Thorium energy can help check CO2 and global warming, cut deadly air pollution, provide inexhaustible energy, and increase human prosperity. Our world is beset by global warming, pollution, resource conflicts, and energy poverty. Millions die from coal plant emissions. We war over mideast oil. Food supplies from sea and land are threatened. Developing nations' growth exacerbates the crises. Few nations will adopt carbon taxes or energy policies against their economic self-interests to reduce global CO2 emissions. Energy cheaper than coal will dissuade all nations from burning coal. Innovative thorium energy uses economic persuasion to end the pollution, to provide energy and prosperity to developing nations, and to create energy security for all people for all time. "This book presents a lucid explanation of the workings of thorium-based reactors. It is must reading for anyone interested in our energy future." Leon Cooper, Brown University physicist and 1972 Nobel laureate for superconductivity "As our energy future is essential I can strongly recommend the book for everybody interested in this most significant topic." George Olah, 1994 Nobel laureate for carbon chemistry

Fractals are characterized by the repetition of similar patterns at ever-diminishing scales. Fractal geometry has emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers on the border between mathematics and information technology and can be seen in many of the swirling patterns produced by computer graphics. It has become a new tool for modeling in biology, geology, and other natural sciences. Anthropologists have observed that the patterns produced in different cultures can be characterized by specific design themes. In Europe and America, we often see cities laid out in a grid pattern of straight streets and right-angle corners. In contrast, traditional African settlements tend to use fractal structures-circles of circles of circular dwellings, rectangular walls enclosing ever-smaller rectangles, and streets in which broad avenues branch down to tiny footpaths with striking geometric repetition. These indigenous fractals are not limited to architecture; their recursive patterns echo throughout many disparate African designs and knowledge systems. Drawing on interviews with African designers, artists, and scientists, Ron Eglash investigates fractals in African architecture, traditional hairstyling, textiles, sculpture, painting, carving, metalwork, religion, games, practical craft, quantitative techniques, and symbolic systems. He also examines the political and social implications of the existence of African fractal geometry. His book makes a unique contribution to the study of mathematics, African culture, anthropology, and computer simulations.

A New Yorker Best Book of the year An Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did" (SF Chronicle)-a cultural, scientific, literary, and personal history of exercise. Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise-a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or athletics-was an ancient obsession, too, but as a chapter in human history, it's been largely overlooked. In Sweat, Bill Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement. Hippocrates, Plato, Galen, Susan B. Anthony, Jack LaLanne, and Jane Fonda, among many others, make appearances in Sweat, but chief among the historical figures is Girolamo Mercuriale, a Renaissance-era Italian physician who aimed singlehandedly to revive the ancient Greek “art of exercising” through his 1569 book De arte gymnastica. Though largely forgotten over the past five centuries, Mercuriale and his illustrated treatise were pioneering, and are brought back to life in the pages of Sweat. Hayes ties his own personal experience-and ours-to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the 21st century.

The United States developed the Gambit and Hexagon programs to improve the nation's means for peering over the iron curtain that separated western democracies from east European and Asian communist countries. The inability to gain insight into vast "denied areas" required exceptional systems to understand threats posed by US adversaries. Corona was the first imagery satellite system to help see into those areas. Hexagon began as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program with the first concepts proposed in 1964. The CIA's primary goal was to develop an imagery system with Corona-like ability to image wide swaths of the earth, but with resolution equivalent to Gambit. Such a system would afford the United States even greater advantages monitoring the arms race that had developed with the nation's adversaries. The Hexagon mapping camera flew on 12 of the 20 Hexagon missions. It proved to be a remarkably efficient and prodigious producer of imagery for mapping purposes. The mapping camera system was successful by every standard including technical capabilities, reliability, and capacity.