Just saying the words Star Wars evokes images of whooshinglight sabers, Luke Skywalker's landspeeder racing above the sand,and epic battles between the forces of good and evil that takeplace in the farthest reaches of space. Star Wars: Where ScienceMeets Imagination explores how George Lucas's incredible use ofscience and technology may have presaged-and at times directlyinfluenced-the future of life on Earth and beyond. From commercial space flight and super-speed trains that levitateby magnetism to robot servants and microscopic nanorobots thatperform surgery internally, scientists inspired by Star Wars aretaking fictional ideas and turning them into reality. In the nexttwenty years, human soldiers will be outfitted like stormtroopers,impervious to chemical weapons and equipped with superhumanendurance. Such advances, while monumental, also raise huge ethicalquestions. The book gives voice to the scientists and creators ofthe technologies whose stories describe the complexities andconsequences

A veritable rock star in the book world some five centuriesafter his birth, Leonardo Da Vinci is a man for the ages. Millionsof readers hungrily ponder the mysteries behind his sketch-fillednotebooks, radical inventions, and enigmatic paintings. Thisstunning book, like no other on the market, explores the master’sinsights and synthesizes his relationship with art and science in amagnificently illustrated and informative style. Every pageresonates with Leonardo’s genius, demonstrated by his own art andwritings as well as modern diagrams and workable re-creations ofhis inventions. Physicist and artist Bulent Atalay, author of Math and the MonaLisa, deftly explains Leonardo’s interest in topics ranging fromarchitecture to botany to philosophy. Engaging prose and splendidimages point up the science and mathematics underlying Leonardo’sgenius, showing how attention to proportions, patterns, shapes, andsymmetries informed his art. The story flows chronologically, withquotations revealing the near-magical

Rental housing subsidy programmes have been an important partof the American welfare system since the 1930s. The Benefits ofSubsidized Housing Programs: An Intertemporal Approach is anempirical study of the distributive effects of the entire system ofrental housing subsidies for lower-income households based on anational sample. Using the 1977 Annual Housing Survey, ProfessorHammond has evaluated the benefits of all federal, state and localgovernment rental housing subsidy programmes taken as a wholeacross the nation. Additionally, she has estimated the changes inconsumption patterns resulting from these programmes and therelationship between household benefit and household income;household size; age, education, sex, and race of the head of thehousehold; and the geographic location of the household.

Promoters of multi-billion dollar land-use developmentmegaprojects systematically misinform parliaments, the public andthe media in order to get them approved and built. This book notonly explores these issues, but suggests practical solutionsdrawing on theory and scientific evidence from the several hundredprojects in twenty nations and five continents. It is of interestto students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politiciansand concerned citizens.

A groundbreaking book providing a new take on three ofcosmology’s most profound questions: What, if anything, came beforethe Big Bang? What is the source of order in our universe? What isthe universe’s ultimate future? Current understanding of our universe dictatesthat all matter will eventually thin out to zero density, with hugeblack holes finally evaporating away into massless energy. RogerPenrose—one of the most innovative mathematicians of our time—turnsaround this predominant picture of the universe’s “heat death,”arguing how the expected ultimate fate of our accelerating,expanding universe can actually be reinterpreted as the “Big Bang”of a new one. Along the way to this remarkable cosmologicalpicture, Penrose sheds new light on basic principles that underliethe behavior of our universe, describing various standard andnonstandard cosmological models, the fundamental role of the cosmicmicrowave background, and the key status of black holes. Intellectually thrilling and acc

From one of the most significant neuroscientists at worktoday, a pathbreaking investigation of a question that hasconfounded philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists forcenturies: how is consciousness created? Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying andwriting about how the brain operates, and his work has garneredacclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and thehumanistic. In Self Comes to Mind, he goes against thelong-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from thebody, presenting compelling new scientific evidence thatconsciousness—what we think of as a mind with a self—is to beginwith a biological process created by a living organism. Besides thethree traditional perspectives used to study the mind (theintrospective, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasiointroduces an evolutionary perspective that entails a radicalchange in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed andtold. He also advances a radical hypothesis regarding the o

Stephen Hawking's worldwide bestseller, "A Brief History ofTime", has been a landmark volume in scientific writing. Itsauthor's engaging voice is one reason, and the compelling subjectshe addresses is another: the nature of space and time, the role ofGod in creation, and the history and future of the universe. But itis also true that in the years since its publication, readers haverepeatedly told Professor Hawking of their great difficulty inunderstanding some of the book's most important concepts. This isthe origin of and the reason for "A Briefer History of Time": itsauthor's wish to make its content accessible to readers - as wellas to bring it up-to-date with the latest scientific observationsand findings. Although this book is literally somewhat 'briefer',it actually expands on the great subjects of the original. Purelytechnical concepts, such as the mathematics of chaotic boundaryconditions, are gone. Conversely, subjects of wide interest thatwere difficult to follow because they were interspersed thro

The New York Times bestselling author of Physics of theImpossible gives us a stunning and provocative vision of thefuture. Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s topscientists, who are already inventing the future in their labs,Kaku—in a lucid and engaging fashion—presents the revolutionarydevelopments in medi?cine, computers, quantum physics, and spacetravel that will forever change our way of life and alter thecourse of civilization itself. His astonishing revelations include: ? The Internet will be in your contact lens. It willrecog?nize people’s faces, display their biographies, and eventranslate their words into subtitles. ? You will control computers and appliances via tinysen?sors that pick up your brain scans. You will be able torearrange the shape of objects. ? Sensors in your clothing, bathroom, and appliances willmonitor your vitals, and nanobots will scan your DNA and cells forsigns of danger, allowing life ex

This book describes the new generation of discrete choicemethods, focusing on the many advances that are made possible bysimulation. Researchers use these statistical methods to examinethe choices that consumers, households, firms, and other agentsmake. Each of the major models is covered: logit, generalizedextreme value, or GEV (including nested and cross-nested logits),probit, and mixed logit, plus a variety of specifications thatbuild on these basics. Simulation-assisted estimation proceduresare investigated and compared, including maximum simulatedlikelihood, method of simulated moments, and method of simulatedscores. Procedures for drawing from densities are described,including variance reduction techniques such as anithetics andHalton draws. Recent advances in Bayesian procedures are explored,including the use of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and itsvariant Gibbs sampling. No other book incorporates all thesefields, which have arisen in the past 20 years. The procedures areapplicable in many fields