This book is for anyone enthralled by the romantic dream of a voyage 'to the stars.' From our current viewpoint in the twenty-first century, crewed interstellar travel will be an exceptionally difficult undertaking. It will require building a spacecraft on a scale never before attempted, at vast cost, relying on unproven technologies. Yet somehow, through works of science fiction, TV and movies, the idea of human interstellar travel being easy or even inevitable has entered our popular con...

In 1944, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger published a groundbreaking little book called What Is Life? In fewer than one hundred pages, he argued that life was not a mysterious or inexplicable phenomenon, as many people believed, but a scientific process like any other, ultimately explainable by the laws of physics and chemistry.Today, more than sixty years later, members of a new generation of scientists are attempting to create life from the ground up. S...

This is the story of how the Smithsonian Institute became intertwined in a secret biological warfare project. During the 1960s, the Smithsonian Institution undertook a large-scale biological survey of a group of uninhabited tropical islands in the Pacific. It was one of the largest and most sweeping biological survey programs of all time, a six-year-long enterprise during which Smithsonian personnel banded 1.8 million birds, captured live specimens and took blood samples, ...

The first book to tell the shocking story of Golden Rice, a genetically modified grain that provides essential Vitamin A and can save lives in developing countries—if only they were allowed to grow it.Ordinary white rice is nutrient poor; it consists of carbohydrates and little else. About one million people who subsist on rice become blind or die each year from vitamin A deficiency. Golden Rice, which was developed in the hopes of combatting that problem by a team...

A Harvard biologist and master inventor explores how new biotechnologies will enable us to bring species back from the dead, unlock vast supplies of renewable energy, and extend human life.In Regenesis, George Church and science writer Ed Regis explore the possibilities of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation ...

In a destitute hospital in the crowded African city of Kikwit, townspeople, nurses, and doctors are dying of a gruesome disease at the rate of more than a dozen a day. Zaire is on the brink of an explosive epidemic - but the outbreak is stopped when experts from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta arrive in the city, reclaim the hospital, and interrupt the chain of virus transmission. With remarkable speed, the CDC's virus detectives trace the outbreak back to its first human ...

A New Yorker Best Book of the YearA breakthrough investigation of synthetic biology: the promising and controversial technology platform that combines biology and artificial intelligence and has the potential to program biological systems like we program computers.The breakthrough science of synthetic biology has the potential to help solve humanity’s existential challenges from climate change, to the health and feeding of millions...

The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy?A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled, and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary—among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation, and lowering the voting age to sixteen (the age at which you c...

A revolutionary guide to designing humane, eco-conscious homes, buildings, and cities of the future.It is estimated that the earth's population will expand to an unprecedented nine billion people over the next century. This explosion in population is predicted to place further stress on our environment, deplete our natural resources, and lead to increases in anxiety and depression due to overcrowding. In this visionary and uplifting book, Teresa Coady offers reader...

From former Vice journalist and executive producer of hit Netflix documentary Fyre comes an eye-opening look at the con artists, grifters and snake oil salesmen of the digital age—and why we can’t stop falling for them.We live in an age where scams are the new normal. A charismatic entrepreneur sells thousands of tickets to a festival that never happened. Respected investors pour ...

#1 bestselling author and acclaimed venture capitalist John Doerr reveals a sweeping action plan to conquer humanity’s greatest challenge: climate change.In 2006, John Doerr was moved by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and a challenge from his teenage daughter: “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.” Since then, Doerr has searched for solutions to this existential problem—as an investor, an advocate, and a philanthropist.Fif...

During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of the new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS's messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the gr...