[ad_1] Workman Excerpted from How to Astronaut: An Insider’s Guide to Leaving Planet Earth by Terry Virts (Workman). © 2020. For all the emergency training I went through as an astronaut, I never expected to be holed up in the Russian segment of the ISS, the hatch to the US segment sealed, with my crew waiting and […]
Category: hittingthebooks
Hitting the Books: How social media keeps us clicking
[ad_1] Your Brain on Social Media So our brains are wired to process social signals. What then happens to our brains on social media? Neuroscientists at UCLA wanted to know, so they created an Instagram-style app to study how the brain reacts when we scroll through photos in our Instagram feed. The app displayed a […]
Hitting the books: How China uses AI to influence its 1.4 billion citizens
[ad_1] BenBella Books Excerpted with permission from T-Minus AI: Humanity’s Countdown to Artificial Intelligence and the New Pursuit of Global Power (BenBella Books, 2020) With the advance of twenty-first-century technology, the watchful eye of the Communist Party’s authority has become even more penetrating. Digital methods of censorship, surveillance, and social control have become unavoidable, integral parts of […]
Hitting the Books: Lessons learned from gaming with the King of Sweden
[ad_1] I looked at the email in slight disbelief. (In my head it came with an appropriately elaborate font.) Dear Managing Director David Polfeldt, Would you be so kind as to give his Royal Majesty a tour of your company? The King of Sweden? Really?! When did a video game studio become eligible for an […]
Hitting the Books: Big Tech turns your every move into profit
[ad_1] Is the fact that internet firms have overtaken the Western media ecosystem actually bad for our society? Perhaps it is for the best, in that it breaks the more traditional centralization of content creation? In fact, most of the appeal of social media originates from its capacity to connect us with issues and ideas […]
Hitting the Books: This $80 prosthetic has helped millions walk again
[ad_1] Penguin Random House From WHAT CAN A BODY DO: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren published on August 18, 2020 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 Sara Hendren. One of the largest public hospitals in Asia is in the […]
Hitting the Books: Volcanoes, mortal enemy of the mighty telescope
[ad_1] Every observer who’s spent any time in Chile has been through at least one small earthquake. Telescopes actually have something of an interesting quirk when it comes to these tremors: they’re pointed so incredibly carefully and kept so incredibly still that even the tiniest and earliest shake of an earthquake can show up dramatically […]
Hitting the Books: Why we’ll never see the edge of the universe
[ad_1] The present-day observable universe is probably bigger than you think. The “observable” part refers to the region within our particle horizon. We define this as being the farthest we could possibly see, given the limitations of the speed of light and the age of the universe. Since light takes time to travel, and more […]
Hitting the Books: Why women make better astronauts
[ad_1] On February 2, 1960, Look magazine ran a cover story that asked “Should a Girl Be First in Space?” It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And, as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other […]
Hitting the Books: America needs a new public data system
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto by Julia Lane. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020. On sale as an ebook now. On sale in print 9/1/2020. Nowadays when people have an appointment to go to across town, their calendar app obligingly predicts how long it’s going to take […]