Washoe County Library System

It's the biggest revolution you've never heard of, and it's hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about high performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising...

From the acclaimed author of Tubes, a lively and surprising tour of the infrastructure behind the weather forecast, the people who built it, and what it reveals about our climate and our planetThe weather is the foundation of our daily lives. Its a staple of small talk, the app on our smartphones, and often the first thing we check each morning. Yet behind these quotidian interactions is one of the most expansive machines human beings have ever constructeda...

How things work or are manufactured: includes locks, clocks, scales for weighing, and cloth manufacture.

"You look like a thing and I love you" is one of the best pickup lines ever... according to an artificial intelligence trained by scientist Janelle Shane, creator of the popular blog AI Weirdness. She creates silly AIs that learn how to name paint colors, create the best recipes, and even flirt (badly) with humans--all to understand the technology that governs so much of our daily lives. We rely on AI every day for recommendations, for translations,...

Offers an up-to-date guide on the latest technology, procedures, and drugs available to women who are having difficulty conceiving, providing advice on how to make the right fertility choices.

"Do you spend hours every day on your smartphone or tablet? Reading the news, shopping for clothes, checking your email, and catching up on social media? Do you scroll through blog articles and text with your friends while waiting in line at the DMV or the grocery store, avoiding any chance interactions with actual human beings? If so, you arent alone. Most of us are stuck on a hedonic treadmill of push-button notifications, friend updates, and text...

How might we mitigate the evil consequences of technology and enhance the good? Using hypothetical and genuine examples of the advancement of science and technology (past, present and future), the author attempts to answer this question and examines the ethics involved. Dyson shows us where science and technology, real and imagined, may be taking us. The stories he tells-about "Napoleonic" versus "Tolstoyan" styles of doing science, the coming era...

"How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible-a guide for rebooting the world? Human...