Imagine a world where your brain can be interrogated to learn your political beliefs, thought crimes are punishable by law, and your own feelings can be used against you. Where perfumers create customized fragrances to perfectly suit your emotions, and social media titans bypass your conscious mind to hook you to their products. A world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, and the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories or cure addictions.
Neuroscience has already made all of the above possible today, and neurotechnology will soon become the universal controller for all of our interactions with technology. This can benefit humanity immensely, but without safeguards, it can severely threaten our fundamental human rights to privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination. Companies, governments, and militaries are all in: from contemplative neuroscience to consumer-based EEG technology, there have never been more ways to hack and track our brains.
The Battle for Your Brain by Nita A. Farahany dives deeply into the promises and perils of the coming dawn of brain access and alteration. Written by one of the world's foremost experts on neuroscience as it intersects with law and ethics, this highly original book offers a pathway forward to navigate the complex ethical dilemmas that neurotechnology presents, which will fundamentally impact our freedom to understand, shape, and define ourselves.
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family — past and present — is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?
Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
In The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer compellingly lays out the case for why and how we can take action to provide immense benefit to others, at minimal cost to ourselves. Using ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving, he shows that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. And he provides practical recommendations of charities proven to dramatically improve, and even save, the lives of children, women and men living in extreme poverty.
The Life You Can Save teaches us to be a part of the solution, helping others as we help ourselves.
It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignment--find them and then retire them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!
By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They've even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected.
Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and retire them. But when cornered, androids fight back--with lethal force.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a groundbreaking book by Michael Pollan, one of America's most fascinating, original, and elegant writers. Pollan turns his omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. This question has confronted humanity since the discovery of fire, but how we answer it today may determine our very survival as a species.
Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal. He develops a definitive account of the American way of eating, taking readers from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds. He emphasizes our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the plant and animal species we depend on.
Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest. He explains how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, contending that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do.
Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.
The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is a groundbreaking book by Michael Pollan, one of America's most fascinating, original, and elegant writers. Pollan turns his omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. This question has confronted humanity since the discovery of fire, but how we answer it today may determine our very survival as a species.
Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal. He develops a definitive account of the American way of eating, taking readers from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds. He emphasizes our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the plant and animal species we depend on.
Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest. He explains how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance. The surprising answers Pollan offers have profound political, economic, psychological, and moral implications for all of us. Ultimately, The Omnivore's Dilemma is a book as much about visionary solutions as it is about problems, contending that, when it comes to food, doing the right thing often turns out to be the tastiest thing an eater can do.
Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore's Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.
Digital Fortress is a techno-thriller novel written by American author Dan Brown. The book explores the theme of government surveillance of electronically stored information on the private lives of citizens, and the possible civil liberties and ethical implications of using such technology.
When the NSA's invincible code-breaking machine encounters a mysterious code it cannot break, the agency calls its head cryptographer, Susan Fletcher, a brilliant, beautiful mathematician. What she uncovers sends shock waves through the corridors of power. The NSA is being held hostage—not by guns or bombs—but by a code so complex that if released would cripple U.S. intelligence.
Caught in an accelerating tempest of secrecy and lies, Fletcher battles to save the agency she believes in. Betrayed on all sides, she finds herself fighting not only for her country but for her life, and in the end, for the life of the man she loves.
A pilot stranded in the desert awakes one morning to see, standing before him, the most extraordinary little fellow. "Please," asks the stranger, "draw me a sheep." And the pilot realizes that when life's events are too difficult to understand, there is no choice but to succumb to their mysteries. He pulls out pencil and paper... And thus begins this wise and enchanting fable that, in teaching the secret of what is really important in life, has changed forever the world for its readers.
Few stories are as widely read and as universally cherished by children and adults alike as The Little Prince. It will capture the hearts of readers of all ages.