New Science Life

What defines who we are? For decades, the answer has seemed obvious: our genes, the "blueprint of life." In The Master Builder, biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias argues we've been missing the bigger picture. It's not our genes that define who we are, but our cells.

★★★★★ "An interesting take on humanities future!" - Reader Review ___ A fresh take on science fiction and a glimpse at humanity through the eyes of an alien who doesn't know what 'family' is, until he finds one! "Humans are the only known intelligent species to actively create 'Found Families' in the form of parents, children, siblings, and more. If a human starts spending more time with you and initiating physical contact, they have probably adopted you." These were the words that caught my ears when attending the most prestigious university in my quadrant as a minor in alien ...

In a world where everything seems to transform in a blink, anyone can suddenly find themselves scrambling for human connection. Someone who has always found it easy to connect can suddenly feel disoriented if they start a new job, move to a new region, or welcome a new member into the family. Others may have always found it difficult to connect, feel they've outgrown their circles, or may feel dissatisfied for a range of other reasons. In Our New Social Life, social connection and happiness experts Natalie Kerr and Jaime Kurtz explain the science behind these struggles.

While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.

This audiobook narrated by Christopher Ragland describes the revolution in science that is transforming our understanding of extinct life.

Combining the best current medical knowledge with a new approach grounded in integrative medicine, Chopra and Tanzi offer a groundbreaking new model of healing and the healing system, one of the main mysteries in the mind-body connection. The Healing Self is a breakthrough audiobook in self-care for a wide audience. Immunity - the body's ability to ward off disease - can no longer be taken for granted.

Growing older is a blessing. But the slow decline and the loss of functionality associated with aging has led us to treat the process like a disease. These negative effects of aging, however, are not inevitable. Rather, they’re largely the result of environmental and lifestyle factors that, when properly addressed, can be reversed through a process called Autojuvenation™.

Christopher Reeve has mastered the art of turning the impossible into the inevitable. In Nothing Is Impossible, Reeve shows that we are all capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable hardships. Published on the eve of both his fiftieth birthday and the seventh anniversary of his spinal cord injury, Nothing Is Impossible reminds us that life is not to be taken for granted but to be lived fully with zeal, curiosity, and gratitude.

Based on the largest near-death experience study in history, involving 3,000 people from diverse backgrounds and religious traditions, including nonbelievers, God and the Afterlife presents startling evidence that a supreme being exists - and there is amazing consistency about what he is like.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed.

Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong. In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels, each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).

Why do we get cancer? Is it our modern diets and unhealthy habits? Chemicals in the environment? An unwelcome genetic inheritance? Or is it just bad luck? The answer is all of these and none of them. We get cancer because we can’t avoid it - it’s a bug in the system of life itself.

With one major enemy town behind them, the GreenPiece clan marches onward to new conquests. Facing Oren and his monster army are the combined forces of the so-called "civilized races", intent on halting his invasion of their territory. Reality blurs as Oren fights harder than ever to save the trapped players, his clan, and his family.

More than 50 years after his death, revered intellectual and teacher C. S. Lewis continues to speak to booklovers, thanks not only to his intellectual insights on Christianity but also his wondrous creative works and deep reflections on the literature that influenced his life. Cultivated from his many essays, articles, and letters, as well as his classic works, The Reading Life provides guidance and reflections on the love and enjoyment of books.

Drawing on modern neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and decades of practice and teaching, Eddie Stern’s One Simple Thing, with a foreword from Deepak Chopra, explains how what we do affects who we become, and reveals how a steady routine of physical movements, activities, and attitudes are able to transform not just our bodies but our brain functions and emotions, and how we experience life.

In 1999, Clark Elliott suffered a concussion when his car was rear-ended. Overnight his life changed from that of a rising professor with a research career in artificial intelligence to a humbled man struggling to get through a single day. At times he couldn't walk across a room, or even name his five children. Doctors told him he would never fully recover. After eight years, the cognitive demands of his job, and of being a single parent, finally became more than he could manage.

Like his fellow lunarnauts - otherwise known as Moonies - living on Moon Base Alpha, twelve-year-old Dashiell Gibson is famous the world over for being one of the first humans to live on the moon. And he's bored out of his mind. Kids aren't allowed on the lunar surface, meaning they're trapped inside the tiny moon base with next to nothing to occupy their time - and the only other kid Dash's age spends all his time hooked into virtual reality games.

No one predicted the dragon apocalypse. The dragons came suddenly and decimated the world as we knew it, including New York City. Now, three years later, Noah, his hardcore survivalist father, and a ragtag group of survivors are barely scraping by in this new reality. Kids scavenge not only for materials in abandoned homes but also for leftover books at the library. Adults spend their time establishing a make-shift society and defending their shelter… with any means available. At least for the few months the dragons are hibernating, until it’s no longer safe aboveground.

Victorian philosopher William James had a theory about emotion and behavior: It isn’t that our feelings guide our actions (feel happy and you will laugh). On the contrary, it is our actions that guide our emotions (laugh and you will feel happy). This led James to a remarkable conclusion: "If you want a quality, act as if you already have it." Roused by James’s astonishing discovery, renowned psychologist and best-selling author Richard Wiseman confirms James’s principle and shows how the self-help genre has for too long put the cart before the horse in trying to help us take control of our lives.

In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection - a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them.