The future is all around us, goes the techie adage; it’s just not evenly distributed. And so it is with a certain battery, writes Popular Science features editor Fletcher, that could change the world.
What was it those guys in Star Trek were always hunting for? Ah, yes: dilithium, the stuff with which to keep their starship tanked up. Here on Earth we have lithium, with veins of the mineral scattered across the deserts of Bolivia and Chile. The author opens with an account of a “concept car” from General Motors, the Chevrolet Volt, revealed just a few years back with the idea that “electrification of the automobile had finally arrived thanks to a critical enabling technology: the lithium-ion battery.” The problem, as Fletcher notes, was that the batteries were there theoretically, “within sight yet not within hand”—that is, lithium batteries were in use, to be sure, in things such as cell phones and cameras, but just hadn’t quite scaled up to car size. Was GM just trying to project a green image? Perhaps. But, Fletcher argues, when the technology matches up with reality, big changes could await us in the form of a comparatively inexpensive, comparatively abundant and certainly comparatively clean fuel source. The author provides an entertaining, surprisingly eventful history of human efforts to harness energy in the form of battery power since the days of Alessandro Volta, focusing closely on latter-day genius and evangelist John Goodenough, who worked on lithium oxides beginning in the 1950s but whose breakthrough invention went begging for a license—“not for any good reason,” notes Fletcher, except that it was unorthodox. Fast-forward 50 years, and the unorthodox is the commonplace. Who will benefit, though? That’s a matter that remains to be settled once a variety of international scientists get around to conjuring up lithium-based fuel out of—yes, thin air. A fine, readable work of popular science, sometimes verging on science fiction.
Pub Date: May 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-3053-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A meticulously researched, frightening report on a deadly pathogen.
A gripping account of one of the most devastating infectious agents on the planet.
MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, was once considered the exclusive bane of hospitalized patients, who were already weakened by disease or surgery, and hence prey to any infectious organism able to survive and adapt to the array of disease-fighting drugs used in health-care settings. Methicillin is an antibiotic that was first hailed as the successor to penicillin, designed to dispatch the bugs that had grown resistant to the first antibiotic. And so it did—until the bugs outwitted it. In time, strains of MRSA appeared not only in sick patients, but also in healthy people who had never been near a hospital. Science journalist McKenna (Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, 2004) writes that the first reports of community-based MRSA were scoffed at by the medical profession. The doctors assumed that the community patients had acquired infection from a bug that had escaped from the hospital. The strains were different, however, and so was their profile of drug resistance. McKenna traces a 50-year history of antibiotic-drug development and drug resistance, coming to the dismal conclusion that it’s a war we are losing. MRSA infections now kill nearly 20,000 Americans each year, and an estimated 4.4 million are colonized with the bug. Compounding the problem are the difficulties in hospital infection control—just getting staff to wash their hands between patients has proven a formidable hurdle. Testing all hospital admissions and isolating carriers has been effective, but the process is costly and comes with its own side effects—patients are left alone and have fewer check-ups by a staff that requires new gloves and gowns each time. Big Pharma has not helped, since companies see greater profit in drugs for chronic diseases. McKenna suggests that vaccines might be the answer, but it seems a distant hope—and too late for the patients whose heartbreaking stories she tells.
A meticulously researched, frightening report on a deadly pathogen.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5727-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.
A fascinating unpacking of ancient myths that feature robots and other lifelike beings, some of which bear an eerie resemblance to modern technology.
More than 2,000 years ago, Greek thinkers were already envisioning the spectacular potential of being “made, not born.” As Mayor (The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, 2014, etc.), a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford, writes, during ancient times, “we…find a remarkable set of concepts and ideas that arose in mythology, stories that envisioned ways of imitating, augmenting, and surpassing natural life by means that might be termed bio-techne, ‘life through craft’…ancient versions of what we now call biotechnology.” The bronze giant Talos, protector of Crete, appears in numerous poems and artworks, some dating to 500 B.C.E.; Jason, of the Argonauts, is depicted as battling a phalanx of robotlike soldiers sprung from the earth and programmed to kill. Of course, these episodes are fiction, but they reveal the sophistication of the ancients’ imagined automata. In her meticulous research, the author discovers that the Greeks were hardly alone in conceiving mechanistic warriors, servants, or evil human replicas. Surviving myths from Rome, India, and China also explore ideas of artificial life and intelligence. In her insightful analyses of these tales, Mayor is approachable and engaging, and she infuses many familiar stories with new energy in the context of technology. She adroitly explores the ethical aspects of artificial life, addressing big questions about sentience and agency through the lens of ancient ideas. She also makes a convincing argument that these imagined machines anticipated advances that are considered cutting-edge today. Ultimately, she leaves readers in awe of these thinkers who dreamed of “androids” long before it was conceivable to build them.
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-18351-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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