Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in History & Culture

April 13, 1970. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert are hurtling towards the moon in the Apollo 13 spacecraft, when an explosion rocks the ship. The cockpit grows dim, the air grows thin, and the instrument lights wink out. Moments later, the astronauts are forced to abandon the...

The debut of ChatGPT on November 30th was a watershed moment in the history of technology. We stand on the threshold of a new age — one where content of all kinds, even software itself, will be conjured, seemingly from thin air, with simple conversation. In a culture fraught with...

A galvanizing critique of the forces vying for our attention—and our personal information—that redefines what we think of as productivity, reconnects us with the environment, and reveals all that we’ve been too distracted to see about ourselves and our world. Nothing is harder to do these...

The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he...

The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization...

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions – a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes. Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote...

‘The Internet was supposed to be for everyone...It was supposed to liberate us from gender.’ It's a tough time to be a woman on the internet. Over the past two generations, the political map of human relations has been redrawn by feminism and by changes in technology. In Cybersexism, Laurie...

We love to imagine the future. But why is dramatic future technology always just around the corner, and never a reality? For decades we've delighted in dreaming about a sci-fi utopia, from flying cars and bionic humans to hoverboards; with driverless cars first proposed at the 1939 World's Fair...

When twelve-year-old Alex receives an old tin robot in the post, the note from his grandfather simply reads: ‘This one is special’. But as strange events start occurring around him, it doesn’t take Alex long to suspect that the small toy is more than special; it might also be deadly. Just...

In a world of endless distraction, we have given away two of our most valuable assets: time and attention. Technology has given us the incredible gift of access to an ever-increasing amount of information and has opened the door to a vast array of choices and opportunities. However, having more...

Leading computer science expert Professor Peter J. Bentley breaks down the fast-moving world of computers in the time of automata into ten pivotal lessons. In Ten Short Lessons in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, leading expert Professor Peter J. Bentley breaks down the fast-moving world of...

In 1977 a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important mixtape ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another – it was from Earth to the cosmos. When NASA sent Voyagers 1 and 2 on a Grand Tour of the outer planets, they...

In 1919, in the wake of the First World War, a group of extraordinary women came together to create the Women s Engineering Society. They were trailblazers, pioneers and boundary breakers, but many of their stories have been lost to history. To mark the centenary of the society's creation...