Showing titles in Innovations

Sunday Times best-selling author of A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, teams up with The Science Museum to celebrate the ideas and inventions of the incurably curious.

This audiobook will help you get ready for the changes coming in the years ahead. Listen now. Packed with expert insights, the book addresses critical questions: How will AI alter employment, education, and global geopolitics? What ethical dilemmas will arise as humans interlace with AI through cyborgs and synthetic biology? Can we prepare for superintelligence and its utopian—or dystopian—outcomes?

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

Are you drowning in endless tasks? Stuck using outdated tools that make your workday drag on forever? Does the mere mention of AI make you feel like you're lost in a sci-fi thriller you don't understand? Take a deep breath. You don't have to be a tech guru to harness the game-changing powers of AI and ChatGPT. You're just one listen away from demolishing the barriers that prevent you from unlocking a wealth of new skills and opportunities.

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don't we have a lunar colony already? In this witty and entertaining audiobook, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith give us a snapshot of the transformative technologies that are coming next - from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered toasters - and explain how they will change our world in astonishing ways. By weaving together their own research and interviews with pioneering scientists, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed and how they would work.

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

In Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy, the revolutionary, acclaimed book, radio series and podcast, best-selling economist Tim Harford introduced us to a selection of 50 radical inventions that changed the world. Along the way he entertained us with a myriad of great stories and revealed some of the most surprising landmarks in our history.

Nichol tells the remarkable tale of how the ejection seat was first conceived during the Second World War as countless lives were lost in accidents and in battle. In the wake of the war, that technological race to save aircrew lives using explosive seats continued at an incredible pace. Nichol tells the story of the brave men who risked their lives testing those early devices, and interviewed the first British pilot to eject back in 1949, when ejection, from pulling the handle to being under the parachute, took thirty seconds. Today, that figure is down to around one second.

Longlisted for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2007.
How much should you pay for a return trip to the moon? How are Winnie the Pooh and the artificial heart related? Did teenagers exist before 1950? If not, who invented them? James May's 20th Century answers all these questions and more.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Philosophe passionné par les grandes questions de notre temps, Luc Ferry décrypte les nouveaux enjeux de l’intelligence artificielle en convoquant les plus grands esprits, de Spinoza à Hegel en passant par Kant et Heidegger. Une révolution est en marche, et peu de gens s’en aperçoivent : l’IA est en train de profondément changer le monde. Avec clarté et profondeur, Luc Ferry explore les promesses et les limites de cette technologie fascinante, qui imite la pensée à la perfection.

In Nuts and Bolts, award-winning engineer and broadcaster Roma Agrawal deconstructs our most complex feats of engineering into seven fundamental inventions: the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump. Each of these objects is itself a wonder of design, the result of many iterations and refinements. Together, they have enabled humanity to see the invisible, build the spectacular, communicate across vast distances, and even escape our planet.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson, read by George Newbern. From Steven Johnson, the best-selling author of Where Good Ideas Come From, comes How We Got to Now, which tracks the surprising inspirations and unexpected consequences of the most influential innovations.

A detailed look into ancient advanced technology, science, and medicine - some of which has yet to be reproduced today.

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly: Wilbur and Orville Wright.

On December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright's Wright Flyer became the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard. The Age of Flight had begun. How did they do it? And why?

The workshop revolutionaries who made our world have never had the attention afforded the political revolutionaries who founded this nation. But it has been these innovators, in small-town attics and on the Mississippi, in Silicon Valley and the wheat fields of Kansas, in a Black woman's beauty parlor and a Dayton bicycle shop, who set America on a course to attain a standard of living unprecedented in the history of the world.

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike—and nearly everyone does. In Two Wheels Good, writer and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dreamlife, and a flashpoint in culture wars for more for than 200 years.

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. It is innovation that will shape the 21st century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike. Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan.

Professor Damon Centola is the world expert in the new science of networks. His ground-breaking research across areas as disparate as voting, health, technology and finance has highlighted powerful and highly effective new ways to ensure lasting change. In this book, Centola distils more than a decade of deep experience into a fascinating new theory that challenges previous assumptions that new ideas are either contagious or not.