With Dr. Kaltenegger as our witty and knowledgeable tour guide, we discover not merely new continents, like the explorers of old, but whole new worlds circling other stars. This riveting account will appeal to anyone who has ever gazed at the night sky in wonder.
ALIEN EARTHS
The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
by Lisa Kaltenegger
St. Martin’s Press, April 2024
For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we are alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. What is life, actually? How do you find it over cosmic distances? And where are we the aliens? As director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University, astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger works with teams of tenacious scientists building the uniquely specialized tool kit to find life on alien worlds. In Alien Earths, she provides an insider’s view of what scientists are learning from Earth’s history and its astonishing biosphere. With an infectious enthusiasm, she takes us on an eye-opening journey to a dozen of the most unusual exoplanets that have shaken our worldview—planets covered in oceans of lava, lonely wanderers lost in space, and planets with more than one sun in the sky! And she dives into the worlds of science fiction, using these imagined other worlds to entertainingly describe how close they come to reality. With the James Webb Space Telescope, other smaller telescopes, and the pioneering work that Dr. Kaltenegger is carrying out in her labs, we live in an incredible epoch of exploration.
Lisa Kaltenegger is the Director of the Carl Sagan Institute to Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell and Associate Professor in Astronomy. She is a pioneer and world-leading expert in modeling potential habitable worlds and their detectable spectral fingerprint. Kaltenegger serves on the National Science Foundation’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC), and on NASA senior review of operating missions. She is a Science Team Member of NASA’s TESS Mission as well as the NIRISS instrument on James Webb Space Telescope. Kaltenegger was named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, an Innovator to Watch by TIME Magazine.
GOING NUCLEAR will be an exploration of the immense power in the centre of the atom, the areas of our world that it touches, and the potential it has to solve the biggest problems our species faces. The book retraces our relationship with nuclear through the Nuclear Revolution of the early 20th century and look towards the Nuclear Renaissance that could — and should — ensue over the coming decades. Gregory argues convincingly that there is no net zero without nuclear power.:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13983990/ctm_0607_HACKTIVISTS_480x360.1419969566.jpeg)
In November of 2022, a webpage was posted online with a simple text box. It was a chatbot called ChatGPT. OpenAI launched it quietly, letting anyone who registered experiment with the new tool. The word spread. ChatGPT was unlike anything people had experienced before. It was more human than a customer service agent, more convenient than a Google search. It could tell you where snowy owls lived or give you a recipe for French onion soup in plain language, as if a real person was writing the answer. It could give health advice and write letters of condolence. ChatGPT’s sister tool, called DALL-E 2, creates images from any text prompt. OpenAI wanted to combine those tools to make an even more powerful system that would create all kinds of content, like magic. In Supremacy, Parmy Olson, tech writer at Bloomberg, sharply alerts readers to the real threat of artificial intelligence: the silent, profit-driven spread of flawed-technology into industries, education and medicine. OpenAI and soon Google are selling their language models to law firms and consulting firms across the globe to help implement them into businesses. Despite the rush, nobody seems to know what the misinformation rate is for these tools or how many employees are behind the modeling.
Yes, the Universe is beautiful. And, despite all our scientific progress, it’s still pretty mysterious. But you know what? The Universe is also kind of an asshole.
There’s a lot of love for napping, and a lot of science that supports it, but … it has a bit of a bad reputation, even though it’s an important part of many cultures! So instead of celebrating them, they’re a secret obsession for many work-fromhomers or corporate (under-desk) nappers. But naps don’t have to be stigmatized any longer! SLOW DOWN, TAKE A NAP will reclaim the siesta as self-care, in a funny, quirky, and sweetly illustrated way.