Beginning with Ben Franklin's kite and leading all the way to the current TV hit "American Idol," Hitt argues that the nation's love of self-invented obsessives has always driven the country to rediscover the true heart of the American dream.

The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools--machines that make machines....

Describes how a wide variety of things such as nursery rhymes, the national anthem, anesthesia, cellophane, raisins, and dynamite came into being.

This multi-generation, globe-trotting saga covers not only the entire gamut of wine making, but wine's place in a treacherously globalized and hyper-marketed world. From the billionaire power brokers of Napa Valley, to the aristocratic rivalries of competing Florentine dynasties, to the efforts of three generations of a Burgundian family fighting to preserve their few acres of land, MONDOVINO: THE SERIES brings to life the human drama (and comedy)...

Takes the reader on a journey into what Gerstein identifies as the central organizing construct for the future of civilization: the continued proliferation of technology. He proposes a method for gaining a better understanding of how technology is likely to evolve in the future, and considers three technologies that are now converging and will shape the future: biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and the "internet of things".

"A structural engineer examines the seven most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world"-- "Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale--and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string,...

"Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries, beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists--mostly...

The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British...

"From FSGO x Logic: a Stanford professor's spirited dismantling of Silicon Valley's intellectual origins"--

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call...