Technology is becoming molecularly precise. Nanotechnology, otherwise known as molecular engineering, will soon create effective machines as small as DNA. This capacity to manipulate matter -- to program matter -- with atomic precision will utterly change the economic, ecological, and cultural fabric of our lives. This book, which is accessible to a broad audience while providing references to the technical literature, presents a wide range of potential applications of this new material technology.

The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of molecular engineering and...

The Cerebral Code is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape mental images in only seconds, starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, but evolving into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human...

Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's...

Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in linguistics, cognitive...

Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tours the "virtual community" of online networking. He describes a community that is as real and as much a mixed bag as any physical community -- one where people talk, argue, seek information, organize politically, fall in love, and dupe others. At the same time that he tells moving stories about people who have received online emotional support during devastating illnesses, he acknowledges a darker side to people's behavior in cyberspace. Indeed, contends Rheingold, people relate to each other online much...

Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery.

In separate chapters, the authors take up visualization, concept formation, categorization, memory retrieval, and problem solving. They describe novel experimental methods for studying creative cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions, along with techniques that can be used to generate many different types of inventions and concepts....

Historians from Thucydides to William McNeill have pointed to the connections between disease and civil society. Political scientists have investigated the relationship of public health to governance, introducing the concept of health security. In Contagion and Chaos, Andrew Price-Smith offers the most comprehensive examination yet of disease through the lens of national security. Extending the analysis presented in his earlier book The Health of Nations, Price-Smith argues that epidemic disease represents a direct threat to the power of a state, eroding prosperity and...

In this imaginative and generously illustrated book, Tadahiko Higuchi applies a methodology to landscape that is similar to that developed by Kevin Lynch for investigating the extent to which urban settings are legible and "imageable" to their inhabitants. He identifies features such as landmarks, boundaries, paths, and nodes that enable people moving through a landscape to piece together a reliable mental map of their surroundings, beginning with major structural elements and filling in with successively finer detail.Tadahiko Higuchi is Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at...

Vitruvius's De architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work's meaning and significance in its own time.

Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus...

This sequel to Market Structure and Foreign Trade examines the new international trade's applied side. It provides a compact guide to models of the effects of trade policy in imperfectly competitive markets, as well as an up-to-date survey of existing knowledge, which is extended by the authors' useful interpretations of the results.Elhanan Helpman is Archie Sherman Professor of International Economic Relations at Tel Aviv University. Paul R. Krugman is Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Group of Thirty.