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Nature and Science April 2019
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Deep Creek : finding hope in the high country
by Pam Houston
The author of Contents May Have Shifted draws on her travels and homestead life in the Colorado Rockies in an essay collection on her ties to nature that explores the symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth
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| Europe: A Natural History by Tim FlanneryWelcome to: Europe, the tropical archipelago that formed 100 million years ago and, following floods, ice ages, and other events, transformed into the geographically and biologically diverse region we know today.
Look for: the "hell pigs" of the Oligocene period, the two-foot long proto-hedgehog Deinogalerix, and Europe's first hominids -- the human-Neanderthal hybrids that colonized the continent 38,000 years ago.
What's next? Confronting the existential threats of climate change, according to Australian author and paleontologist Tim Flannery. |
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| Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith GriselWhat it's about: a behavioral neuroscientist with a history of substance abuse examines addiction from a scientific and personal perspective.
Media buzz: Author Judith Grisel appeared on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss both the book and her experiences with addiction.
Food for thought: Grisel notes, "The opposite of addiction, I have learned, is not sobriety but choice." |
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| Figuring by Maria PopovaWhat it is: a lyrical exploration of the connections between great minds throughout history.
Why you might like it: Starting with Johannes Kepler and concluding with Rachel Carson, Figuring's discursive narrative follows an idiosyncratic, erudite path that blends science and art.
About the author: Maria Popova is the creator of the popular and expansively multidisciplinary Brain Pickings blog. |
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The uninhabitable earth : life after warming
by David Wallace-Wells
"It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible. In California, wildfires now rage year-round, destroying thousandsof homes. Across the US, "500-year" storms pummel communities month after month, and floods displace tens of millions annually. This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation"
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Focus on: Artificial Intelligence
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| Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James BarratWhat it is: a sobering look at the existential threats humanity may face once ANI (artificial narrow intelligence) begets AGI (artificial general intelligence), which in turn will beget ASI (artificial superintelligence).
What does that even mean? Once machines reach human levels of intelligence, it's only a matter of time before they attain superintelligence -- and our inferior human brains can't even fathom how that will play out.
Try this next: scholar and AI expert Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, which offers a philosophical view of artificial intelligence. |
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| Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence -- And Where It's Taking Us Next by Luke DormehlWhat it's about: journalist and documentary filmmaker Luke Dormehl surveys the field of artificial intelligence from its Cold War origins to the not-too-distant future.
Reviewers say: Ray Kurzweil, writing for The New York Times, calls Dormehl "the rare lay person...who actually understands the science (and even the math) and is able to parse it in an edifying and exciting way."
Try this next: George Zarkadakis' In Our Own Image, a comprehensive history of "thinking machines." |
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The fourth age : smart robots, conscious computers, and the future of humanity
by Byron Reese
A timely assessment of the revolutionary potential of artificial intelligence and robotics in human life traces how technology arrived at this point and how such topics as artificial life, machine consciousness, extreme prosperity and technological warfare will be hotly debated issues of the near future. By the author of Infinitive Progress.
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| Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max TegmarkWhat it is: an MIT professor's largely optimistic take on the future of AI -- and the ultimate fate of humans.
What sets it apart: In conversational style, Life 3.0 presents an overview of the field of artificial intelligence, while addressing some of the social and ethical issues that accompany it.
Supplementary materials: flowcharts, diagrams, and explanatory sidebars. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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