Showing results for "How to Human?" in Science & Engineering

In How to Create a Mind, Ray Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines. Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges, brain-computer interfaces, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence to address the world’s problems.

Be More Human explores the importance of reconnecting with our natural state and help us learn how to meet our true needs and live more naturally. Tony Riddle (@thenaturallifestylist) explores how the majority of us do not sit, breathe, eat, sleep or move as nature intended, and so we're actively going against our biology. This audiobook will help us all to reassess our habits and tap back into our natural rhythms and ways of being to optimise our mental and physical wellbeing, reduce stress, sit correctly, breathe better and improve our quality of sleep.

Best-selling author Brian Fagan brings early humans out of the deep freeze with his trademark mix of erudition, cutting-edge science, and vivid storytelling. Cro-Magnon reveals human society in its infancy, facing enormous environmental challenges - including a rival species of humans, the Neanderthals. For ten millennia, Cro-Magnons lived side by side with Neanderthals, an encounter that Fagan fills with drama.

By the time a baby is born, its brain is equipped with billions of intricately crafted neurons wired together through trillions of interconnections to form a compact and breathtakingly efficient supercomputer. Zero to Birth takes you on an extraordinary journey to the very edge of creation, from the moment of an egg's fertilization through each step of a human brain's development in the womb—and even a little beyond. As W. A. Harris guides you through the process of how the brain is built, he takes up the biggest questions that scientists have asked about the developing brain.

After seeing his own cells used to grow clumps of new neurons - essentially mini-brains - Philip Ball begins to examine the concepts of identity and consciousness. Delving into humanity's deep evolutionary past to look at how complex creatures like us emerged from single-celled life, he offers a new perspective on how humans think about ourselves.

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

In this groundbreaking book, Alanna Collen explores the extraordinary world of the powerful microbes that make up 90 percent of the human body. You are just 10 percent human. For every one of the cells that make your body, there are nine impostor cells. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but bacteria and fungi. You are not an individual but a colony of microbes. Far from being passive, the trillions of microbes that live on and in you are intimately involved in running your body.

Approximately 200,000 years ago, as modern humans began to radiate out from their evolutionary birthplace in Africa, Neanderthals were already thriving in Europe - descendants of a much earlier migration of the African genus Homo. But when modern humans eventually made their way to Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals suddenly vanished.

Stories mould who we are, from our character to our cultural identity. They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human.

Welcome to the age of the algorithm, the story of a not-too-distant future where machines rule supreme, making important decisions - in health care, transport, finance, security, what we watch, where we go, even whom we send to prison. So how much should we rely on them? What kind of future do we want? Hannah Fry takes us on a tour of the good, the bad and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us.

What is it that makes us human? Is it language, imagination, morality, or is it that we cook and wear shoes? Or perhaps we are less human than we think - Neanderthal and Denisovan genes can be found within all of us! Once again, New Scientist have all of the unexpected answers, and - just as they did for the universe in The Origin of (Almost) Everything - they take us on a tour around the human body and brain, taking in everything from evolution to email, from the Stone Age to Spotify.

Henry Mance sets out on a personal quest to see if there is a fairer way to share our planet with the other species who enrich our lives. He goes to work in an abattoir and on a pig farm, and meets chefs, hunters, activists, scientists and conservationists who want to redefine how we think about animals. Even on a planet shaped by human activity, we can find the space to allow other sentient beings to thrive - to put our love for animals into practice. This is not a book about what animals can do for us, but what we can do for animals.

Philip Ball has two brains… In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote the seminal work ‘Frankenstein’, an exploration of the consequences of rivalling God by building a human being using parts stolen from dead bodies. 101 years later, Philip Ball explored in his book ‘How to Grow A Human’ how science is moving us closer to a different possibility, unguessed in Shelley’s novel: not of building but of growing a human artificially. The book arose from Philip’s experience of having a "second brain" grown from his own cells in a lab in London. As a visiting scholar at Harvard, he takes us to Boston ...

Science helps us to understand ourselves in a world where we often feel like strangers - but what we know about the world around us, what has already been explored and discovered is only half of science's story. Unexplained will explore the frontier between what we do and don't know about the world: where knowledge meets mystery, complexity overwhelms certainty, and the vastness of our universe unspools the logic of science's established laws. Dr Camilla Pang will teach you to embrace the beauty in the unexplained and fall in love with the search for unknown answers.

How do you sniff out danger? What is a sense of direction or a gut instinct? You know about your five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. But recent research has shown that we actually have at least 32. We take our senses for granted but what would be possible if we properly understood how they all work? Award-winning science Writer Emma Young has spent over a decade finding out, and in Super Senses she takes us on an exhilarating sensory journey.

We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. How to Feel explores the scientific, physical, emotional, and cultural aspects of touch, reconnecting us to what is arguably our most important sense. Sushma Subramanian introduces listeners to the scientists whose groundbreaking research is underscoring the role of touch in our lives.

In the movies, robots can be terrifying. In reality, thinking machines are disrupting the world in ways that are even more disturbing than in Hollywood fantasies - but they also have the potential to change our lives for the better. In this stirring, visionary work, acclaimed roboticist Dr. Ayanna Howard explores how the tech world’s racial and sexual biases are infecting the next generation of Artificial Intelligence, with profoundly negative effects for humans of all genders and races.

Racist pseudoscience is on the rise - fueling hatred, feeding nationalism, and seeping into our discourse on everything from sports to intelligence. Even the well-intentioned repeat stereotypes based on "science", because cutting-edge genetics are hard to grasp - and all too easy to distort. Paradoxically, misconceptions are multiplying amid today's unprecedented surge of research on human genetics. We've never had a clearer picture of who we are and where we come from, and the science, when accurately understood, is a powerful and definitive ally against racism.

Having access to natural, green spaces is vital to our physical and mental wellbeing. But, as urban development spreads, grey has become the new green. Already, concrete outweighs every tree, bush and shrub on Earth. Nature deprivation is a fast-growing epidemic, harming the health and happiness of hundreds of millions of people worldwide - especially vulnerable and marginalized groups. To combat this, Nature Is a Human Right, founded by Ellen Miles in 2020, is working to make access to green space a recognised right for all, not a privilege.

In this world, the only thing that is not changing is change, itself. Some changes are gradual and not even noticeable; some changes are dramatic and have bigger impact on our lives. This book has actionable information on how to keep working, even as the age of artificial intelligence takes root in our everyday life.