- How did the Sun come into existence? - How was the Earth formed? - How long has Earth been the way it is now, with its combination of oceans and continents? - How do you define “life”? - How did the first life forms emerge? - What conditions made it possible for living things to evolve? All these questions are answered in this colourful textbook addressing undergraduate students in "Origins of Life" courses and the scientifically interested public. The authors take the reader on an amazing voyage through time, beginning five thousand million years ago in a cloud of interstellar dust and ending five hundred million years ago, when the living world that we see today was finally formed. A chapter on exoplanets provides an overview of the search for planets outside the solar system, especially for habitable ones. The appendix closes the book with a glossary, a bibliography of further readings and a summary of the Origins of the Earth and life in fourteen boxes.
William James’ celebrated lecture on “The Will to Believe” has kindled spirited controversy since the day it was delivered. In this lively reappraisal of that controversy, Father O’Connell contributes some fresh contentions: that James’ argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Pascal and Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our “over-beliefs” ; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our “passional nature” as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief.
This book pioneers the field of gain-cell embedded DRAM (GC-eDRAM) design for low-power VLSI systems-on-chip (SoCs). Novel GC-eDRAMs are specifically designed and optimized for a range of low-power VLSI SoCs, ranging from ultra-low power to power-aware high-performance applications. After a detailed review of prior-art GC-eDRAMs, an analytical retention time distribution model is introduced and validated by silicon measurements, which is key for low-power GC-eDRAM design. The book then investigates supply voltage scaling and near-threshold voltage (NTV) operation of a conventional gain cell (GC), before presenting novel GC circuit and assist techniques for NTV operation, including a 3-transistor full transmission-gate write port, reverse body biasing (RBB), and a replica technique for optimum refresh timing. Next, conventional GC bitcells are evaluated under aggressive technology and voltage scaling (down to the subthreshold domain), before novel bitcells for aggressively scaled CMOS nodes and soft-error tolerance as presented, including a 4-transistor GC with partial internal feedback and a 4-transistor GC with built-in redundancy.
The inaugural volume of The Rightful Place of Science book series gathers a collection of thinkers who insist there is much to gain from trying to comprehend the politics of technological change and, its close cousin, the practice of science and scientific research. The authors are part of an intellectual and ethical movement to view science and technology neither as objects of worship nor mere scholarly analysis. They wish to improve on the politics of science and to judge their reforms by a pragmatic measure: the quality of the outcomes of science and technology. To these authors, how we talk about technological change matters, because policies ultimately express deeper vernacular yearnings – for democracy, equity and of course utility. In these essays, hard questions get asked, new perspectives are presented, and contrarian understandings abound.
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