Diane Ackerman: The Human Age

W. D. Hartman, “Description of a Partula Supposed to Be New, from the Island Moorea,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 32 (1880): 229.

H. E. Crampton, Studies on the Variation, Distribution, and Evolution of the Genus Partula : The Species Inhabiting Moorea (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1932).

Bryan Clarke, James Murray, and Michael S. Johnson, “The Extinction of Endemic Species by a Program of Biological Control,” Pacific Science 38, no. 2 (1984).

Jun-Jie Gu et al., “Wing stridulation in a Jurassic katydid (Insecta, Orthoptera) produced low-pitched musical calls to attract females,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 3868–73; published ahead of print February 6, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1118372109.

A Cornell neighbor of mine has just invented a lethal “lint brush” for the blood, a very tiny implantable device that snags and kills cancer cells in the bloodstream, before they can transverse the body. We’re constantly minting new metaphors for the brain to use as a mental shortcut. One of today’s metaphors sliding into common usage in a similar way is “low-hanging fruit.” Words are chosen for inclusion in the Oxford Junior Dictionary on the basis of how frequently children use them during the day. A great many nature words, such as “kingfisher,” “minnow,” “stork,” and “leopard,” have been removed. Some of the new words added were “analog,” “cut and paste,” “voicemail,” and “blog.”

GraphExeter: Invented by a team at the University of Exeter, GraphExeter is the lightest, most transparent, and most flexible material ever designed to conduct electricity.

“piezoelectrical effect” (literally, “pressing electricity”): using crystals to convert mechanical energy into electricity or vice versa.

Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Four studies led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow.

The Twitter haiku site is but one example. The “twaikus” appear too fast to contemplate, which rather defeats the original purpose of haikus. But at 140 characters they’re a great way to let off steam, and they’re immensely popular.

In med schools, virtual cadavers aren’t intended to fully replace physical cadavers. McGraw-Hill and many other companies have designed software to use in hospitals, pharmaceutical labs, and Internet courses.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FFd6VWIPrE

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein , chapter 5.

On September 14, 2013, the annual Loebner Prize for robots that can pass for human went to a chatbot named Mitsuku. However, it ultimately gave itself away in December with this exchange. Q: “Why am I tired after a long sleep?” A: “The reason is due to my mental model of you as a client.”

Technological inventions, such as refrigerators and refrigerated train cars, made frozen food possible, including nutritious out-of-season foods, such as frozen fruits and vegetables. As canning opened up the frontiers and women’s home lives, food production became more and more industrialized. With these and other innovations, between WWI and WWII, a massive change in domesticity took place. And after WWII many changes to the domestic kitchen environment (see Dolores Hayden’s books).

Explained especially well in Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman, Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, 2013).

“SyNAPSE” is a backronym (a word chosen and acronym made up to fit it) standing for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics.

Zdenko Herceg and Toshikazu Ushijima, eds., Epigenetics and Cancer, Part B (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2010).

James Nye, Mail Online , January 16, 2014.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIndT7fuGo