Genetic World

Portals, treachery, and murder... Seventeen-year-old Mia Taylor, gatekeeper to an interdimensional portal, wants nothing more than to heal from a romance gone wrong. Illegally falling for her co-worker Regulus had been a huge mistake. But when Regulus goes rogue to hunt down a murderer, Mia must forget her broken heart and use her unique abilities to save him. Traveling across dimensions, she enters a strange and hostile world where a rebel faction holds the key to their escape. Her gift of synesthesia is in high demand, and a secret organization of the otherworldly kind has her in its ...

On May 10, 1998, biologist Craig Venter, director of the Institute for Genomic Research, announced that he was forming a private company that within three years would unravel the complete genetic code of human life, seven years before the projected finish of the U.S. government's Human Genome Project. Venter hoped that by decoding the genome ahead of schedule, he would speed up the pace of biomedical research and save the lives of thousands of people. He also hoped to become very famous and very rich.

Living in the idyllic seaside town of Palmetto Beach is a dream come true for Mitch Sanders, an aspiring marine biologist who studies from home while his wife, Ashley, scores the perfect job at the Bioengineering Clinical Research Institute of Medicine, which is about to make an astounding medical breakthrough.

To many of us, tropical forests are the domain of movies and novels. These dense, primordial wildernesses are beautiful to picture but irrelevant to our lives. Jungle tells a different story. Archaeologist Patrick Roberts argues that tropical forests have shaped nearly every aspect of life on earth. They made the planet habitable, enabled the rise of dinosaurs and mammals, and spread flowering plants around the globe. New evidence also shows that humans evolved in jungles, developing agriculture and infrastructure unlike anything found elsewhere.

Carbon dioxide: this seemingly simple and ubiquitous substance is fundamental to how our planet works. All life is made from CO2, and its behavior on this planet has kept Earth bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In its workings lie both the splendor of our world and the potential for life’s destruction. In short, it is the most important substance in history. But why is CO2 as essential to life on Earth as it is capable of destroying it? Award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen reveals carbon dioxide’s fundamental role in the operation and maintenance of our planet

The world of Dune has shaped an entire generation of science fiction. From the sand-blasted world of Arrakis, to the splendor of the imperial homeworld of Kaitain, readers and listeners have lived in a universe of treachery and wonder. Now, these stories expand on the Dune universe.

Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies.

From the time G39, a marine rifleman in mankind’s distant future, is “born”, to the time he crash lands on an alien planet only a month later, his life is a dizzying onslaught of action and pain. Everything he does has to be in accordance with his superior’s wishes, or the control device implanted in the base of his skull will "correct" him…painfully.

In Unfit for Purpose, biologist and broadcaster Adam Hart explores the mismatch between our fundamental biology and the modern world we have created. In each chapter Adam reveals the many ways in which biological adaptations that evolved to help us survive and thrive now work against us. For example, in the modern world stress is a killer, but how did 'fight or flight' instincts turn from life-savers to life-takers? Obesity might be a disease now, but is it really just a troublesome side-effect of our complex evolutionary past?

Why cooperate? This may be the most important scientific question we have ever, and will ever, face. The science of cooperation tells us not only how we got here, but also where we might end up. Cooperation explains how strands of DNA gave rise to modern-day nation states. It defines our extraordinary ecological success, as well as many of the most surprising features of what make us human: not only why we live in families, why we have grandmothers and why women experience the menopause, but also why we become paranoid and jealous, and why we cheat.

The Terminator meets Zombieland. "A new twist on time travel dystopia." ★★★★★ "On edge of seat till 2am. Mindblowing." ★★★★★ "There is nothing same-old about this story." ★★★★★ I can see the future. But I can't stop the apocalypse. It can't be real, can it? Each time I slip into the future, I bring back more proof. Humanity is on the brink of a genetically-engineered apocalypse. ⌛ Bodies rotting in the streets. ⌛ Wilderness eating away at my hometown. ⌛ Zombies hunting down the few survivors. I'm the only one who can stop it. Because for me, it hasn't ...

An apocalypse ruined all of Dessa's plans. She's reunited with her brother and plans to hide with him and her friends, while waiting out the zombie apocalypse in safety. But an unexpected crisis throws Dessa's group into a race against time. They need some zombie-blocker meds, and they need them fast. Unfortunately, Dessa and her friends will soon learn that the outside world has more than just zombies standing in their way.

After more than a thousand years in flight, Starship is crashing towards a new home. At its helm, a corrupted machine with unknown goals and deadly tactics. Scrappy human leftovers cluster in the middle, making plans to run if they survive the landing. War between man and machine, they believe, is inevitable. Best get away from the biggest machine in existence. For Gamma, that machine, that ship is his home, and he won’t abandon it without a fight. First up on that score, finding his friends, his partner.

As starving, travel-weary people overrun High Meadow, Tillie and Angus must do a delicate dance to keep the doors open. Angus has set the boundaries for their new territory, and Martin is tasked with keeping it safe. Tillie struggles to get everyone fed while keeping an eye on the stores for winter. Wisp helps where he can, vetting the newcomers and finding stragglers, but not every person comes under his scrutiny.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

Follow the Arceneaux family, a group of white tiger shifters in Louisiana where they find love... and heart-stopping danger in other species of supernatural beings. Full of romance, suspense, and gritty drama, this red-hot collection is sure to entertain! Desirable The last time he saw her he promised to spank her curvy derriere. This time, he may do a lot more than that! Curvalicious Natalya thought she’d never have to grow up. And then she met Lézare. The man who makes her want to be the woman she’s never been. Except his family hates her, and as far as she knows, he does to. So the ...

Nelson’s got a tough choice to make, if he wants to become a true superhero. Nelson and his best friend Simon have escaped the DCA prison and become members of the resistance, which is dedicated to bringing down the Superhero Bureau. But the resistance wants Nelson to do something that goes against everything he believes in. They want him to kill anyone that gets in the way of their mission… Now Nelson will be tested as never before by both the resistance and the Superhero Bureau. And he’s going to have decide what’s more important: The superhero code or his friendship with Simon. ...

In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism.

The stability of the Survivor’s Alliance is still fragile. They made it through the winter, but now it’s flu season. Every year the virus changes just a little. Tillie and Angus are trying to prepare for every scenario, even the possibility that they will be the first to go. Nick is working to bridge the gap in supplies until the spring crops come in. Wisp and Bridget are preparing for the birth of their child. But there are changes coming that no one expected.

Fourteen-year-old Zach Davidson’s burden of being abandoned by his father and raised by a single mother juggling three jobs weighed constantly on his mind. Growing up as a late bloomer, black, and bisexual in a predominantly white, rural Utah town only amplified his struggles—until he got abducted by aliens. Then things got crazy. One evening at Blue Lake, Zach and his friends Wilkie, Jeff, and Liza vanish after witnessing UFOs in Utah’s West Desert. They awake in an arid wilderness over two hundred miles away, devoid of any memory of their abduction or how they got there—except for...