"A fascinating inside look at NASA missions" that provides important insight on the organizational aspects of scientific collaboration ( American Journal of Sociology).In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA's robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system br...

In the years since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Opportunity first began transmitting images from the surface of Mars, we have become familiar with the harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape. But those images are much less straightforward than they may seem to a layperson: each one is the result of a complicated set of decisions and processes involving the large team behind the Rovers.With Seeing Like a Rover, Janet Vertesi takes us behind the s...

How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the “postphenomenological” philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical a...

New perspectives on digital scholarship that speak to today's computational realitiesScholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not sp...

A fresh approach to visualization practices in the sciences that considers novel forms of imaging technology and draws on recent theoretical perspectives on representation.Representation in Scientific Practice, published by the MIT Press in 1990, helped coalesce a long-standing interest in scientific visualization among historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science and remains a touchstone for current investigations in science and technology studie...

Science starts to get interesting when things don't make sense.Even today there are experimental results that the most brilliant scientists can neither explain nor dismiss. In the past, similar anomalies have revolutionised our world: in the sixteenth century, a set of celestial irregularities led Copernicus to realise that the Earth goes around the sun and not the reverse. In 13 Things That Don't Make Sense Michael Brooks meets thirteen modern-day anomalies that may becom...

"Top-notch science writing covering everything from the 1,000 species in the human gut to efforts to reverse-evolve a chicken into a dinosaur." — Kirkus ReviewsWith contributions from bestselling and award-winning writers including Jerome Groopman and Elizabeth Kolbert, this volume delves into such topics as the 2008 "Black Friday" stampede at a Long Island Walmart; an annual humans-vs.-AI competition; octopus intelligence; lab-grown meat; marauder ants; t...

A thrilling nonfiction tour of the cosmos that brings the universe down to Earth, from one of the all-time masters of science fiction.No one makes sense out of science like Isaac Asimov. Are you puzzled by pulsars? Baffled by black holes? Bewildered by the big bang? If so, here are succinct, crystal-clear answers to more than one hundred of the most significant questions about the essential nature of the universe—questions that have fired the imagination since the ...

_________________________THE ESSENTIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE SECOND MAN ON THE MOON_________________________'Thrilling ... years on, the raw facts of the adventure remain beguiling and the bravery of the astronauts compelling' - SUNDAY TIMES'Exciting and moving' - DAILY EXPRESS_________________________Buzz Aldrin, one of the th...

An "exciting" minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston ( The New York Times).On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in inco...

We prepare for it each evening, and spend half our lives in its embrace, yet night retains its mysteries. In ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT, author and poet Christopher Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm.Twelve chapters correspond to the twelve hours of an 'ideal' night, starting at 6pm and ending at 6am, and serve as points of departure for night's central themes; from sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, ...

Although Samuel Colt died in 1862 at age 47, he had lived a remarkably full life, one filled with enough controversy, calamity, failure and success to fill several novels. And, at the time, he was America's wealthiest inventor. Colt's widow took over the reins of the Colt Armory, memorialized Colt's name in American mythology, sanitized his foibles and misdeeds, and oversaw the amazing growth of the largest private armory in the world. Although Henry Ford is recognized for introducing th...