Download or read book Synthetic Planet written by Monica J. Casper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely collection of original essays traces the migration of synthetic chemicals from the laboratory to the factory and then into the environment, bodies and communities. Turning our attention to the impact these chemicals have on our ecosystems, human health, social organization and political processes, the contributors break new ground by focusing on the production and distribution of these potentially hazardous agents themselves rather than just detailing their effects.

Download or read book Synthetic Planet written by Monica J. Casper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely collection of original essays traces the migration of synthetic chemicals from the laboratory to the factory and then into the environment, bodies and communities. Turning our attention to the impact these chemicals have on our ecosystems, human health, social organization and political processes, the contributors break new ground by focusing on the production and distribution of these potentially hazardous agents themselves rather than just detailing their effects.

Download or read book The Synthetic Age written by Christopher J. Preston and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering. We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age. Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze. What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.

Download or read book Artificial Earth written by Andrea Avataneo and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-03-28 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever wondered how everyday life could be on an artificial planet? Well, you are just on the right place. Imagine yourself catapulted few hundred years in the future. Get ready to travel in time but not in distance: because the planet concerned is not light years from you, this is happening just underneath your feet... Due to overuse of natural resources and heavy pollution production, the Earth is a planet in a coma. Planet Earth stopped all its vital functions: there is no wind, no rain, no ocean currents, no sunlight, no seasons. New habitable planet exploration and colonization is expensive, risky and with doubtful results. Human beings decided to stay on Earth and invest all their efforts in building machines able to reproduce Earth's environments and its natural functions. Huge fans are used to simulate wind and ocean currents, gigantic water containers are flying around to replicate rain, giant street lights are mounted with large lamps to recreate sunlight. Our former Planet Earth has been renamed Artificial Earth. Tom is an engineer who designs and develops the machines which keep Artificial Earth a habitable place for human beings. Tom is also a part-time elementary school teacher who explains his pupils how former Planet Earth used to be and how present Artificial Earth works. He never lived on Former Earth, he was born on Artificial Earth. What he knows about Former Earth, he learned it at the downtown library. When trying to explain his pupils the differences between our former and artificial planet, he soon realizes that who is really learning something is him. Tom is now able to see things through his pupils' eyes, who never lived on Former Earth and lived so little on Artificial Earth. Clear and obvious things Tom has studied at school and experienced in his life, become now questionable. Welcome to Artificial Earth.

Download or read book The Synthetic Age written by Christopher J. Preston and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering. We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age. Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze. What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.

Download or read book The Synthetic Ones written by Lionel Roberts and published by Gateway. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a Destiny? Does Fate impose a limit? What Barrier stands between man and the creation of life? Since the legendary failure of the ill-fated Frankenstein, man has tried time and time again to pass those limits. He has created androids, clumsy robots of flesh and blood. He has made men of metal and servants of plastic, with wheels for limbs and magnetic tapes for voices. Man has made things by cross breeding the animal kingdom and destroying Nature's intentions...but man has never yet made man. Or has he? Forbisher thought that he had the answer. It wasn't a clumsy Synthetic. It wasn't an Android, or a Robot, it was a real flesh and blood human being. The beautiful woman in his arms was the product of a laboratory experiment, not the result of a natural biological process. But how could he prove it?

Download or read book Meat Planet written by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2013, a Dutch scientist unveiled the world’s first laboratory-created hamburger. Since then, the idea of producing meat, not from live animals but from carefully cultured tissues, has spread like wildfire through the media. Meanwhile, cultured meat researchers race against population growth and climate change in an effort to make sustainable protein. Meat Planet explores the quest to generate meat in the lab—a substance sometimes called “cultured meat”—and asks what it means to imagine that this is the future of food. Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political, and it demands that we examine questions of justice and desirable modes of living in a shared and finite world. Benjamin Wurgaft tells a story that could utterly transform the way we think of animals, the way we relate to farmland, the way we use water, and the way we think about population and our fragile ecosystem’s capacity to sustain life. He argues that even if cultured meat does not “succeed,” it functions—much like science fiction—as a crucial mirror that we can hold up to our contemporary fleshy dysfunctions.

Download or read book Earth Materials written by Dexter Perkins and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-07-24 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a large and growing need for a textbook that can form the basis for integrated classes that look at minerals, rocks, and other Earth materials. Despite the need, no high-quality book is available for such a course. Earth Materials is a wide-ranging undergraduate textbook that covers all the most important kinds of (inorganic) Earth materials. Besides traditional chapters on minerals and rocks, this book features chapters on sediments and stratigraphy, weathering and soils, water and the hydrosphere, and mineral and energy deposits. Introductions to soil mechanics and rock mechanics are also included. This book steers away from the model of traditional encyclopedic science textbooks, but rather exposes students to the key and most exciting ideas and information, with an emphasis on thinking about Earth as a system. The book is written in such a manner as to support inquiry, discovery and other forms of active learning. All chapters start with a short topical story or vignette, and the plentiful photographs and other graphics are integrated completely with the text. Earth Materials will be interesting and useful for a wide range of learners, including geoscience students, students taking mineralogy and petrology courses, engineers, and anyone interested in learning more about the Earth as a system.

Download or read book The Life of Super Earths written by Dimitar Sasselov and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astronomy professor at Harvard University discusses the possibilities of finding other worlds that sustain alien life forms, citing recent breakthroughs in biology and exoplanetary astronomy, including the recent discovery of arsenic-based bacteria in a California lake.

Download or read book Protostars and Planets VI written by Henrik Beuther and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2014-12-18 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary discovery of thousands of confirmed and candidate planets beyond the solar system brings forth the most fundamental question: How do planets and their host stars form and evolve? Protostars and Planets VI brings together more than 250 contributing authors at the forefront of their field, conveying the latest results in this research area and establishing a new foundation for advancing our understanding of stellar and planetary formation. Continuing the tradition of the Protostars and Planets series, this latest volume uniquely integrates the cross-disciplinary aspects of this broad field. Covering an extremely wide range of scales, from the formation of large clouds in our Milky Way galaxy down to small chondrules in our solar system, Protostars and Planets VI takes an encompassing view with the goal of not only highlighting what we know but, most importantly, emphasizing the frontiers of what we do not know. As a vehicle for propelling forward new discoveries on stars, planets, and their origins, this latest volume in the Space Science Series is an indispensable resource for both current scientists and new students in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, and the study of meteorites.

Download or read book Moon Based Synthetic Aperture Radar written by Zhen Xu and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lunar explorations have received increasing attention in recent years with tremendous application values, including using the Moon as a remote sensing platform for Earth observation. As an active sensor, the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) can detect changes in the atmosphere, terrain, and ocean. Moon-based SAR, complementary to the spaceborne SAR systems, expands our capabilities of watching and understanding the Earth. This book explains the Moon-Earth observation geometry, generic parameters, image focusing, and outlook using the Moon-based SAR. Written as a SAR imaging of Earth on the lunar-based platform, it makes it an essential reference to those interested in planetary and Earth sciences. FEATURES Uses the Moon as a remote sensing platform for Earth observation Explains how to obtain a high spatial resolution with a short revisit time using the Moon-based SAR Covers the observation geometry, range and signal models, two-dimensional signal spectrum, and focusing algorithms for the Moon-based SAR Presents a detailed analysis of sources of phase errors in the Moon-based SAR signal Includes global case studies and introduces conceptual ideas for further research This book is intended for senior graduate students, professional researchers, and engineers studying and working in the fields of lunar exploration and remote sensing applications, especially when dealing with high-orbit SAR studies.

Download or read book Rock and Mineral Magnetism written by W. O'Reilly and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past two decades have witnessed a revolution in the earth sciences. The quantitative, instrument-based measurements and physical models of. geophysics, together with advances in technology, have radically transformed the way in which the Earth, and especially its crust, is described. The study of the magnetism of the rocks of the Earth's crust has played a major part in this transformation. Rocks, or more specifically their constituent magnetic minerals, can be regarded as a measuring instrument provided by nature, which can be employed in the service of the earth sciences. Thus magnetic minerals are a recording magnetometer; a goniometer or protractor, recording the directions of flows, fields and forces; a clock; a recording thermometer; a position recorder; astrain gauge; an instrument for geo logical surveying; a tracer in climatology and hydrology; a tool in petrology. No instrument is linear, or free from noise and systematic errors, and the performance of nature's instrument must be assessed and certified. This has been the task of the research worker in rock and mineral magnetism.

Download or read book Half Earth Our Planet s Fight for Life written by Edward O. Wilson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An audacious and concrete proposal…Half-Earth completes the 86-year-old Wilson’s valedictory trilogy on the human animal and our place on the planet." —Jedediah Purdy, New Republic In his most urgent book to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and world-renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson states that in order to stave off the mass extinction of species, including our own, we must move swiftly to preserve the biodiversity of our planet. In this "visionary blueprint for saving the planet" (Stephen Greenblatt), Half-Earth argues that the situation facing us is too large to be solved piecemeal and proposes a solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: dedicate fully half the surface of the Earth to nature. Identifying actual regions of the planet that can still be reclaimed—such as the California redwood forest, the Amazon River basin, and grasslands of the Serengeti, among others—Wilson puts aside the prevailing pessimism of our times and "speaks with a humane eloquence which calls to us all" (Oliver Sacks).

Download or read book Novel AI Applications for Advancing Earth Sciences written by Yadav, Sudesh and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2023-12-29 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Earth Sciences industry faces a new challenge - the need for accurate, efficient, and reliable methods to monitor and predict geological phenomena and environmental changes. As climate change, earthquakes, and other natural disasters become more frequent and severe, the necessity for advanced tools and techniques is paramount. Traditional methods often fall short in providing the precision and speed required to address these critical issues. Geologists and earth scientists who are grappling with the urgent problem of utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize their field, will find the solution within the pages of Novel AI Applications for Advancing Earth Sciences. This book offers the research community concepts expanding upon the fusion of AI technology with earth sciences. By leveraging advanced AI tools, such as convolutional neural networks, support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and the potential of remote sensing satellites, this book transforms the identification of geological features, geological mapping, soil classification, and gas detection. Scientists can now predict earthquakes and assess the probability of climate change with unprecedented accuracy. Additionally, the book explains how the optimization of algorithms for specific tasks substantially reduces the time complexity of earth observations, leading to an unprecedented leap in accuracy and efficiency.

Download or read book Residues written by Soraya Boudia and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Residues properties -- Legacy -- Accretion -- Apprehension -- Residual materialism.

Download or read book Library of Congress Subject Headings written by Library of Congress and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 1992 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inescapable Ecologies written by Linda Lorraine Nash and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description