Genetic Science

What will become of our self-destructed planet? The answer shatters all expectations in this subversive speculation from the Hugo Award - winning author of the Broken Earth trilogy. An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: A graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind - hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out ages ago.

Held captive by Dark Horse Company, Captain Axel Finn is faced with a mission to humanity’s ancestral home after all contact with the planet is lost. Learning his mother might be hiding there, Axel agrees to help his adversaries, and deploy on Vengeance, the last Steward ship. But his decision might lead to his downfall if the Wrath have already arrived on Earth. On the treacherous Wooly planet of Dari, bounty hunter Rangnar Soki becomes the prey, finding himself the target in a deadly game of survival. His path to rejoin Axel’s crew hinges on passing a test of Dari’s most revered guardian.

Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened.

In 1994, a team led by fossil-hunting legend Tim White—"the Steve Jobs of paleoanthropology"—uncovered the bones of a human ancestor in Ethiopia's Afar region. The findings challenged many assumptions about human evolution and repudiated a half-century of paleoanthropological orthodoxy. An intriguing tale of scientific discovery, obsession and rivalry that moves from the sun-baked desert of Africa to modern high-tech labs and academic lecture halls, Fossil Men is popular science at its best, and a must-listen for fans of Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Edward O. Wilson.

For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. After new discoveries, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different - and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs.

Composée de chercheurs et de militaires, la société française Pygmée Prod commercialise les services d'une nouvelle race d'humains créée de toute pièce : les Emachs, des femmes et des hommes ne dépassant pas 17 cm. Ces êtres réduits servent sur la planète entière à diverses tâches : leur petite taille et la minutie de leurs gestes font des merveilles ; certains se sont même illustrés dans des actes héroïques. Tout pourrait continuer ainsi, si un fait divers sordide ne venait tout bouleverser.

We human beings share 98 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet humans are the dominant species on the planet - having founded civilizations and religions, developed intricate and diverse forms of communication, learned science, built cities, and created breathtaking works of art - while chimps remain animals concerned primarily with the basic necessities of survival. What is it about that two percent difference in DNA that has created such a divergence between evolutionary cousins?

Abbie awakens in a daze with no memory of who she is or how she landed in this unsettling condition. The man by her side claims to be her husband. He’s a titan of the tech world, the founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most innovative start-ups. He tells Abbie that she is the perfect wife. He says she had a terrible accident five years ago and that, through a huge technological breakthrough, she has been brought back from the abyss. But as Abbie pieces together memories of her marriage, she begins to question her husband’s motives - and his version of events.

Il y a environ 4 000 millions d'années, la vie est apparue sur la Terre. Mais quelle est l'histoire de son évolution ? La vie était-elle inévitable ? La race humaine, telle que nous la connaissons, était-elle prévisible ? Quels autres êtres intelligents auraient pu la remplacer ? À partir de questionnements comme ceux-ci et des réponses scientifiques qui existent déjà, Juan Luis Arsuaga nous présente les découvertes-clés de la théorie de l'évolution et nous élève vers un questionnement plus vaste encore : pourquoi sommes-nous ici ?

Veteran mech operator Sergeant Major Shaw spent his career fighting huge monsters known as Sentinels. He never expected that he would be piloting them. But as a new war unfolds, Shaw finds himself and his team using this unorthodox technology in a desperate attempt to save the New World Republic from destruction. The Principality of the Seven Sons has control of an ancient Progenitor dreadnaught rumored to have the power to enslave and destroy empires. No one is safe. Not even Shaw and his Deadmen.

For Mack McKinley and his team of GhostWalker killing machines, urban warfare is an art. But despite a hard-won knowledge of the San Francisco streets, Mack knows from experience that too many things can still go wrong. Danger was just another part of the game--and now he's come face-to-face with a woman who can play just as tough. She's Jaimie, a woman with a sapphire stare so potent it can destroy a man. Years ago she and Mack had a history--volatile, erotic, and electric.

Too many years of hunting psychotic vampires night after night have left Rachel with a need for change. So when the opportunity to travel across the galaxy aboard a Lasaran warship to a utopian planet arises, the powerful Immortal Guardian jumps at the chance. Rachel eagerly looks forward to making a fresh start . . . until an enemy attacks and she ends up alone in an escape pod so far from alliance-occupied space that no one can hear her communications. No one except a renegade cyborg who shouldn't exist.

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.

More than three decades ago, Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School proposed a theory in his multimillion-copy best seller The Relaxation Response, which stated that by calming the mind, one could calm the body and alleviate stress, pain, and illness.

The world is in crisis! What is the solution? Ultimately, we have to find the redeeming, and thus transforming, understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition. And it is precisely that dreamed-of insight, and its now desperately needed transformation of our lives, that Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith presents in this book.

When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the "Cambrian explosion", many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin's Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life.

Kadan Montague - a genetically enhanced warrior - is called back from an important assignment in Europe to investigate a series of brutal murders. The suspect is a fellow GhostWalker and, if he isn't found, the entire GhostWalker program will be swept under the carpet, putting the lives of Kadan and all other GhostWalkers in jeopardy. Kadan turns to Tansy Meadows, an elite tracker, to help him hunt down the killer before he can strike again.

At first glance, the planet Rada seems like a lush paradise. But the ruling families, all boasting genetically enhanced abilities, are in constant competition for power - and none more so than the Adlers and the Baenas. For generations, the powerful families have pushed and pulled each other in a dance for dominance. Until a catastrophic betrayal from within changes everything.

Control is a book about what geneticist Adam Rutherford calls “a defining idea of the twentieth century.” Inspired by Darwin’s ideas about evolution, eugenics arose in Victorian England as a theory for improving the British population, and quickly spread to America. With disarming wit and scientific precision, Rutherford explains why eugenics still figures prominently in the twenty-first century, despite its genocidal past. And he confronts insidious recurring questions, revealing the intellectual bankruptcy of the idea, and the scientific impossibility of its realization.

Renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux digs into the natural history of life on earth to provide a new perspective on the similarities between us and our ancestors in deep time. This pause-resisting survey of the whole of terrestrial evolution sheds new light on how nervous systems evolved in animals, how the brain developed, and what it means to be human. In The Deep History of Ourselves, LeDoux argues that the key to understanding human behavior lies in viewing evolution through the prism of the first living organisms.