to See Here written by Kevin Wilson and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller • A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, TIME, The A.V. Club, Buzzfeed, and PopSugar “I can’t believe how good this book is.... It’s wholly original. It’s also perfect.... Wilson writes with such a light touch.... The brilliance of the novel [is] that it distracts you with these weirdo characters and mesmerizing and funny sentences and then hits you in a way you didn’t see coming. You’re laughing so hard you don’t even realize that you’ve suddenly caught fire.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of Fleishman is in Trouble, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of The Family Fang, a moving and uproarious novel about a woman who finds meaning in her life when she begins caring for two children with a remarkable ability. Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help. Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth. Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for? With white-hot wit and a big, tender heart, Kevin Wilson has written his best book yet—a most unusual story of parental love.

Download or read book The Spontaneous Brain written by Georg Northoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for a Copernican revolution in our consideration of mental features—a shift in which the world-brain problem supersedes the mind-body problem. Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features. Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, explains that empirical evidence suggests that the brain's spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central to aligning and integrating the brain within the world. This spatiotemporal structure allows the brain to extend beyond itself into body and world, creating the “world-brain relation” that is central to mental features. Northoff makes his argument in empirical, ontological, and epistemic-methodological terms. He discusses current models of the brain and applies these models to recent data on neuronal features underlying consciousness and proposes the world-brain relation as the ontological predisposition for consciousness.

Download or read book The Heavenly Table written by Donald Ray Pollock and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Donald Ray Pollock, author of the highly acclaimed The Devil All the Time and Knockemstiff, comes a dark, gritty, electrifying (and, disturbingly, weirdly funny) new novel that will solidify his place among the best contemporary American authors. It is 1917, in that sliver of border land that divides Georgia from Alabama. Dispossessed farmer Pearl Jewett ekes out a hardscrabble existence with his three young sons: Cane (the eldest; handsome; intelligent); Cob (short; heavy set; a bit slow); and Chimney (the youngest; thin; ill-tempered). Several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler lives with his son, Eddie, and his wife, Eula. After Ellsworth is swindled out of his family's entire fortune, his life is put on a surprising, unforgettable, and violent trajectory that will directly lead him to cross paths with the Jewetts. No good can come of it. Or can it? In the gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy with a healthy dose of cinematic violence reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, the Jewetts and the Fiddlers will find their lives colliding in increasingly dark and horrific ways, placing Donald Ray Pollock firmly in the company of the genre's literary masters.

Download or read book The Catcher in the Rye written by J. D. Salinger and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caufield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days.

Download or read book There Must Be More Than That written by Shinsuke Yoshitake and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creator of The Boring Book, a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book Shinsuke Yoshitake is back with a witty, thought-provoking picture book for our times. There Must Be More Than That! is all about perspective, and wading past the bad to embrace the possibility of good. • A thoughtful and laugh-out-loud exploration into an uncertain ever after • Empowers readers to choose their own future • A powerful antidote to anxiety for kids unsure about current events and what comes next What does the future hold? This question can be daunting—or delightfully promising! Readers of all ages will seek solace in this smart and spirited exploration of the good that might be right around the corner. • Perfect for fans of Shinsuke Yoshitake • Ideal for children ages 5 to 8 years old • A great pick for parents and grandparents, as well as librarians and teachers • You'll love this book if you love books like Sofia Valdez, Future Prez by Andrea Beaty; What Do You Do With an Idea? by Kobi Yamada; and Dream Big, Little One by Vashti Harrison.

Download or read book Brain Signals written by Risto J. Ilmoniemi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unified treatment of the generation and analysis of brain-generated electromagnetic fields. In Brain Signals, Risto Ilmoniemi and Jukka Sarvas present the basic physical and mathematical principles of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG), describing what kind of information is available in the neuroelectromagnetic field and how the measured MEG and EEG signals can be analyzed. Unlike most previous works on these topics, which have been collections of writings by different authors using different conventions, this book presents the material in a unified manner, providing the reader with a thorough understanding of basic principles and a firm basis for analyzing data generated by MEG and EEG. The book first provides a brief introduction to brain states and the early history of EEG and MEG, describes the generation of electromagnetic fields by neuronal activity, and discusses the electromagnetic forward problem. The authors then turn to EEG and MEG analysis, offering a review of linear and matrix algebra and basic statistics needed for analysis of the data, and presenting several analysis methods: dipole fitting; the minimum norm estimate (MNE); beamforming; the multiple signal classification algorithm (MUSIC), including RAP-MUSIC with the RAP dilemma and TRAP-MUSIC, which removes the RAP dilemma; independent component analysis (ICA); and blind source separation (BSS) with joint diagonalization.

Download or read book The Probable Future written by Alice Hoffman and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Hoffman’s most magical novel to date—three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love. Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people’s dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future—a future that she might not want to see. In The Probable Future this vivid and intriguing cast of characters confronts a haunting past—and a very current murder—against the evocative backdrop of small-town New England. By turns chilling and enchanting, The Probable Future chronicles the Sparrows’s legacy as young Stella struggles to cope with her disturbing clairvoyance. Her potential to ruin or redeem becomes unbearable when one of her premonitions puts her father in jail, wrongly accused of homicide. Yet this ordeal also leads Stella to the grandmother she was forbidden to meet and to a historic family home full of talismans from her ancestors. Poignant, arresting, unsettling, The Probable Future showcases the lavish literary gifts that have made Alice Hoffman one of America’s most treasured writers. Praise for The Probable Future “A thrilling adventure of literary alchemy . . . A magical, mystical tour de force of pure entertainment.”—The Seattle Times “Delicious . . . Hoffman is an unapologetic optimist, and optimism is in short supply these days. It feels like a vacation to curl up with [The Probable Future].”—The New York Times Book Review “Instantly alluring . . . A mysterious, modern-day fairy tale . . . Hoffman is an amazingly talented writer with a beautiful sense of sentence construction, an intriguing imagination, and the ability to create compelling, complex characters that readers care about.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Hoffman’s ethereal tale of a family of women with supernatural gifts is a magical escape, grounded in the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.”—Marie Claire

Download or read book THE HIGH AUCTION written by Misba and published by Nomad's Forge. This book was released on 2021-09-26 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the near future, a machinist, a monk, and a mesmerizer are looking for the Source of the universe, but among the ancient scriptures, they only find the devil ... Few humans in the future find the secrets of what words and sounds can do, for the Apocalypse and war have led them to evolve in mind and physique. Two of them end World War III with just a four-minute speech. Some say they did mass hypnosis. Others say it was their voice and will. Fifty years later in South Asia, KUSHA, a twenty-three-year-old machine-geek with social awkwardness and amnesia, tries to get the Devil’s Book with secrets of voice. But her idol of voice and everyone's beloved war heroes, YUAN and RUEM, are also after it for power. In a society that worships the evolved High Grades with voice, how you speak and which words you talk with is important. As someone who finds all solutions in books, Kusha thinks the secrets in the three-foot-long ancient book will teach her to speak mesmerizingly. She believes it will help her evolve. So, she decides to attend the auction where the book will be sold. But there's a problem; powerful High Grades want the book too. They want to code fate, rewriting the material world. They are undead, immortal mesmerizers. And being a philosopher, Kusha admires their ethics while she must fight them—the fight that starts with the book. The fight creates a chain reaction leading her to an epic journey. About the Series: THE HIGH AUCTION: WISDOM REVOLUTION is a book of genre-bending Adult Sci-fi-Fantasy series "The Machinist, The Monk, And The Mesmerizer Chronicles." Here, you'll find Metaphysical magic built around philosophy and spirituality. You'll find ancient mysteries, archaeological adventures, and, most importantly, you will meet some characters. Its inspiration was from myths/truth (read the word you prefer) of all religions where humans evolved to Sufis, Rishis, Sannashis, Monks, and sometimes, Gods. Example: Shiva Purana in Hindu epics where Sati evolved to Goddess Parvati and splits into Kali to destroy the evil is a prominent example. You'll find diverse cultures, sexuality, and faith in this series. Enjoy. What the Critiques and Reviewers are saying about it: "GEM PROSE ... YOU WILL FINISH THIS BOOK ONCE YOU START ..." "EXCEPTIONALLY THOUGHT-PROVOKING ..." "RELATABLE ... YOU KEEP NODDING AT EVERYTHING ..."

Download or read book One in a Billion written by Mark Johnson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A riveting scientific detective story” (The Washington Post) by two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists who chronicle a young Wisconsin boy with a never-before-seen disease and the doctors who save his life by taking a new step into the future of medicine. In this landmark medical narrative, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher share the story of Nic Volker, the first patient to be saved by a bold breakthrough in medicine—a complete gene sequencing, aimed at finding the cause of an otherwise undiagnosable illness. At just two years old, Nic experienced a brief flicker of pain that signaled the awakening of a new and deadly disease, one that would hurl him and his family into a harrowing journey in search for a lifesaving cure. After his symptoms stump every practitioner, it becomes clear that Nic’s is a one in a billion case, a disease that no one has ever seen before. As Nic and his family search for answers, the scientific community is racing to bring about the next revolution in medicine—translating results from the Human Genome Project to treatments for actual patients. At the forefront is the brilliant geneticist Howard Jacob, who starts a lab at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Then Nic’s head physician reaches out to Jacob with an unprecedented of idea. A disease like Nic’s is likely due to a rare mutation: if they could sequence his genes to try to find the mutation, the boy might live. Jacob doesn’t know if he can do it; Nic’s doctors don’t know if it will even work; and no one knows what else might lie in the Pandora’s Box of Nic’s genome. But they decide to try—and in doing so, they step into a new era of medicine. One in a Billion is “a compelling story of a modern medical miracle—the first instance of personalized medicine” (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and the birth of a scientific revolution.