検索キーワード： 制作 "Audible Studios" 科学・工学

Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph - so why is it so little understood? Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense.

Nützliche Mitbewohnerinnen, Ekelobjekte oder verblüffende Wesen? An Spinnen scheiden sich die Geister. Von manchen bewundert für ihre kunstvollen Netze und das Archaische ihrer Erscheinung, von anderen gefürchtet. Aber warum ist das so? Dieses Buch dringt tief in das Beziehungsgeflecht von Spinnen und Menschen vor. Es zeigt den Einfluss der Spinnen auf unsere Sprache, Wissen, Träume und Geschichte. Warum verglich man Napoleon mit einer Spinne? Wie prägte die christliche Symbolik die Abneigung gegenüber Spinnen? Und wieso wurden gleich drei Weltraummissionen von Spinnen begleitet?

2016年3月に筆者はアメリカ・サンフランシスコに出張した。出かける前後、日本で話題になっていたのが、Googleが開発した囲碁用AI「AlphaGo」と、囲碁の世界チャンピオン・李世ドルの対決だ。アメリカでは日本ほど話題になっていないようだが、そこは囲碁というゲームに対する認知度というか、注目度の差かな、と思う。筆者は囲碁にはさほど詳しくない。弱いながら、将棋とチェスはそこそこわかるが、囲碁はルールを知っている程度。場の展開の有利・不利がどうにも見通せない、というレベルに過ぎない。だが、囲碁というゲームの複雑さや、先を読むことの難しさを思うと、ここまでの囲碁用AIが作れたことには、感嘆を禁じえない。囲碁は、ゲーム理論の世界では「二人ゼロサム有限確定完全情報ゲーム」と呼ばれる。意思決定に関わる情報のすべてが盤面に存在するため、コンピュータにとっては比較的与し易いものとされ、AI研究の初期から研究が続けられてきた。それでも囲碁と将棋は難しく、プロに確実に勝つソフトを作るのは、一つの目標とされてきた。(本文より)小寺・西田の「金曜ランチビュッフェ　はこちらから→http://yakan-hiko.com/kode-nishi.html

Unser Handeln als Konsumenten, Produzenten und Investoren zerstört die natürliche und soziale Umwelt. Ohne es zu merken, töten wir Menschen. Der Ökonom Jakob Thomä legt den Finger in die Wunde: Wie ein Detektiv sammelt er Indizien, besichtigt Tatorte und ermittelt Verdächtige. Seine harte Beweisaufnahme führt ihn zu neuen Antworten auf die Frage, wie die Menschheit zukunftsfähig wird. "Der Kill-Score" erzählt mit einem radikalen Realismus die Geschichte von den tödlichen Folgen unseres Handelns.

ダイソンが掃除機や扇風機で蓄積してきたノウハウを活かして参入した“ヘアドライヤー”という新しい事業領域。その高価格（4万5000円）が話題だ。高価だけに、SNSのタイムラインで検索をすると、本当にその価値があるのか？という視点での話題が拡がっている。 また、高価格を肯定するために、必要以上に広告やPRで消費者をミスリードするメッセージを出しすぎているのではないか？　という意見もあった。家電ベンチャーCEREVOを経営する友人の岩佐氏は「618gのドライヤなんて軽くないぞ！　メディアよ、ダイソンのPR戦略に踊らされるな！ ...という話」というブログを書いていた。 ダイソンの製品は悪くないが、そのPR戦略の踊らされているマスコミはおバカであるという指摘だ。実際にお馬鹿な記事が大量にあるかどうかはともかく、ダイソンが“消費者を踊らせるPR戦略”をしているかというと、まったくそんなことはない。(本文より) 本田雅一　続・モバイル通信リターンズはこちらから→http://yakan-hiko.com/honda.html

On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of Northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than 18,000 people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned. It was Japan's greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.

The periodic table is one of the most potent icons in science. It lies at the core of chemistry and embodies the most fundamental principles of the field. The one definitive text on the development of the periodic table by van Spronsen (1969), has been out of print for a considerable time. The present book provides a successor to van Spronsen, but goes further in giving an evaluation of the extent to which modern physics has, or has not, explained the periodic system. The book is written in a lively style to appeal to experts and interested lay-persons alike.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Heisenberg’s role in the Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within the context of his vast research and tackles the vexing questions of a scientist’s personal responsibility and guilt when serving an abhorrent military regime.

Think you have a good memory? Think again. Memories are our most cherished possessions. We rely on them every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is they are far from being the accurate records of the past we like to think they are. True, we can all admit to having suffered occasional memory lapses, such as entering a room and immediately forgetting why or suddenly being unable to recall the name of someone we've met dozens of times. But what if we have the potential for more profound errors of memory?

The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse. In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. We hear news reports of Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia - but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to find yourself strapped to a giant rocket that's about to go from zero to 17,500 miles per hour? Or to look back on Earth from outer space and see the surprisingly precise line between day and night? Or to stand in front of the Hubble Space Telescope, wondering if the emergency repair you're about to make will inadvertently ruin humankind's chance to unlock the universe's secrets? Mike Massimino has been there, and in Spaceman he puts you inside the suit.

This fascinating book charts the relationship between Mark Rowlands, a rootless philosopher, and Brenin, his extraordinarily well-travelled wolf. More than just an exotic pet, Brenin exerted an immense influence on Rowlands as both a person and, strangely enough, as a philosopher, leading him to reevaluate his attitude toward love, happiness, nature, and death.

In A Few Quick Ones, P. G. Wodehouse brings together some of his oldest friends for a party. Jeeves and Wooster are there, so is Mr Mulliner and the Oldest Member.

In June of 1916, Albert Einstein published his ambitious paper proposing the existence of gravitational waves. In 2016, Einstein's 100-year-old theory was proven correct when scientists detected ripples in the fabric of space. Einstein and Relativity: A Conversation by Paul Rudd and Brian Greene celebrates this achievement, with Greene and Rudd sitting down to talk about string theory, relativity, and the discovery of gravitational waves.

In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions - infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material - and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative.

"A maioria das pessoas parece ter, pelo menos, uma pseudociência de estimação. Ficaremos satisfeitos, nestes casos, em plantar no mínimo uma semente de ceticismo que leve o leitor a considerar: será?” “Energias curativas, bolinhas de açúcar mágicas, terapias que invocam os antepassados e maluquices inventadas sobre o poder avassalador dos desejos inconscientes operam, todas, sob ‘leis de tapete voador’.

When leading Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt began working in the 1980s, scientists thought they knew all the conceivable forms of matter. The Second Kind of Impossible is the story of Steinhardt’s 35-year-long quest to challenge conventional wisdom. It begins with a curious geometric pattern that inspires two theoretical physicists to propose a radically new type of matter - one that raises the possibility of new materials with never-before-seen properties but that violates laws set in stone for centuries.