INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Vaclav Smil is my favorite author." Bill Gates "How the World Really Works represents the highly readable distillation of this lifetime of scholarship Mr. Smil looks over the horizon of the future with humility and calmness, foreseeing 'a mixture of progress and setbacks, of seemingly insurmountable difficulties and near-miraculous advances.' Wall Street Journal An essential analysis of the modern science and technology...

In a far distant future, an enforcement agent named Quillon has been living incognito in the last human city of Spearpoint, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, his world is wrenched apart. For the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels, and with the dying body comes bad news--to save the angel's life, Quillon must leave his home and travel into the cold...

"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao--literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the...

"What if you once had a painful memory removed? And what if you were offered the chance to get it back? Tell Me an Ending follows four characters grappling with the question of what to remember-and what they hoped to forget forever. Finn, an Irish architect living in the Arizona desert, begins to suspect his charming wife of having an affair. Mei, a troubled grad school drop-out in Kuala Lumpur, wonders why she remembers a city she's never visited....

Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done. The conversion of energy on Earth ranges from terra-forming forces of plate tectonics to cumulative erosive effects of raindrops. Life on Earth depends on the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into plant biomass. Humans have come to rely on many more energy flows -- ranging from fossil fuels to photovoltaic generation of electricity -- for their civilized existence....

"Astonishingly photographed, and featuring unforgettable, cascading scores by Philip Glass, these are immersive sensory experiences that meditate on the havoc humankind's obsession with technological advancement has wreaked on our world"--Container.

From the perspective of space, this program traces mankind's journey from hunter-gatherer to dominant global species. With mind-bending data and CGI, the program shows how we have transformed our planet and produced a world of extraordinary complexity.

"Ubiquitous computational technologies will define our future, and this book takes the hopeful view that such technologies, properly designed, can enhance rather than diminish human agency. As people co-evolve with our technology, we can develop technological assistance to enhance our decision making and compensate for our biases: personalized medicine, intelligent romance, digital law, hybrid athletics, and cyberfinance offer compelling cases of...