Consider

Consider

Author: Kristy Acevedo

Publisher: North Star Editions, Inc.

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1631630601

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When mysterious holograms suddenly appear heralding the end of the world, 17-year-old Alexandra Lucas must battle through the intense effects of her anxiety disorder and decide whether to stay on Earth or step through a portal to the unknown.


Surfing Uncertainty

Surfing Uncertainty

Author: Andy Clark

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0190217014

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Exciting new theories in neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence are revealing minds like ours as predictive minds, forever trying to guess the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. In this up-to-the-minute treatment, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores new ways of thinking about perception, action, and the embodied mind.


Off Rock

Off Rock

Author: Kieran Shea

Publisher: Titan Books (US, CA)

Published: 2017-04-18

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1785653393

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A “fast-paced, high-energy” space adventure that is part sardonic heist caper and part homage to science fiction B-movies of the 1970s (Booklist) “Five awesome and entertaining words to describe this one: Bank heist set in space. Yes, please.” —io9 In the year 2778, Jimmy Vik is feeling dissatisfied. After busting his ass for assorted interstellar mining outfits for close to two decades, downsizing is in the wind, his ex-girlfriend/supervisor is climbing up his back, and daily Jimmy wonders if he’s played his last good hand. So when Jimmy stumbles upon a significant gold pocket during a routine procedure on Kardashev 7-A, he believes his luck may have changed—larcenously so. But smuggling the gold “off rock” won’t be easy. To do it, Jimmy will have to contend with a wily criminal partner, a gorgeous covert assassin, the suspicions of his ex, and the less than honorable intentions of an encroaching, rival mining company. As the clock ticks down, treachery and betrayal loom, the body count rises, and soon Jimmy has no idea who to trust.


How to Make a Spaceship

How to Make a Spaceship

Author: Julian Guthrie

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-09-20

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0698405854

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A New York Times bestseller! The historic race that reawakened the promise of manned spaceflight A Finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had eighty seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did, he would make history as the world’s first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world’s largest governments had done before. Peter Diamandis was the son of hardworking immigrants who wanted their science prodigy to make the family proud and become a doctor. But from the age of eight, when he watched Apollo 11 land on the Moon, his singular goal was to get to space. When he realized NASA was winding down manned space flight, Diamandis set out on one of the great entrepreneurial adventure stories of our time. If the government wouldn’t send him to space, he would create a private space flight industry himself. In the 1990s, this idea was the stuff of science fiction. Undaunted, Diamandis found inspiration in an unlikely place: the golden age of aviation. He discovered that Charles Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight to win a $25,000 prize. The flight made Lindbergh the most famous man on earth and galvanized the airline industry. Why, Diamandis thought, couldn’t the same be done for space flight? The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne, and the other teams in the hunt, is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. It is driven by outsized characters—Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, John Carmack, Paul Allen—and obsessive pursuits. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn’t just a victory for one team; it was the foundation for a new industry and a new age.


A Dictionary of Astronomy

A Dictionary of Astronomy

Author: Ian Ridpath

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 931

ISBN-13: 0192542613

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Compiled with the help of over 20 expert contributors under the editorship of renowned author and broadcaster Ian Ridpath, the third edition of A Dictionary of Astronomy covers everything from space exploration and the equipment involved, to astrophysics, cosmology, and the concept of time, in over 4,300 entries. The dictionary also includes biographical entries on eminent astronomers, as well as worldwide coverage of observatories and telescopes. Supplementary material is included in the appendices, such as tables of Apollo lunar landing missions, the constellations, planetary data, and numerous other tables and diagrams complement the entries. The entries have been fully revised and updated for this edition, and more than 100 new entries have been added to reflect the recent developments within the field of astronomy, including Bennu, Euclid, Mars Orbiter Mission, and slowly pulsating B star. A Dictionary of Astronomy is an invaluable reference source for students, professionals, amateur astronomers, and space enthusiasts.


Asteroid Hunters

Asteroid Hunters

Author: Carrie Nugent

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1501120093

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For the first time, scientists could have the knowledge to prevent a natural disaster epic in scale—an asteroid hitting the earth and in this exciting, adventuresome book, Carrie Nugent explains how. What are asteroids, and where do they come from? And, most urgently: Are they going to hit the Earth? What would happen if one was on its way? Carrie Nugent is an asteroid hunter—part of a group of scientists working to map our cosmic neighborhood. For the first time ever, we are reaching the point where we may be able to prevent the horrible natural disaster that would result from an asteroid collision. In Asteroid Hunters, Nugent reveals what known impact asteroids have had: the extinction of the dinosaurs, the earth-sized hole Shoemaker Levy 9 left in Jupiter just a few decades ago, how the meteorite that bursted over Chelyabinsk in Russia could have started a war, and unlucky Ms. Anne Hodges—the only person (that we know of) in US history to be the victim of a direct hit. Nugent also introduces the telescope she uses to detect near-Earth asteroids. Ultimately, detection is the key to preventing asteroid impact, and these specialized scientists are working to prevent the unthinkable from happening. If successful, asteroid hunting will lead to the first natural disaster humans have the know-how and the technology to prevent. The successful hunt and mapping of asteroids could mean nothing less than saving life on earth.


Fire in the Sky

Fire in the Sky

Author: Gordon L. Dillow

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1501187759

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This “accessible and always entertaining” (Booklist) combination of history, pop science, and in-depth reporting offers a fascinating account of the asteroids that hit Earth long ago and those streaming toward us now, as well as how prepared we are against asteroid-caused catastrophe. One of these days, warns Gordon Dillow, the Earth will be hit by a comet or asteroid of potentially catastrophic size. The only question is when. In the meantime, we need to get much better at finding objects hurtling our way, and if they’re large enough to penetrate the atmosphere without burning up, figure out what to do about them. We owe many of science’s most important discoveries to the famed Meteor Crater, a mile-wide dimple on the Colorado Plateau created by an asteroid hit 50,000 years ago. In his masterfully researched Fire in the Sky, Dillow unpacks what the Crater has to tell us. Prior to the early 1900s, the world believed that all craters—on the Earth and Moon—were formed by volcanic activity. Not so. The revelation that Meteor Crater and others like it were formed by impacts with space objects has led to a now accepted theory about what killed off the dinosaurs, and it has opened up a new field of asteroid observation that is brimming with urgency. Dillow looks at great asteroid hits of the past and modern-day asteroid hunters and defense planning experts, including America’s first Planetary Defense Officer. Satellite sensors confirm that a Hiroshima-scale blast occurs in the atmosphere every year, and a smaller, one-kiloton blast every month. While Dillow makes clear that the objects above can be deadly, he consistently inspires awe with his descriptions of their size, makeup, and origins. Both a riveting work of popular science and a warning to not take for granted the space objects hurtling overhead, Fire in the Sky is, ultimately, a testament to our universe’s celestial wonders.


Ohio

Ohio

Author: Stephen Markley

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Published: 2019-06-04

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1501174487

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“Extraordinary...beautifully precise...[an] earnestly ambitious debut.” —The New York Times Book Review “A wild, angry, and devastating masterpiece of a book.” —NPR “[A] descendent of the Dickensian ‘social novel’ by way of Jonathan Franzen: epic fiction that lays bare contemporary culture clashes, showing us who we are and how we got here.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “A book that has stayed with me ever since I put it down.” —Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers One sweltering night in 2013, four former high school classmates converge on their hometown in northeastern Ohio. There’s Bill Ashcraft, a passionate, drug-abusing young activist whose flailing ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to post-BP New Orleans, and now back home with a mysterious package strapped to the undercarriage of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting her family and the mother of her best friend and first love, whose disappearance spurs the mystery at the heart of the novel; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried desperately to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the washed-up captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax. Set over the course of a single evening, Ohio toggles between the perspectives of these unforgettable characters as they unearth dark secrets, revisit old regrets and uncover—and compound—bitter betrayals. Before the evening is through, these narratives converge masterfully to reveal a mystery so dark and shocking it will take your breath away.


Complexity

Complexity

Author: M. Mitchell Waldrop

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 150405914X

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“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly