This book explores ethical issues at the interfaces of science, policy, religion and technology, cultivating the skills for critical analysis.

Introductory Science of Alcoholic Beverages provides readers an engaging introduction to the science behind beer, wine, and spirits. It illustrates not only the chemical principles that underlie what alcoholic beverages are, why they are the way they are and what they contain, but also frames them within the context of historical and societal developments. Discussed chapter topics include introductions to beer, wine, and spirits; the principles behind fermentation and distillation; and overviews of how each beverage class is made. The chapters highlight the unique chemistries that lend beer, wine, and spirits their individuality, as well as the key chemicals that impart their characteristic aroma and flavor profiles. This book goes beyond focused descriptions of individual alcoholic beverages by summarizing their common chemical lineage and illuminating the universal scientific principles that underpin them. It will be of interest to students of physics and chemistry, as well as enthusiasts and connoisseurs of beer, wine, and spirits.

A novel, integrative approach to cities as complex adaptive systems, applicable to issues ranging from innovation to economic prosperity to settlement patterns. Human beings around the world increasingly live in urban environments. In Introduction to Urban Science, Luis Bettencourt takes a novel, integrative approach to understanding cities as complex adaptive systems, claiming that they require us to frame the field of urban science in a way that goes beyond existing theory in such traditional disciplines as sociology, geography, and economics. He explores the processes facilitated by and, in many cases, unleashed for the first time by urban life through the lenses of social heterogeneity, complex networks, scaling, circular causality, and information. Though the idea that cities are complex adaptive systems has become mainstream, until now those who study cities have lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding cities and urbanization, for generating useful and falsifiable predictions, and for constructing a solid body of empirical evidence so that the discipline of urban science can continue to develop. Bettencourt applies his framework to such issues as innovation and development across scales, human reasoning and strategic decision-making, patterns of settlement and mobility and their influence on socioeconomic life and resource use, inequality and inequity, biodiversity, and the challenges of sustainable development in both high- and low-income nations. It is crucial, says Bettencourt, to realize that cities are not "zero-sum games" and that knowledge, human cooperation, and collective action can build a better future.

How does science work? Does it tell us what the world is “really” like? What makes it different from other ways of understanding the universe? In Theory and Reality, Peter Godfrey-Smith addresses these questions by taking the reader on a grand tour of more than a hundred years of debate about science. The result is a completely accessible introduction to the main themes of the philosophy of science. Examples and asides engage the beginning student, a glossary of terms explains key concepts, and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. Like no other text in this field, Theory and Reality combines a survey of recent history of the philosophy of science with current key debates that any beginning scholar or critical reader can follow. The second edition is thoroughly updated and expanded by the author with a new chapter on truth, simplicity, and models in science.

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remarkable chapter on the microscope in cell biology.

This popular reader has been vastly updated with ten stimulating new selections on the natural and the social sciences: feminism; postmodernism, relativism, and science; confirmation, acceptance, and theory; explanatory unification; and science and values. Retaining the best essays from the previous editions, the editors have added important new pieces to maintain this influential text's relevance.