Genetic Science

Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom — the Metazoa— they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds.

After a long and bloody battle, legendary Hell Diver Xavier Rodriguez reigns as the dutiful but reluctant new king of the islands. Advised by a council of former sky citizens as well as Cazadores, he works to assimilate the two societies peacefully. But not all Cazadores have accepted the new order. While X tries to ease tensions at home, a rookie team of divers, led by Michael Everhart, returns to the skies in Discovery, formerly the ITC Deliverance. Their mission: To locate other human survivors throughout the world and rescue them.

Save the cure. Kill the crew. That was the dying order of the captain of the starship Elixr. The ship followed the order. Then it lost its mind. Two decades later, the last chance to save billions of souls rests with the dead starship's only occupants: a pair of boys raised by a deranged robot. When Elixr crashes on a barren world, they join forces with an impoverished girl living on the edge of society to search for answers. Who are they? Why have they survived? And what could Elixr possibly do to save a world on the precipice of collapse? The more they learn, the greater the stakes become...

Are stars like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams genetic freaks put on Earth to dominate their respective sports? Or are they simply normal people who overcame their biological limits through sheer force of will and obsessive training? In this controversial and engaging exploration of athletic success, Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein tackles the great nature vs. nurture debate and traces how far science has come in solving this great riddle.

Pursued by a relentless assassin, Alan and Jinny race across the galaxy in search of a secret truth that has eluded humanity for centuries. The 47 colonies have been at peace for over 700 years. But nothing is as it seems. The Council government of all humanity controls the populace through lies, fear, and genetically-engineered agents who do its terrible bidding.

The sun is bloated, diseased, dying perhaps. Beneath its baneful light, Shadrapar, last of all cities, harbours fewer than 100,000 human souls. Built on the ruins of countless civilisations, Shadrapar is a museum, a midden, an asylum, a prison on a world that is ever more alien to humanity. Bearing witness to the desperate struggle for existence between life old and new is Stefan Advani: rebel, outlaw, prisoner, survivor.

We colonized 700 planets. Humankind enjoyed the benefits of expansion room and the end of wars. We even disbanded our military. Then the Krall found us. The Krall have used thousands of years of combat to select the genes of the strongest and fastest warriors. They are a species determined to dominate the entire galaxy, through destruction and annihilation of every opponent.

Koban is an uninhabited high-gravity planet with impossibly fast savage animals, which employ organic superconducting nerves. This deadly world is where the Krall tested humans for war capability.

Professor Jim Davies's fascinating and highly accessible book, Riveted, reveals the evolutionary underpinnings of why we find things compelling. Drawing on work from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, economics, computer science, and biology, Davies offers a comprehensive explanation to show that in spite of the differences between the many things that we find compelling, they have similar effects on our minds and brains.

Leah Pfeifer has spent two years in an isolated cabin in Colorado with her almost three-year-old daughter, Anna, trying to protect the girl both from her inherited psychic ability and from the government organization that would be happy to exploit it. Trouble seems to find them anyway, and a panicked phone call from Leah's younger sister, Rowena, prompts Leah to leave in search of treatment for Anna and to rescue Rowena from the cycle of abuse that Leah herself narrowly escaped years ago.

Powerful necromancers are on the move, and the dungeon has become a battleground. Without his faithful Wisp, Cal's mind slips - he begins creating traps and monsters that go against his already loose morals. A direct threat from an unexpected force causes Cal's mind to stabilize, but he doesn't know for how long. Using every resource at his disposal, he works to keep his mind clear while he funds a search for his lost companion.

We are living through the most prosperous age in all of human history, yet we are listless, divided, and miserable. Wealth and comfort are unparalleled, but our political landscape is unmoored, and rates of suicide, lone­liness, and chronic illness continue to skyrocket. How do we explain the gap between these truths? And how should we respond? For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our troubles is clear: The accelerat­ing rate of change in the modern world has outstripped the capacity of our brains and bodies to adapt.

New York Times best-selling author Daniel Suarez delivers an exhilarating sci-fi thriller exploring a potential future where CRISPR genetic editing allows the human species to control evolution itself. On a crowded train platform, Interpol agent Kenneth Durand feels the sting of a needle - and his transformation begins....

How far would you go to discover the truth? Seraphina Waters embarks on her latest mission just as she's on the verge of graduation. Armed with hard-earned skills, talent, and a mouthy companion, Phina pursues the identity of a traitor among the ranks of SpyCorps. Even if the answer could be a stab to the heart. Following shadows and rumors, Phina races time to discover the truth. Little does she know that while she's chasing the traitor, the traitor is chasing her.

Desperate to escape the dangerous streets of Old Triton, the buried city, Milla takes the ultimate risk. Could a dead girl's identity be her way out? A ticket to a richer, brighter world? Now she's part of a high tech contest, with a prize beyond money, fame, and everything she has ever known. A chance to become something...new. But if anyone finds out who Milla really is, she's dead. The other competitors come from privilege, their faces and bodies tweaked to perfection. Rich and handsome Cale could be the most dangerous of all.

In the mysterious city of Queen Mab, the forces of light and darkness are locked in a murderous struggle for truth. The dedicated agents of the Holy Inquisition battle with their shadowy counterparts, the infamous Cognitae, to discover the encrypted identity of the enigmatic, all-powerful King in Yellow. Caught at the heart of this struggle is the pariah Alizebeth Bequin. Bequin must withstand an onslaught of angels, daemons, and even the monstrous warriors of the Traitor Legions, to unpick the greatest riddle of her life.

In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.

The world’s food supply grows aggressively, occupying every inch of earth, no matter how inhospitable. World hunger is averted. Humanity flourishes. RC-714 is digested, absorbed…and passed on. The Change affects small fast-breeding mammals first. They multiply with the same aggressive speed as the ExoGen plants, but an insatiable hunger drives them to violence. A war between species breaks out. When RC-714 reaches humanity, along with every other large creature on the planet, civilization implodes.

Earth...Population: 1 Her name is Eve14. She is the result of a 1000-year project by the robots of Earth to restore the planet after all life was wiped out in 2065. 27 robotic minds, copied from Earth's great scientists, carried on after the species died. They mixed and matched those minds in endless combinations, producing a whole race of machines with human personalities. Immortal, but with memories of sensations they can no longer experience, some renegade robots now have a daring agenda. They want human bodies.

Two years ago, a super solar storm triggered a CME pulse that crippled the country and destroyed the electrical grid. What remains of the country’s leaders are hiding a secret: something that threatens not just the US but the entire world. The Gulf Coast town of Harris Springs, Mississippi has suffered from gang attacks, famine, hurricanes, and has battled a crusading army of religious zealots. Now, they face their greatest challenge: outsmarting a tyrannical president and escaping an approaching pandemic.

Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called "evolutionary spirituality". Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in an audiobook whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it.