Carbon Queen

Carbon Queen PDF

Author: Maia Weinstock

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-03-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0262545977

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The life of trailblazing physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, who expanded our understanding of the physical world. As a girl in New York City in the 1940s, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus was taught that there were only three career options open to women: secretary, nurse, or teacher. But sneaking into museums, purchasing three-cent copies of National Geographic, and devouring books on the history of science ignited in Dresselhaus (1930–2017) a passion for inquiry. In Carbon Queen, science writer Maia Weinstock describes how, with curiosity and drive, Dresselhaus defied expectations and forged a career as a pioneering scientist and engineer. Dresselhaus made highly influential discoveries about the properties of carbon and other materials and helped reshape our world in countless ways—from electronics to aviation to medicine to energy. She was also a trailblazer for women in STEM and a beloved educator, mentor, and colleague. Her path wasn’t easy. Dresselhaus’s Bronx childhood was impoverished. Her graduate adviser felt educating women was a waste of time. But Dresselhaus persisted, finding mentors in Nobel Prize–winning physicists Rosalyn Yalow and Enrico Fermi. Eventually, Dresselhaus became one of the first female professors at MIT, where she would spend nearly six decades. Weinstock explores the basics of Dresselhaus’s work in carbon nanoscience accessibly and engagingly, describing how she identified key properties of carbon forms, including graphite, buckyballs, nanotubes, and graphene, leading to applications that range from lighter, stronger aircraft to more energy-efficient and flexible electronics.

Arlene, the Rebel Queen

Arlene, the Rebel Queen PDF

Author: Carol Liu

Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1937110508

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It's tough to save a friendship while you're busy saving the planet

Scientific Journeys

Scientific Journeys PDF

Author: H. Frederick Dylla

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-09-26

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 3030558002

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This collection of essays traces a scientific journey bookmarked by remarkable mentors and milestones of science. It provides fascinating reading for everyone interested in the history, public appreciation, and value of science, as well as giving first-hand accounts of many key events and prominent figures. The author was one of the “sputnik kids” growing up in the US at the start of the space age. He built a working laser just two years after they were first invented, an experience that convinced him to become a physicist. During his 50-year career in physics, many personalities and notable events in science and technology helped to form his view of how science contributes to the modern world​, including his conviction that the impact of science can be most effective when introduced within the context of the humanities - especially history, literature and the arts. From the Foreword by former U.S. Congressman, Rush D. Holt: In this volume, we have the wide-ranging thoughts and observations of Fred Dylla, an accomplished physicist with an engineer’s fascination for gadgets, a historian’s long perspective, an artist’s aesthetic eye, and a teacher’s passion for sharing ideas. Throughout his varied career [...] his curiosity has been his foremost characteristic and his ability to see the connection between apparently disparate things his greatest skill. [...] Here he examines the roots and growth of innovation in examples from Bell Laboratories, Edison Electric Light Company, and cubist painter Georges Braque. He considers the essential place of publishing in science, that epochal intellectual technique for learning how the world works. He shows the human enrichment and practical benefits that derive from wise investments in scientific research, as well as the waste resulting from a failure to embrace appropriate technologies.

Carbon

Carbon PDF

Author: Kate Ervine

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2018-10-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1509501150

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Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done? In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.

Terra Forma

Terra Forma PDF

Author: Frederique Ait-Touati

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-02-01

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0262046695

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Charting the exploration of an unknown world—our own—with a new cartography of living things rather than space available for conquest or colonization. This book charts the exploration of an unknown world: our own. Just as Renaissance travelers set out to map the terra incognito of the New World, the mapmakers of Terra Forma have set out to rediscover the world that we think we know. They do this with a new kind of cartography that maps living things rather than space emptied of life and available to be conquered or colonized. The maps in Terra Forma lead us inward, not off into the distance, moving from the horizon line of conventional cartography to the thickness of the ground, from the global to the local. Each map in Terra Forma is based on a specific territory or territories, and each tool, or model, creates a new focal point through which the territory is redrawn. The maps are “living maps,” always under construction, spaces where stories and situations unfold. They may map the Earth’s underside rather than its surface, suggest turning the layers of the Earth inside out, link the biological physiology of living inhabitants and the physiology of the land, or trace a journey oriented not by the Euclidean space of GPS but by points of life. These speculative visualizations can constitute the foundation for a new kind of atlas.

Carbon Blues

Carbon Blues PDF

Author: Mike Mason

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2020-04-16

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0228002176

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Climate change is the most serious crisis of our time. As history is being written in fire in California and Greece, in the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and in the melting ice of the Arctic and Antarctica, Carbon Blues demystifies current debates on climate change, discussing everything from carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere caused by cars, coal, and oil to global warming and worsening natural disasters. A detailed examination of the history of climate change and its present and future consequences, Carbon Blues traces the essential economic importance of coal in the nineteenth century and oil in the twentieth, emphasizing the role of the automobile and the internal combustion engine in the dereliction of our planet. Exposing campaigns to mislead the public, Mike Mason reveals that the fatal consequences of CO2 and NO2 have been widely known for decades but successfully discounted and manipulated by the carbon lobby led by Exxon, BP, figures such as the Koch brothers, and democratically elected governments. The book underlines the disturbing truth: that despite current attempts to remediate climate change, the harm already done - melting polar ice and the warming and rising of the seas - will be virtually irreversible. As the fight against climate change comes to a head, Carbon Blues searches for fruitful ways forward.

Mad by the Millions

Mad by the Millions PDF

Author: Harry Yi-Jui Wu

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0262045389

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The World Health Organization's post-World War II work on the epidemiology and classification of mental disorders and its vision of a "world psyche." In 1946, the World Health Organization undertook a project in social psychiatry that aimed to discover the epidemiology and classification of mental disorders. In Mad by the Millions, Harry Y-Jui Wu examines the WHO's ambitious project, arguing that it was shaped by the postwar faith in technology and expertise and the universalizing vision of a "world psyche." Wu shows that the WHO's idealized scientific internationalism laid the foundations of today's highly highly metricalized global mental health system.

Power after Carbon

Power after Carbon PDF

Author: Peter Fox-Penner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0674245628

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As the electric power industry faces the challenges of climate change, technological disruption, new market imperatives, and changing policies, a renowned energy expert offers a roadmap to the future of this essential sector. As the damaging and costly impacts of climate change increase, the rapid development of sustainable energy has taken on great urgency. The electricity industry has responded with necessary but wrenching shifts toward renewables, even as it faces unprecedented challenges and disruption brought on by new technologies, new competitors, and policy changes. The result is a collision course between a grid that must provide abundant, secure, flexible, and affordable power, and an industry facing enormous demands for power and rapid, systemic change. The fashionable solution is to think small: smart buildings, small-scale renewables, and locally distributed green energy. But Peter Fox-Penner makes clear that these will not be enough to meet our increasing needs for electricity. He points instead to the indispensability of large power systems, battery storage, and scalable carbon-free power technologies, along with the grids and markets that will integrate them. The electric power industry and its regulators will have to provide all of these, even as they grapple with changing business models for local electric utilities, political instability, and technological change. Power after Carbon makes sense of all the moving parts, providing actionable recommendations for anyone involved with or relying on the electric power system.

EcoQueen

EcoQueen PDF

Author: Joanna Measer Kanow

Publisher: Sea of Trees Publishing

Published: 2021-04-22

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9781736598702

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A superhero with the powers to reverse global warming is finally stepping in. Her name is EcoQueen. What would you do if you possessed superpowers that could help reverse the devastating effects of climate change? This is the question asked and answered by seventeen-year-old Kora, who steps into the daunting role of EcoQueen as she combats the worst villain of our time. Empowered by her abilities, Kora sets out on a mission to protect the people and ecosystems threatened by rising sea levels, catastrophic weather events, long-lasting droughts, and blazing wildfires across the globe. As young Kora learns to control her fantastic gifts, she realizes the impact of environmental changes caused by humans, fossil fuels, and pollution. With help from her autistic twin brother, Río, Kora embraces her destiny as EcoQueen, the superhero of a new generation, whom the world so desperately needs. While Kora begins her epic journey across the planet to battle the destructive forces of climate change, she must also solve the mystery of the miraculous sacred seeds-which may just hold the secret to stopping global warming once and for all.

The Continued Exercise of Reason

The Continued Exercise of Reason PDF

Author: Brendan Dooley

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0262535009

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Lectures, many never before published, that offer insights into the early thinking of the mathematician and polymath George Boole. George Boole (1815–1864), remembered by history as the developer of an eponymous form of algebraic logic, can be considered a pioneer of the information age not only because of the application of Boolean logic to the design of switching circuits but also because of his contributions to the mass distribution of knowledge. In the classroom and the lecture hall, Boole interpreted recent discoveries and debates in a wide range of fields for a general audience. This collection of lectures, many never before published, offers insights into the early thinking of an innovative mathematician and intellectual polymath. Bertrand Russell claimed that “pure mathematics was discovered by Boole,” but before Boole joined a university faculty as professor of mathematics in 1849, advocacy for science and education occupied much of his time. He was deeply committed to the Victorian ideals of social improvement and cooperation, arguing that “the continued exercise of reason” joined all disciplines in a common endeavor. In these talks, Boole discusses the genius of Isaac Newton; ancient mythologies and forms of worship; the possibility of other inhabited planets in the universe; the virtues of free and open access to knowledge; the benefits of leisure; the quality of education; the origin of scientific knowledge; and the fellowship of intellectual culture. The lectures are accompanied by a substantive introduction by Brendan Dooley, the editor of the volume, that supplies biographical and historical context.