Category: hittingthebooks
Hitting the Books: Lessons learned from gaming with the King of Sweden
Video games have come a long way from their dim arcade origins. No longer a mere niche diversion for pasty, maladjusted youth, gaming is now an integral part of modern pop culture standing shoulder to shoulder with “classical” forms of media like fil… Source
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Hitting the Books: This $80 prosthetic has helped millions walk again
The modern world around us — from the spaces we inhabit to the furniture we perch upon to the gadgets, tools and devices we hold in our hands — is implicitly designed for humans that fit within a specific bell curve of shape and ability. If you happe… Source
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Hitting the Books: Volcanoes, mortal enemy of the mighty telescope
Humans are, as a species, hardwired to explore. We conquered the planet thanks to untold generations of people needing to see what lay over the next hill or around the next river bend and our infatuation with the stars is no different — we’ve wondere… Source
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Hitting the Books: Why women make better astronauts
Kate Greene knows better than most what it’s like to live on Mars. As a member of NASA’s inaugural 2013 HI-SEAS project, she spent four months in a simulated Martian environment on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene exami… Source
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Hitting the Books: How to huck a human into low Earth orbit
Astronauts may get the glory for successful spaceflights but they’d never even get off the ground if not for the folks at Mission Control. In Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control, Paul Dye vividly recounts his 20-year caree… Source
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Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners
We’ve dreamt of colonizing the stars since our first tenuous steps across the moon, yet fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, the prospect of living and working beyond the bounds of Earth remains tantalizingly out of reach. In his latest book, Spa… Source
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