Genetic Science

In the shadows of Area 51's clandestine labs, the unthinkable has been unleashed: creatures engineered to decimate armies now roam free. Driven by a scientist's ambition, these beasts defy the bounds of nature, but at what cost? When ethical lines blur into oblivion, one scientist's desperate flight for survival awakens the beasts' taste for freedom. As they veer toward Alamo, Nevada, carving a swathe of carnage, the military scrambles to contain an error too fatal to admit. Created to be unstoppable on the battlefield, these creatures are unbound by human constraints, sowing fear with ...

Jonas kills people...with his mind. He reaches out, focuses for a moment, and feels a snap of pain between his eyes. Then his target falls over dead: a hole in the center of their brains. The cause of death is unknown to all aside from Jonas, and his lone companion, Bubbles, a sarcastic AI with aspirations to be more human, or a serial killer. One of the two. Maybe both. Jonas calls his ability...mind bullet.

Over the last century, the search for human ancestors has spanned four continents and resulted in the discovery of hundreds of fossils. While most of these discoveries live quietly in museums, there are a few that have become world-renowned celebrity personas. In Seven Skeletons, historian of science Lydia Pyne explores how seven such famous fossils of our ancestors have the social cachet they enjoy today.

From the international bestselling author of The Cursed Thief and The Blood King comes a harrowing thrill ride through an apocalyptic New York City! My name is Frank Moon, and I’m surrounded by death. Until today, I thought I’d seen everything in my time as a cop. Nope, not even close. Believe it or not, a meteor just landed in Central Park! The damn thing brought along a hellish radiation too. The strobing red emission has altered the genetic code of the people who witnessed it enter Earth’s atmosphere. Lucky for me, I was too busy binge-watching my favorite TV show or I would’ve ...

Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics - as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.

This Very Short Introduction uncovers the history of our understanding of sexual selection, from Darwin's key insights to the modern day. Considering the investment animals place on reproduction, variation in mating systems, sexual conflict, and the origin of sexual dimorphism, authors Marlene Zuk and Leigh Simmons discuss questions such as whether females can really choose between males on aesthetic grounds and how sexual conflict is resolved in different species.

When Sam’s wife first tells him about Vitek, a twenty-first-century fertility lab, he sees it as the natural next step in trying to help their future child get a “leg up” in a competitive world. But the more Sam considers the lives that his child could lead, the more he begins to question his own relationships and the choices he has made in his life.

Scientists' understanding of life is progressing more rapidly than at any point in human history, from the extraordinary decoding of DNA to the controversial emergence of biotechnology. Featuring pioneering biologists, geneticists, physicists, and science writers, Life explains just how far we've come - and takes a brilliantly educated guess at where we're heading.

The characters in Tasting the Past include a young Swiss scientist who set out to decode the DNA of every single wine grape in the world; Middle Eastern researchers who seek to discover the wines that King David drank; and a University of Pennsylvania academic who has spent decades analyzing wine remains. The science illuminates wine in ways no critic can, and demolishes some of the most sacred dogmas of the industry: well-known French grapes aren't especially noble.

Until very recently, if you were to ask most doctors, they would tell you there were only two kinds of medicine: the quack kind, and the evidence-based kind. The former is baseless, and the latter based on the best information human effort could buy. Well, Eric Topol isn't most doctors, and he suggests you entertain the notion of a third kind of medicine, one that will make the evidence-based state-of-the-art stuff look scarcely better than an alchemist trying to animate a homunculus in a jar.

One night with a superpowered babe. Alan Star thinks he's the luckiest guy in the world, but fantasy turns into nightmare when a late-night meetup with a heroine turns deadly. To the dismay of the powers-in-charge, Alan has stumbled upon the dirty truth behind the squeaky-clean image of the hero business. Soon, everyone from government black ops to angry superpowered flames want to shut him up. Permanently. With nowhere else to run, Alan escapes to the one place that the heroes won't go: the underground world of a fabled hero-killer. There, he discovers the key to becoming the greatest hero...

A year has passed since the Hell Divers defeated the machines at Kilimanjaro. The freed captives have settled into their new home at the Vanguard Islands, joining survivors from around the world. But extreme weather and failed crops have raised the specter of famine. Ships must push deeper into dangerous red zones, only to come back with less loot - and fewer soldiers.

Equal parts Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence, but wholly original in scope, A Brief History of Intelligence offers a paradigm shift for how we understand neuroscience and AI. Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow.

After a long, perilous journey, Hell Divers Xavier Rodriguez and Magnolia Katib discover the Metal Islands, a sunny, habitable zone where thousands of people live by fishing and farming. But this "paradise" is really a violent warrior society ruled by the cannibal King el Pulpo. For the first time in X's life, he is forced to lay down his arms and surrender.

Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the "wolf" in our backyards and its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse.

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences", leads the listener through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

Cherry Bomb, an A.I. made human—and immortal—is out for revenge against her creator, Will, who left her on the Galahad, a ship full of unholy monsters, traversing the universe from beginning to end, ad infinitum. Countless years pass, giving her more than enough time to plot her revenge. Upon gaining control of the ship, she sets her plan in motion, building a vast army and reforming the universe as she sees fit.

The Earth teems with life: in its oceans, forests, skies, and cities. Yet there's a black hole at the heart of biology. We do not know why complex life is the way it is, or, for that matter, how life first began. In The Vital Question, award-winning author and biochemist Nick Lane radically reframes evolutionary history, putting forward a solution to conundrums that have puzzled generations of scientists.

Seraphina Waters craves the opportunity to protect Bethany Anne's growing Etheric Empire. Thrown a lifeline when she needs it most, she's given a chance to prove herself. If she can. Pulled into alien politics and a life beyond her imagination, Phina might just have a chance to have the one thing she's always wanted. Now, she just needs to pull it off without getting killed.

Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson participated in a drug experiment run by a veiled government agency known as The Shop. One year later, they marry. Two years later, their little girl, Charlie, sets her teddy bear on fire by simply staring at it. Now that Charlie is eight, she doesn't start fires anymore. Her parents have taught her to control her pyrokinesis, the ability to set anything - toys, clothes, even people - aflame. But The Shop knows about and wants this pigtailed "ultimate weapon".