Glass works

Author: Simon Schaffer is professor of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University and edits The British Journal for the History of Science. He is co-author, alongside Steven Shapin, of the 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. He is one of the great historians of science of the recent decades.

Summary: Glass Works is a collection of essays written by Simon Schaffer. The events described range from surprising animal blood transfusions in Restoration England to the physical ideas and commercial interests behind the soap bubbles business in the Victorian Era, the vicissitudes of the crucial experiment of Newtonian optics, the secret of the illustrated automaton which played chess or the strange social life of astronomical instruments in China and in the Pacific in the Enlightenment.

Publisher: Marcial Pons Historia Year of issue: 2011

Emotions and social intelligence

Author: Ignacio Morgado (San Vicente de Alc�ntara, 1951). Professor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience at Universitat Aut�noma de Barcelona. He has developed research studies in universities of Ruhr (Germany), Oxford (United Kingdom) and, recently, in the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA).

Summary: Emotions and feelings are an essential part of life. This book deals with what they are, how they appear and how they are generated, why they are so strong and why they are so difficult to control. The book analyses the emotional differences between men and women and how aging affects feelings and emotional control. It explains how feelings and reason are related to each other.

Publisher: Ariel Year of issue: 2010

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Author:

Jonah Lehrer graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a contributing editor at Wired, Scientific American Mind, National Public Radio's Radiolab, and has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Jonah Lehrer is also featured in brief informational sessions on the television show "Brink", on the science channel.

Summary:

In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, his debut book, Lehrer argues for an intimate relationship with science and the humanities, and he argues that many discoveries of neuroscience are actually rediscoveries of insights made much earlier by various artists (Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Cézanne, Gertrude Stein and Auguste  Escoffier), notably including Marcel Proust.

Publisher: PAIDÓS Year of issue: 2008

CO₂ as a resource: from its capture to its industrial uses

Author: Lourdes F. Vega, born in Villanueva del Fresno (Badajoz), holds a PhD in physics from the University of Seville. After studying chemical engineering in Los Angeles and New York, she returned to Spain where she worked at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB, CSIC). She is currently director of R&D of Carburos Metálicos and MATGAS, where she leads several projects that are demonstrating the feasibility of using carbon dioxide from industrial emissions to sustainable uses.

Summary: This book reviews several research projects carried out on new uses of carbon dioxide captured from various sustainable industrial uses and current applications, which range from power supply and water treatment to the manufacturing of new materials and compounds.

Publisher: Fundación Gas Natural Year of issue: 2010