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    Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
    Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
    Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
    Audiobook9 hours

    Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology

    Written by Lisa Margonelli

    Narrated by Christina Moore

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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. 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. 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. Her globe-trotting journey veers into uncharted territory, from evolutionary theory to Edwardian science literature to the military industrial complex. 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. Whether in Namibia or Cambridge, Arizona or Australia, Margonelli turns up astounding facts and raises provocative questions. 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateAug 21, 2018
    ISBN9781980010418
    Author

    Lisa Margonelli

    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. From 2006 to 2012, she was a fellow at the New America Foundation. She has written for The Atlantic, Wired, Scientific American, The New York Times, and other publications. She lives in Maine.

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Meticulously researched and annotated exploration of termites, those who study them from various standpoints such as biological understanding, use in bioengineering (grassoline), use in robotics (eg. swarming military drones); engagingly written with wry, philosophical, psychological asides concerning science, scientists and the conundrums of complexity.