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Nature and Science April 2019
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| Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith GriselIn Never Enough, Grisel reveals the unfortunate bottom line of all regular drug use: there is no such thing as a free lunch. All drugs act on the brain in a way that diminishes their enjoyable effects and creates unpleasant ones with repeated use. Yet they have their appeal, and Grisel draws on anecdotes both comic and tragic from her own days of using as she limns the science behind the love of various drugs, from marijuana to alcohol, opiates to psychedelics, speed to spice.
With more than one in five people over the age of fourteen addicted, drug abuse has been called the most formidable health problem worldwide, and Grisel delves with compassion into the science of this scourge. She points to what is different about the brains of addicts even before they first pick up a drink or drug, highlights the changes that take place in the brain and behavior as a result of chronic using, and shares the surprising hidden gifts of personality that addiction can expose. She describes what drove her to addiction, what helped her recover, and her belief that a “cure” for addiction will not be found in our individual brains but in the way we interact with our communities. |
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.
Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action.
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Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet
by Will Hunt
When Will Hunt was sixteen years old, he discovered an abandoned tunnel that ran beneath his house in Providence, Rhode Island. His first tunnel trips inspired a lifelong fascination with exploring underground worlds, from the derelict subway stations and sewers of New York City to sacred caves, catacombs, tombs, bunkers, and ancient underground cities in more than twenty countries around the world. Underground is both a personal exploration of Hunt’s obsession and a panoramic study of how we are all connected to the underground, how caves and other dark hollows have frightened and enchanted us through the ages.
In a narrative spanning continents and epochs, Hunt follows a cast of subterraneaphiles who have dedicated themselves to investigating underground worlds. He tracks the origins of life with a team of NASA microbiologists a mile beneath the Black Hills, camps out for three days with urban explorers in the catacombs and sewers of Paris, descends with an Aboriginal family into a 35,000-year-old mine in the Australian outback, and glimpses a sacred sculpture molded by Paleolithic artists in the depths of a cave in the Pyrenees. Each adventure is woven with findings in mythology and anthropology, natural history and neuroscience, literature and philosophy.
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Focus on: Artificial Intelligence
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| Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max TegmarkAn MIT professor's largely optimistic take on the future of AI -- and the ultimate fate of humans.
In conversational style, Life 3.0 presents an overview of the field of artificial intelligence, while addressing some of the social and ethical issues that accompany it. |
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| Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James BarratA sobering look at the existential threats humanity may face once ANI (artificial narrow intelligence) begets AGI (artificial general intelligence), which in turn will beget ASI (artificial superintelligence).
What does that even mean? Once machines reach human levels of intelligence, it's only a matter of time before they attain superintelligence -- and our inferior human brains can't even fathom how that will play out. |
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| Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence -- And Where It's Taking Us Next by Luke DormehlJournalist and documentary filmmaker Luke Dormehl surveys the field of artificial intelligence from its Cold War origins to the not-too-distant future.
Ray Kurzweil, writing for The New York Times, calls Dormehl "the rare lay person...who actually understands the science (and even the math) and is able to parse it in an edifying and exciting way." |
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| Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry KasparovIn 1997, world chess champion Garry Kasparov played against IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer -- and lost. Now, Kasparov examines the development of machine intelligence through the lens of chess, including a detailed and insightful post-mortem of his match with Deep Blue.
Reviewers say: this book reads like "an absorbing, page-turning thriller" (The Guardian). |
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Contact the Library for more great titles! |
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