""In Prime Movers, Smil's passion for the Cinderellas of civilization focuses on the diesel engines and gas turbines that power ocean vessels and wide-body jets. These engines have made ocean shipping and intercontinental air travel so cheap that they have changed the face of our planet. Marshall McLuhan's dreams of a Global Village have become true in unimagined ways. Being an engineer myself,…
"Foreword by Michael Toscano"--Cover."Military drones have recently been hailed as a revolutionary new technology that will forever change the conduct of war. And yet the United States and other countries have been deploying such unmanned military systems for more than a century. Written by a renowned authority in the field, this book documents the forgotten legacy of these pioneering efforts, …
The development of deep space surveillance technology and its later application to near-Earth surveillance, covering work at Lincoln Laboratory from 1970 to 2000.In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union raced to develop space-based intelligence gathering capability. The Soviets succeeded first, with SPUTNIK I in 1957. The United States began to monitor the growing Soviet space prese…
"A new, updated edition of a popular book on the history, science, and engineering of bicycles. The bicycle is almost unique among human-powered machines in that it uses human muscles in a near-optimum way. This new edition of the bible of bicycle enthusiasts provides just about everything you could want to know about the history of bicycles, how human beings propel them, what makes them go fas…
"Making Time on Mars is a book about people, robots, processes and intuitions working together to make time on Mars. In early 2004, for over ninety days NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers mission set their daily work activities on Earth according to "Mars time" clocks. Two local Mars times, one for each of the two Mars rovers, drove work timelines for all mission members. A successful mission that …
"The MIT Press."This technological fantasy, the product of the MIT Students System Project and the inspiration for the 1979 film "Meteor," presents a plan for avoiding a hypothetical collision between Earth and the Apollo asteroid, Icarus, which sweeps by every nineteen years within a few million miles (a near-miss in astronomical terms). Collision with a four billion-ton rock would create a ca…
Technological change is a central feature of modern societies and a powerful source for social change. There is an urgent task to direct these new technologies towards sustainability, but society lacks perspectives, instruments and policies to accomplish this. There is no blueprint for a sustainable future, and it is necessary to experiment with alternative paths that seem promising. Various ne…
This book offers a snapshot of the latest research and developments in road and railway vehicle dynamics. Gathering peer-reviewed contributions to the 27th Symposium of the International Association of Vehicle System Dynamics (IAVSD), held online on August 1719, 2021, from Saint Petersburg, Russia, it offers extensive information for both researchers and professionals in the field of ground veh…
Focusing on technical, policy and social/societal practices and innovations for electrified transport for personal, public and freight purposes, this book provides a state-of-the-art overview of developments in e-mobility in Europe and the West Coast of the USA. It serves as a learning base for further implementing and commercially developing this field for the benefit of society, the environme…