Genetic World

Veterinarian Darcy Jackson and her family run a small but lucrative hobby farm, raising alpacas and sheltering abused animals in Harmony Valley, a coastal ranching and agricultural community. One foggy night while Darcy is returning home after a call, she veers off the road to avoid hitting a strange creature in the road and crashes her truck. Leroy Malek and his son, Dylan have been harboring a well-kept secret for years raising and caring for hybrids.

Some dreams can’t be ignored. Over a month has passed since Karin Makos has settled on Chamak. Together with her sister and the rest of the crew from the Nemina, she is finally able to do something useful in this war - heal the Lost that the Shadows have taken. But time is not on their side, and more than the Shadow enemy lurks in the wings. Soon, Karin finds herself fighting for her life in the forests of Nova Earth, plagued by strange, vivid dreams of her past, and racing hard to prevent the catastrophe that threatens to swallow the planet.

Alexandra Tashen is a brilliant student, adoring daughter, merry wit, and exuberant prankster. After a blissful childhood on a Texas ranch, she learns the truth: She is a refuse, an illegal refugee smuggled into the Allied Nations as an infant. Everyone from her birth region carries a harmless but detectable bit of viral DNA from a flu vaccine. If detected by the rapid genetic testing at security screens, Alex will be returned to the Federation and a likely death.

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.

‘What is it like to be a bat?’, the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked concerning consciousness. For biologist Martin Stevens, the question forms the starting point of an exploration of animal senses. In this enthralling account, we learn not only of the wonder of animal senses, but how they work and how scientists go about investigating them. And, throughout, we consider how these senses came to be.

It is indisputable that human intelligence makes our species stand out from other lives on Earth. Our brains, much more than our muscles, explain our successes in development, as well as our sometimes devastating effects on the planet. Our modern brain is an evolutionary feat in development for over 520 million years and is the key to everything that makes us the entirety of humanity. But while the human brain is remarkable, what happens if people stop being intelligent?

Brady knew two things: It was the end of the world, and the Greens had won. 2084 was going to be an interesting year. All he needed to do was break out of jail first. Sattva Systems™ had transformed Nanotechnology and Fusion Power to avert the oncoming climate change catastrophe. Still, they were thwarted by the old industries at every turn. Leaving Bodhi Sattva - its charismatic owner, with no choice but to team up with the Green Revolutionaries to bring down the internet and capitalism. He would lead them into a new era with his one-hundred-year plan to save the planet.

It’s been a little over two years since Judas infected the world. Mankind was no match for a virus with a stronger will to survive. The sick wander aimlessly, with a hunger that is never satisfied. The only hope for humanity lies within the immune. A group of survivors set out to rebuild in spite of the apocalypse, but they are faced with the reality that man is the most dangerous threat when they are no rules.

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.

Darwin developed the theory of sexual selection to explain why the animal world abounds in stunning beauty, from the brilliant colors of butterflies and fishes to the songs of birds and frogs. He argued that animals have "a taste for the beautiful" that drives their potential mates to evolve features that make them more sexually attractive and reproductively successful. But if Darwin explained why sexual beauty evolved in animals, he struggled to understand how.

We humans have an extraordinary capacity for compassion—much of it in response to the atrocities we inflict on the planet, its animals, and each other. The popular explanation for this paradox is that we evolved as carnivorous “killer apes,” who gradually curbed our lust for violence (with frequent exceptions) by implementing humane social norms. This explanation is so well worn, especially in the American psyche, that it epitomizes cliché. So, we could be forgiven for believing it, when nearly every word is fiction.

When a cryptic note sends former FBI agent turned wealth advisor David Blum on a journey to discover the truth behind his father’s recent death, all clues point to Otto Feldmann, a world-renowned professor of genetics, with secrets to hide. Further digging leads Blum to Kay Westfield, a bank executive who once witnessed a bizarre explosion on Feldmann’s experimental farm.

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.

An end-of-times sci-fi thriller. The concluding novel in the Alt Truths duology. So, Richard and Sarah find themselves the unwitting "ingredients" in Perry’s latest attempts to create a melting pot of world happiness. But the boy isn’t the only savant, and when our hapless heroes discover an African war criminal is using a "super-savant" to impose his version of global order, it looks as if Utopia is going to have to wait.

In a near-future world dominated by The Directorate, a sinister regime, Alex and Mia find love amidst oppression. Alex, born with "Inferior Genes", possesses a secret that could change everything. Together, they join the underground resistance and uncover the regime's dark secrets. Their daring mission to expose The Directorate's tyranny takes them to the heart of its power. Betrayals and sacrifices test their love, but they emerge victorious, ushering in a new era where individuality and freedom reign.

Over more than 25 years of teaching and research, Christine Desdemaines-Hugon has become an unrivaled expert in the cave art and artists of the Dordogne region. In Stepping-Stones she combines her expertise in both art and archaeology to convey an intimate understanding of the "cave experience." Her keen insights communicate not only the incomparable artistic value of these works but also the near-spiritual impact of viewing them for oneself.

If you think you are you, think again. Primate Change is a wide-ranging, polemical look at how and why the human body has changed since humankind first got up on two feet. Spanning the entirety of human history - from primate to transhuman - Vybarr Cregan-Reid's book investigates where we came from, who we are today and how modern technology will change us beyond recognition.

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.

From the author of Seed of Israel: DNA Guide to Tracing Your Jewish Ancestry comes this great dive into the history of Ashkenazi Jews. While controversial debates spark disagreements on the crystallization of this Jewish Diaspora, modern genetic studies and personal DNA samples finally conclude the Levantine Middle Eastern and Mediterranean roots of Ashkenazi ancestry: Judean people from the Holy Land that journeyed across the Mediterranean to the bottleneck of Europe.

After escaping the laboratory where he was imprisoned by the scientific mega-corporation GenTech, Kata wants just one thing: to go back to his homeworld of Trandellia with his friend Tau and forget all about what happened. Forget about being imprisoned and mutated, forget about GenTech's attempts to break and sell him as a piece of livestock, and above all, forget the tortures he suffered at the hands of some of the scientists.