ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.”Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.Fei-Fei’s adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities—and the extraordinary dangers—of the technology she loves.The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is—and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

"More than a history of science; it is a tour de force in the genre." —New York Times Book ReviewA dramatic new account of the parallel quests to harness time that culminated in the revolutionary science of relativity, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps is "part history, part science, part adventure, part biography, part meditation on the meaning of modernity....In Galison's telling of science, the meters and wires and epoxy and solder come alive as characters, along with physicists, engineers, technicians and others.…Galison has unearthed fascinating material" (New York Times).Clocks and trains, telegraphs and colonial conquest: the challenges of the late nineteenth century were an indispensable real-world background to the enormous theoretical breakthrough of relativity. And two giants at the foundations of modern science were converging, step-by-step, on the answer: Albert Einstein, an young, obscure German physicist experimenting with measuring time using telegraph networks and with the coordination of clocks at train stations; and the renowned mathematician Henri Poincaré, president of the French Bureau of Longitude, mapping time coordinates across continents. Each found that to understand the newly global world, he had to determine whether there existed a pure time in which simultaneity was absolute or whether time was relative.Esteemed historian of science Peter Galison has culled new information from rarely seen photographs, forgotten patents, and unexplored archives to tell the fascinating story of two scientists whose concrete, professional preoccupations engaged them in a silent race toward a theory that would conquer the empire of time.

Explore the miracles of the microscopic world.Find out all about the unique and beautiful kingdoms of life at a microscopic scale and how every organism meets the challenges of survival no matter its size. The perfect book for people who enjoy photography, nature and biology.Inside the pages of this exciting educational nature book, you'll find:- Microscopic life-forms (often neglected), and their life-forms in extreme close-ups, revealing details such as nerve cells and hair follicles.- Artworks support the beautiful images, providing a deeper insight into structure and function and building a picture of how living organisms work at a microscopic level. - Comprehensive coverage of the natural world, including all the main groups of living things.- Explores overlooked groups that have a huge role in the natural world: insects, which make up 80% of the world's animal species, and bacteria - of which there are more in a human mouth than there are people in the world.- The book is organized according to the main functions of life: movement, reproduction, energy and feeding, sensing the surroundings, defense, etc. - Optional 80-page section containing a catalog of the major kingdoms of life.The beauty of nature under a microscopeExplore the inhabitants of an invisible world in incredible detail with this book, which contains macro photography and spectacular microscope imagery. You'll have so much information about the hidden world of intricate structures beyond the naked eye. From the tiniest spiders and insects to even microscopic creatures like bacteria and viruses, this book contains it all!See the beauty of a pollen grain, a butterfly egg, the spore of a fungus and a human's nerve cell in extreme close up. The amazing imagery in Micro Life contains focus-stacked macro photographs and micrographs (microscope images), including scanning electron micrographs. Illustrations in this book explain the science - from the workings of an insect's eye to how a plant "breathes" through its leaves. Micro Life is an unexpectedly breathtaking look at the natural world. Find out how life works and how organisms solve the fundamental problems of movement, reproduction, energy, communication and defense. This book belongs on the bookshelves of schools, libraries and homes for those interested in photography, nature or biology.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • Memory is far more than a record of the past. In this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world’s top memory researchers reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma and healing."Why We Remember offers a radically new and engaging explanation of how and why we remember." —Dr. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep"Prominent neuroscientist and Guggenheim Fellow Charan Ranganath guides us through the science of our memories with incredible insight and clear science. He combines fascinating tales of the peculiarities of memory with practical, actionable steps. Not only will every reader remember better afterward, they’ll also never forget this life-changing book.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of Maladies and GeneA new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research. In Why We Remember, pioneering neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about the everyday act of remembering. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.Memory, Dr. Ranganath shows, is a highly transformative force that shapes how we experience the world in often invisible and sometimes destructive ways. Knowing this can help us with daily remembering tasks, like finding our keys, and with the challenge of memory loss as we age. What’s more, when we work with the brain’s ability to learn and reinterpret past events, we can heal trauma, shed our biases, learn faster, and grow in self-awareness.Including fascinating studies and examples from pop culture, and drawing on Ranganath’s life as a scientist, father, and child of immigrants, Why We Remember is a captivating read that unveils the hidden role memory plays throughout our lives. When we understand its power-- and its quirks--we can cut through the clutter and remember the things we want to remember. We can make freer choices and plan a happier future.

One of Smithsonian's Favorite Books of 2018One of Forbes's 2018 Best Books About Astronomy, Physics and MathematicsOne of Kirkus's Best Books of 2018 The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost 200 years later.Many of science's greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive "double-slit" experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton. Nearly a century later, Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles, and the experiment became key to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe.How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle exist before we look at it, or does the very act of looking create reality? Are there hidden aspects to reality missing from the orthodox view of quantum physics? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit?With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. Through Two Doors at Once is the most fantastic voyage you can take.

From the moon’s formation to its potential for future exploration, this richly illustrated volume presents 100 milestones in lunar history. This colorfully illustrated history chronicles the development, observation, and exploration of the moon. Astrobiologist and science writer David Warmflash takes us on a thought-provoking journey from the hypotheses of the Moon’s formation to predictions for building a lunar infrastructure. The story is told in 100 vivid and varied milestones and moments, including:Tidal forces slow Earth’s spin and push the Moon farther awayThe Greeks grasp why the Moon widens from a crescent to a full moon and shrinks to darknessEdmund Halley creates the science of geophysics and sets the stage for studying space radiationThe Moon proves Albert Einstein’s general relativity theoryThe successful Apollo 11 lunar landing paves the way for future science missionsA new generation of moon probes are launchedPraise for Moon“With this book, and its rich illustrations, astrobiologist David Warmflash weaves a tale of lunar geology and humanity’s relationship to the dusty orb.” —Space.com“This fine book should be considered required reading for armchair lunar explorers, young and old.” —Scott Parazynski, MD, NASA Space Shuttle astronaut (STS-66, 86, 95, 100, 120) and author of The Sky Below“This beautifully artistic book is filled with colorful images, delicate drawings, and fact-filled prose about the lunar body that influences our planet. Naturally, I enjoy the chapter “Beginnings of Lunar Field Science” revealing the Apollo 12 crew of Conrad, Gordon, and Bean’s contribution to the study of the Moon. But for me the book’s joy lies in learning about the moon myths of the Earth’s early civilizations. Moon: An Illustrated History is a valuable addition to my bookshelf, a terrestrial tool that I recommend to explorers, historians, and lovers of the Moon.” —Amy Sue Bean, daughter of moonwalker, astronaut, and artist Alan Bean, lunar module pilot on Apollo 12, commander on Skylab 3