The government documents included in this book are comprised of reports and testimonies from June 2018 to September 2018 on research and development in the United States. The first report examines research and development projects started from 2010 through 2017 on advanced fossil energy. For over 100 years, three fossil fuel sources -- coal, oil and natural gas -- have made up at least 80% of total US energy consumption. While fossil fuels are associated with some negative environmental impacts a such as carbon dioxide emissions, the predominance of coal, oil and natural gas is likely to continue into the future. The second report focuses on considerations for maintaining US competitiveness in Quantum Computing, Synthetic Biology and other potentially transformational research advances. Federal support in such areas can accelerate innovation and drive technological advances and promote US competitiveness in the global economy. The third and final report focuses on additional actions needed to improve licensing of patented laboratory inventions. The GAO was asked to review agency practices for managing inventions developed at federal labs, with a particular focus on patent licensing. This report examines the challenges in licensing patents and steps take to address and report them.

This book describes twelve inventions that transformed the United States from a rural and small-town community to an industrial country of unprecedented power. These inventions demonstrate that no one person is ever responsible for technological advances and that the culture produces a number of people who work together to create each new invention. The book also shows the influences of technology on society and examines the beliefs and attitudes of those who partake in technological advances. The book is both a sociological analysis and a history of technology in the United States in the past two hundred years.

Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate, the notebook, the glassed-in beehive, and myriad other ingenious inventions designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete. Yet observation has almost never been considered as an object of historical inquiry in itself. This wide-ranging collection offers the first examination of the history of scientific observation in its own right, as both epistemic category and scientific practice. "Histories of Scientific Observation" features engaging episodes drawn from across the spectrum of the natural and human sciences, ranging from meteorology, medicine, and natural history to economics, astronomy, and psychology. The contributions spotlight how observers have scrutinized everything - from seaweed to X-ray radiation, household budgets to the emotions - with ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance verging on obsession. This book makes a compelling case for the significance of the long, surprising, and epistemologically significant history of scientific observation, a history full of innovations that have enlarged the possibilities of perception, judgment, and reason.

The Best Tool of the Millennium

The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." An award-winning author who once built a house using only hand tools, Rybczynski has intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- which serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.

In the corner of a Manchester laboratory in 2004, two scientists stumbled on a major discovery while pulling pieces of Sellotape apart - graphene. This is the story of those scientists, Professors Andre Geim and Kostya Novosolev, their eureka moment, subsequent Nobel Prizes and investigation into the wonder material's potential uses. But it is also the tale of the building they created with architects Jestico + Whiles and others to push graphene's potential ever further. This is the story of the National Graphene Institute. -- .

The story of how diesel engines and gas turbines, used to power cargo ships and jet airplanes, made today's globally integrated economy possible. The many books on globalization published over the past few years range from claims that the world is flat to an unlikely rehabilitation of Genghis Khan as a pioneer of global commerce. Missing from these accounts is a consideration of the technologies behind the creation of the globalized economy. What makes it possible for us to move billions of tons of raw materials and manufactured goods from continent to continent? Why are we able to fly almost anywhere on the planet within twenty-four hours? In Prime Movers of Globalization, Vaclav Smil offers a history of two key technical developments that have driven globalization: the high-compression non-sparking internal combustion engines invented by Rudolf Diesel in the 1890s and the gas turbines designed by Frank Whittle and Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain in the 1930s. The massive diesel engines that power cargo ships and the gas turbines that propel jet engines, Smil argues, are more important to the global economy than any corporate structure or international trade agreement. Smil compares the efficiency and scale of these two technologies to prime movers of the past, including the sail and the steam engine. The lengthy processes of development, commercialization, and diffusion that the diesel engine and the gas turbine went through, he argues, provide perfect examples of gradual technical advances that receive little attention but have resulted in epochal shifts in global affairs and the global economy.

From the ancient conquest of fire and the first turn of a wheel to the latest in scientific leaps toward the stars, this easy-access history offers a panoramic perspective on humankind's restless quest for the laws, theories, and tools by which we can grasp and master our universe.
This concise, concentrated, consistently organized look at our species' key scientific and innovative achievements spans all human history, presenting ten distinct eras from the first glimmers of intelligence to the cutting-edge technologies of the modern world. Within these intuitive divisions, all human scientific endeavors and achievement are divided into four general fields of inquiry and arrayed into four basic geocultural regions for easy comparison in a logical, systematic grid format highlighted by 350 photographs, maps, illustrations, and diagrams that add graphic emphasis to key information. Special two-page feature spreads explore the most revolutionary developments in greater depth; compelling, expertly composed essays and memorable quotations add sparkle; and informative sidebars provide specifically focused items of information about particular inventions, ideas, or themes. Completing this comprehensive approach, an extensive glossary explains unfamiliar terms, and a detailed index makes it a simple matter to follow a particular field or process from its origin through its complete cross-cultural evolution. This is a reference as usefully accessible as it is inherently fascinating.

This book contains fascinating vignettes depicting future societies and the implications which increasing technological change has on society and the environment. The topics discussed include nanotechnology, medicine, computational science, biotechnology, synthetic biology, and cognitive technology, among others in science. In addition, social norms, attitudes, and policy are also featured. The upshot of this combination is an entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking volume. The glimpses into future societies subsequent to the introduction and incorporation of various emerging technologies depict scenarios of how we view ourselves, how we view others, how we are viewed by others, how our surroundings are viewed, how our leaders and political structures are viewed, what our social and behavioral norms are, what our temperament/mood is, and so forth. The introduction features a focused discourse on current trends of the impacts of emerging technologies and the conclusion highlights where society should go from here.

Thanks to the ICT economy, today's world is witnessing a progressive process of transfer and movement from a society founded on the production of merchandise and material goods made by man to a new society driven by sciences and knowledge. This new society utilises human intelligence in an attempt to solve cultural problems, to support activities, to rationalize performance, to plan, to program, and to elaborate strategies and projects for the future.This book, thus, proposes a multifaceted framework where contemporary art, biology, the digital, geology, technology, physiology, chemistry and philosophy enter into debate and complete one another. It revolves around a number of questions which are logically interconnected, such as, "What is bio-art?" "Can a laboratory artist manipulate living things, make complex hybridizations, and give birth to chimeras that would coexist with human beings?" "Do we have the right to use them?" Should we authorize research that will allow the development of these techniques, prohibit it, or finance it?" "Do we have the right to create embryos for transplantation or injection?"