Tag Archives: science

In My Hands Today…

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New Thinking: From Einstein to Artificial Intelligence, the Science and Technology that Transformed Our World – Dagogo Altraide

As each new stage of technology builds on the last, advancements start to progress at an exponential rate. In order to know where we’re headed, it’s essential to know how we got here. What hidden stories lie behind the technology we use today? What drove the men and women who invented it? What were those special moments that changed the world forever?

Dagogo Altraide explores these questions in a history of human innovation that reveals how new technologies influence each other, how our modern world came to be, and what future innovations might look like. From the electric world of Tesla and the steam engine revolution to the first computers, the invention of the internet, and the rise of artificial intelligence, New Thinking tells the stories of the men and women who changed our world with the power of new thought.

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The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny – Laura Bates

Misogyny is being hardwired into our future. Can we stop it?

We like to believe we’re moving closer to equality, riding the wave of technological progress into a brighter, fairer future. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lies a chilling truth: new technologies are not just failing to solve age-old inequalities—they’re deepening them.

In The New Age of Sexism, acclaimed author and activist Laura Bates exposes how misogyny is being coded into the very fabric of our future. From the biases embedded in artificial intelligence to the alarming rise of sex robots and the toxic dynamics of the metaverse, Bates takes readers on a shocking journey into a world where technology is weaponized against women.

This isn’t a dystopian warning about what might happen. It’s a harrowing account of what’s happening now and the dangers we face if we don’t act. With clarity and urgency, Bates reveals how these advancements are dragging society backward, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and jeopardizing decades of progress in the fight for gender equality.

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Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past – David Reich

A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history.

Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archaeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows listeners to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species.

Reich delves into how the genomic revolution is transforming our understanding of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal deep inequalities among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals.

Provocatively, Reich’s book suggests that there might very well be biological differences among human populations but that these differences are unlikely to conform to common stereotypes.

Drawing upon revolutionary findings and unparalleled scientific studies, Who We Are and How We Got Here is a captivating glimpse into humankind—where we came from and what that says about our lives today.

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Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World – Dorian Lynskey

For two millennia, Christians have looked forward to the end, haunted by the apocalyptic visions of the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation. But for two centuries or more, these dark fantasies have given way to secular stories of how the world, our planet, or our species (or all of the above) might come to an end.

Dorian Lynskey’s fascinating book explores the endings that we have read, listened to or watched over the last two dozen decades, whether they be by the death and destruction of a nuclear holocaust or collision with a meteor or comet, devastating epidemic or takeover by robots or computers.

The result is nothing less than a cultural history of the modern world, weaving together politics, history, science, high and popular culture in a book that is uniquely original, grippingly readable and deeply illuminating about both us and our times.

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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global – Laura Spinney

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today, those descendants constitute the world’s largest language family, the thread that connects disparate languages, such as Dante’s Inferno and the Rig Veda, to the love poetry of Rumi and The Lord of the Rings. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of the world’s population. How did this happen?

Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve those lost the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.