'This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us?' - Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Gene We all assume we know what life is, but the more scientists learn about the living world - from protocells to brains, from zygotes to pandemic viruses - the harder they find it to locate the edges of life, where it begins and ends. What exactly does it mean to be alive? Is a virus alive? Is a foetus? Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can't answer that question here on earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society's most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead. Life's Edge is an utterly fascinating investigation by one of the most celebrated science writers of our time. Zimmer journeys through the strange experiments that have attempted to recreate life. Literally hundreds of definitions of what that should look like now exist, but none has yet emerged as an obvious winner. Lists of what living things have in common do not add up to a theory of life. It's never clear why some items on the list are essential and others not. Coronaviruses have altered the course of history, and yet many scientists maintain they are not alive. Chemists are creating droplets that can swarm, sense their environment, and multiply - have they made life in the lab? Whether he is handling pythons in Alabama or searching for hibernating bats in the Adirondacks, Zimmer revels in astounding examples of life at its most bizarre. He tries his own hand at evolving life in a test tube with unnerving results. Charting the obsession with Dr Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

As advances in disruptive technologies transform politics and increase the velocity of information and policy flows worldwide, the public is being confronted with changes that move faster than they can comprehend. There is an urgent need to analyze and communicate the ethical issues of these advancements. In a perpetually updating digital world, data is becoming the dominant basis for reality. This new world demands a new approach because traditional methods are not fit for a non-physical space like the internet. Applied Ethics in a Digital World provides an analysis of the ethical questions raised by modern science, technological advancements, and the fourth industrial revolution and explores how to harness the speed, accuracy, and power of emerging technologies in policy research and public engagement to help leaders, policymakers, and the public understand the impact that these technologies will have on economies, legal and political systems, and the way of life. Covering topics such as artificial intelligence (AI) ethics, digital equity, and translational ethics, this book is a dynamic resource for policymakers, civil society, CEOs, ethicists, technologists, security advisors, sociologists, cyber behavior specialists, criminologists, data scientists, global governments, students, researchers, professors, academicians, and professionals.

An Anthropogenic Table of Elements provides a contemporary rethinking of Dmitri Mendeleev's periodic table of elements, bringing together "elemental" stories to reflect on everyday life in the Anthropocene. Concise and engaging, this book provides stories of scale, toxicity, and temporality that extrapolate on ideas surrounding ethics, politics, and materiality that are fundamental to this contemporary moment. Examining elemental objects and forces, including carbon, mould, cheese, ice, and viruses, the contributors question what elemental forms are still waiting to emerge and what political possibilities of justice and environmental reparation they might usher into the world. Bringing together anthropologists, historians, and media studies scholars, this book tests a range of possible ways to tabulate and narrate the elemental as a way to bring into view fresh discussion on material constitutions and, thereby, new ethical stances, responsibilities, and power relations. In doing so, An Anthropogenic Table of Elements demonstrates through elementality that even the smallest and humblest stories are capable of powerful effects and vast journeys across time and space.

Social Impacts of Smart Grids: The Future of Smart Grids and Energy Market Design explores the significant, unexplored societal consequences of our meteoric evolution towards intelligent, responsive and sustainable power generation and distribution systems-the so-called 'smart grid'. These consequences include new patterns of consumption behavior, systems planning under increasing uncertainty, and the ever- growing complexities involved. The work covers the historical impact of the transformation, examines the changing role of production and consumption behavior, articulates the principles and options for socially responsible smart grid power market design, and explores social acceptance of the smart grid. Where relevant, it examines adjacent literatures from P2P electricity markets, electric vehicles, smart homes and smart cities, and related 'internet of energy' developments. Finally, it provides insights into mitigating the likely social consequences of our integrated low-carbon energy future.

Spiritual masters through the ages have devised methods different than those of science for investigating the great mystery of nature by, for example, immersing themselves in it, making use of silence, stillness, and solitude. The scientific and spiritual quests have been the two great quests of humanity, but somehow a feeling has developed that science is antagonistic to spirituality. Since the whole of reality is built up of both matter and consciousness, why should the quest for the understanding of order in the external world be antagonistic to the quest for the understanding of order in the inner world of our consciousness? Science and Spirituality for a Sustainable World brings together theories, methodologies, new ideas, experiences, and applications emphasizing the importance of both spirituality and skill for leadership and sustainable management, sensitizing leaders and management practitioners toward the spirituality-skill paradigm, skill-based leadership, and highlighting the role of spiritual values for environmental sustainability. Featuring a wide range of topics that focus on the relationship between spirituality and science such as spiritual education, management practices, and traditional wisdom, this book is essential for researchers, academicians, administrators, managers, professionals, policymakers, and students.

Authored by London-based Researcher from Imperial, Exponential Progress takes readers on a journey through over seven decades of progress, as technology has shaped and controlled everything from banking and business to education, medicine, and the very basis of the human genome. It is a must read for anyone look to learn about fascinating emerging technologies that will disrupt our lives over the next ten years. Humanity is progressing towards a world that will be dominated by the end-results the scientific inventions that will evolve over the next decade. Technological progress has accelerated over the past decade - it was slow and buggy at the beginning, but the rate of improvement is now exponential. The growth is accelerating faster than we could have ever imagined. From a business perspective, these ground-breaking technologies are expected to be the best investments for the next decade. That is why investors and entrepreneurs are tenacious to grow rapidly. But where did it all start? How far have we come in the past 70 years since we developed the first digital computer? Thousands of innovators are in the process of developing the building blocks of these technologies, that will radically grow over the next decade and potentially dominate the century. But now, civilisation has reached a point when this progress cannot be controlled. The author cuts to the core of what humanity has achieved since the invention of the digital computer, where the new jaw-dropping technological innovation will come from, and where the line is drawn between fact and fad. This nonfiction meticulously looks back at the history, analyse current progress and what the researchers have achieved until now. The author attempts to comprehend the need for advancement and in parallel, the potential over the next decade, and reflecting on the necessity of control. If you are interested in new technologies, this will be one of the best books to read. Prepared to be mind-blown with the ideas you are going to find. Farabi, the author of Exponential Progress, is the Head of Research at IntelXSys(TM) and working as one of the Research Experience Leads for Clinical Research and Innovation (CRI) module at the Imperial College London. He has worked with over 100 companies as a technology consultant and spoken at a number of international conferences around the world.

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Shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year Award 2019

'Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn't at least familarised themselves with Zuboff's central ideas.' - Zadie Smith, The Guardian

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us.

The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?

Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.

Urban Mobility and the Smartphone: Transportation, Travel Behavior and Public Policy provides a global synthesis of the transformation of urban mobility by the smartphone, clarifying the definitions of new concepts and objects in mobility studies, accounting for the changes in transportation and travel behavior triggered by the spread of the smartphone, and discussing the implications of these changes for policy-making and research. Urban mobility is approached here as a system of actors: the perspectives of individual behavior (including lifestyles), the supply of mobility services (including actors, business models), and public policy-making are considered. The book is based on an extensive review of the academic literature as well as systematic observation of the development of smartphone-based mobility services around the world. In addition, case studies provide practical illustrations of the ongoing transformation of mobility services influenced by the dissemination of smartphones. The book not only consolidates existing research, but also picks up on weak signals that help researchers and practitioners anticipate future changes in urban mobility systems. Key Features * Synthesizes existing research into one reference, providing researchers and policy-makers with a clear and complete understanding of the changes triggered by the spread of the smartphone. * Analyzes numerous case studies throughout developed and developing countries providing practical illustrations of the influence of the smartphone on travel behavior, transportation systems, and policy-making. * Provides insights for researchers and practitioners looking to engage with the "smart cities" and "smart mobility" discourse.