Description The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum\'s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact Termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature\'s most misunderstood insects.
From 2006 to 2012, she was a fellow at the New Amer.
About the Author Lisa Margonelli is the author of the national bestseller Oil on the Brain: Petroleum\'s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank and writes the Small Science column for Zócalo Public Square, where she is a senior editor.
Is a termite an individual or a unit of a superorganism? Can we harness the termite\'s properties to change the world? If we build termite-like swarming robots, will they inevitably destroy us? Is it possible to think without having a mind? Underbug burrows into these questions and many others--unearthing disquieting answers about the world\'s most underrated insect and what it means to be human.
Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions.
What begins as a natural history of the termite becomes a personal exploration of the unnatural future we\'re building, with darker observations on power, technology, historical trauma, and the limits of human cognition.
Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex.
Over the course of a decade-long obsession with the little bugs, Margonelli pokes around termite mounds and high-tech research facilities, closely watching biologists, roboticists, and geneticists.
Are we more like Termites than we ever imagined? In Underbug, the award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli introduces us to the enigmatic creatures that collectively outweigh human beings ten to one and consume $40 billion worth of valuable stuff annually--and yet, in Margonelli\'s telling, seem weirdly familiar.
Description The award-winning journalist Lisa Margonelli, national bestselling author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum\'s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank, investigates the environmental and economic impact Termites inflict on human societies in this fascinating examination of one of nature\'s most misunderstood insects
