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The merging of computer science and molecular biology, genetic codes and computer codes

As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge—life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.

An original exploration of the ways cyberspace affects human experience.

New technologies suggest new ideas about embodiment: our "reach" extends to global sites through the Internet; we enter cyberspace through the engines of virtual reality. In this book, a leading philosopher of technology explores the meaning of bodies in technology-how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world is affected by the various information technologies.

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region’s chief cash crop—tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. 

As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South—as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil’s lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region—those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

An accessible history of music technology from the earliest days to the present.

For more than forty thousand years, humans have been using technologies simple and complex to fashion instruments for making music, the earliest surviving examples being simple bone flutes. The first book to offer a history of western music through the lens of tools, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune explores the relationship between music and technology from the Paleolithic Age to the present day. Taking an expansive view of music technology, Deirdre Loughridge develops critical perspectives on on the ways the past is built into the present, the affordances and constraints of tools, and the trade-offs made in adopting one tool rather than another. By examining music-technological transitions from across history, including the violin, piano, cymbal, electric guitar, and synthesizer, Bone Flute to Auto-Tune shows how earlier eras have been built into later technologies, influencing not only the sound of our music but also how our tools can both help and hinder us. 

The result is a music history attuned to the possibilities that new technologies open up or reveal and those they foreclose or conceal, and that considers what is gained and lost in the transition from one technology to another. By identifying turning points and trade-offs, a long historical perspective enables us to see alternate paths along which music technologies might have developed, and to grapple with our own moment in the ongoing interplay between technological change and the enduring human need for music.

Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”

This book is a thorough documentation of tectonics in the Hong Kong construction industry. It looks at how buildings have been designed and built in a high-density city in a subtropical climate. Written in both Chinese and English, it covers almost all aspects of building materials and technology in Hong Kong with a succinct sequence that follows the construction process of a building project. The case studies in Chapter 3 brings together 16 local projects, which embrace a wide range of building types: from single-storey buildings to high-rise towers, from private development to public institutional construction, from office to residence, and provide invaluable information on the application of building materials and technology.

While it is intended primarily for students in architecture, surveying, and construction, Building Materials and Technology in Hong Kong is an indispensable reference for professionals and practitioners who are dealing with building design and construction. Those with a general interest in building construction will also find this highly illustrated book an interesting and engaging read.

Fabrics that are not only stain resistant but actually clean themselves. Airplane wings that change shape in midair to take advantage of shifts in wind currents. Hypodermic needles that use tiny serrations to render injections virtually pain free.

Though they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, in fact such inventions represent only the most recent iterations of natural mechanisms that are billions of years old—the focus of the rapidly growing field of biomimetics. Based on the realization that natural selection has for countless eons been conducting trial-and-error experiments with the laws of physics, chemistry, material science, and engineering, biomimetics takes nature as its laboratory, looking to the most successful developments and strategies of an array of plants and animals as a source of technological innovation and ideas. Thus the lotus flower, with its waxy, water-resistant surface, gives us stainproofing; the feathers of raptors become transformable airplane wings; and the nerve-deadening serrations on a mosquito’s proboscis are adapted to hypodermics.

With Bulletproof Feathers, Robert Allen brings together some of the greatest minds in the field of biomimetics to provide a fascinating—at times even jaw-dropping—overview of cutting-edge research in the field. In chapters packed with illustrations, Steven Vogel explains how architects and building engineers are drawing lessons from prairie dogs, termites, and even sand dollars in order to heat and cool buildings more efficiently; Julian Vincent goes to the very building blocks of nature, revealing how different structures and arrangements of molecules have inspired the development of some fascinating new materials, such as waterproof clothing based on shark skin; Tomonari Akamatsu shows how sonar technology has been greatly improved through detailed research into dolphin communication; Yoseph Bar-Cohen delves into the ways that robotics engineers have learned to solve design problems through reference to human musculature; Jeannette Yen explores how marine creatures have inspired a new generation of underwater robots; and Robert Allen shows us how cooperative behavior between birds, fish, and insects has inspired technological innovations in fields ranging from Web hosting to underwater exploration.

A readable, yet authoritative introduction to a field that is at the forefront of design and technology—and poised to become even more important in the coming decades as population pressures and climate change make the need for efficient technological solutions more acute—Bulletproof Feathers offers adventurous readers a tantalizing peek into the future, by way of our evolutionary past.