From the visionary founder of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, a manifesto for the dawning age of active materialsThings in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to r...

What if structures could build themselves or adapt to fluctuating environments? Skylar Tibbits, Director of the Self-Assembly Lab in the Department of Architecture at MIT, Cambridge, MA, crosses the boundaries between architecture, biology, materials science and the arts, to envision a world where material components can self-assemble to provide adapting structures and optimized fabrication solutions. The book examines the three main ingredients for self-assembly, includes interviews with ...

This audiobook narrated by Christopher Ragland delivers a manifesto for the dawning age of active materialsThings in life tend to fall apart. Cars break down. Buildings fall into disrepair. Personal items deteriorate. Yet today's researchers are exploiting newly understood properties of matter to program materials that physically sense, adapt, and fall together instead of apart. These materials open new directions for industrial innovation and challenge us to rethin...

Howard Sounes, the bestselling author of Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan and Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, turns his considerable reporting and storytelling skills to one of the most famous, talented—and wealthiest—men alive: Paul McCartney.Fab is the first exhaustive biography of the legendary musician; it tells Sir Paul's whole life story, from childhood to present day, from working-class Liverpool beginnings to the cultu...

The best-selling guide to network science, the revolutionary field that reveals the deep links between all forms of human social lifeA cocktail party. A terrorist cell. Ancient bacteria. An international conglomerate. All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. In Linked, Albert-László Barabási, the nation's foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, c...

K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology -- the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.Already, scientists have constructed prototypes for circuit boa...

Everything you ever need to know about making it as a scientist.Despite your graduate education, brainpower, and technical prowess, your career in scientific research is far from assured. Permanent positions are scarce, science survival is rarely part of formal graduate training, and a good mentor is hard to find.In A Ph.D. Is Not Enough!, physicist Peter J. Feibelman lays out a rational path to a fulfilling long-term research career. He offers sou...

"Hidalgo has made a bold attempt to synthesize a large body of cutting-edge work into a readable, slender volume. This is the future of growth theory." -- Financial TimesWhat is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's antidisciplinarian Cér Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands tr...

Reports from the cutting edge, where physics and biology are changing the fundamental assumptions of computing.Computers built from DNA, bacteria, or foam. Robots that fix themselves on Mars. Bridges that report when they are aging. This is the bizarre and fascinating world of Natural Computing. Computer scientist and Scientific American’s “Puzzling Adventures” columnist Dennis Shasha here teams up with journalist Cathy Lazere to explore the outer...

If a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, does it cause a tornado in Texas?Chaos theory attempts to answer such baffling questions. The discovery of randomness in apparently predictable physical systems has evolved into a science that declares the universe to be far more unpredictable than we have ever imagined.Introducing Chaos explains how chaos makes its presence felt in events from the fluctuation of animal populations to the ups and downs of the stock market. ...

We are leaving the Information Age and transitioning into the Shift Age, a time of transformation and change that offers both great risk and incredible opportunity. In Entering the Shift Age, David Houle identifies and explains the dynamics and forces that have shaped our world and will continue to reshape our world for the next 20 years. He shows how the Shift Age means a world fully global yet focused on the individual, where the speed of change is so fast that change itself is ...

In this increasingly digitized world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of fabrication. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, digital design remains a fluid concept, its development and current influence discussed in scattered articles.