High School Science: Common Core State Standards and Support Materials: Robotics

Flesh and Machines explores the startlingly reciprocal connection between humans and their technological brethren, and explains how this relationship is being redefined as humans develop increasingly complex machines. The impetus to build machines that exhibit lifelike behaviors stretches back centuries, but for the last fifteen years much of this work has been done in Rodney Brooks’s laboratory at MIT. His goal is not simply to build machines that are like humans but to alter our perception of the potential capabilities of robots. Our current attitude toward intelligent robots, he asserts, is simply a reflection of our own view of ourselves. In Flesh and Machines, Brooks challenges that view by suggesting that human nature can be seen to possess the essential characteristics of a machine. Our instinctive rejection of that idea, he believes, is itself a conditioned response: we have programmed ourselves to believe in our “tribal specialness” as proof of our uniqueness. Provocative, persuasive, compelling, and unprecedented, Flesh and Machines presents a vision of our future and our future selves.

Step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow diagrams for making more than thirty toys with such materials as notebook paper, rubber bands, and paper clips.

Dealing with aerodynamics in the broadest sense, this book discusses, in addition to aeroplanes, the aerodynamics of cars and birds, and the motion of diverse objects through air and water. The fundamental notions of mechanics and fluid dynamics are clearly explained, while the underlying science is discussed rigorously, but using only elementary mathematics, and then only occasionally. To put the science into its human context, the author describes -- with many illustrations -- the history of human attempts to fly and discusses the social impact of commercial aviation as well as the outlook for future developments. This new edition has been brought up to date throughout; solutions to selected exercises have been added, as have new problems and other study aids.

The airplane ranks as one of history’s most ingenious and phenomenal inventions#151;and surely one of the most world-shaking. How ideas about its aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine it became is the epic story James R. Hansen tells inThe Bird Is on the Wing.Just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane. Hansen provides an engaging, easily understandable introduction to the role of aerodynamics in the design of such historic American aircraft as the DC-3, X-1, and 747. Recognizing the impact individuals have had on the development of the field, he conveys not only a history of aircraft technology, but also a collective biography of the scientists, engineers, and designers who created the airplanes. From da Vinci, whose understanding of what it took to fly was three centuries too early for practical use, to the invention of the airplane by the Wright brothers, Hansen explores the technological matrix from which aeronautical engineering emerged. He skillfully guides the reader through the development of such critical aerodynamic concepts as streamlining, flutter, laminar-flow airfoils, the mythical #147;sound barrier,” variable-sweep wing, supersonic cruise, blended body, and much more. Hansen’s explanation of how vocabulary and specifications were developed to fill the gap between the perceptions of pilots and the system of engineers will fascinate all those interested in how human beings have used aerodynamics to move among, and even beyond, birds on the wing.