Genetic Science

Our world has ended five times: It has been broiled, frozen, poison gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth's past dead ends, and in the process offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the 21st century have analogs in these five extinctions.

Religious fundamentalists and biblical literalists present any number of arguments that attempt to disprove evolution. Those with a sympathetic ear often fail to critically examine these creationist claims, leading to an ill-informed public and, perhaps more troubling, ill-advised public policy. As Aron Ra makes clear, however, every single argument deployed by creationists in their attacks on evolution is founded on fundamental scientific, religious, and historical falsehoods - all of them.

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.

Origin is the story of who the first peoples in the Americas were, how and why they made the crossing, how they dispersed south, and how they lived based on a new and powerful kind of evidence: their complete genomes. Origin provides an overview of these new histories throughout North and South America, and a glimpse into how the tools of genetics reveal details about human history and evolution.

No one wants to overeat. And certainly no one wants to overeat for years, become overweight, and end up with a high risk of diabetes or heart disease--yet two thirds of Americans do precisely that. Even though we know better, we often eat too much. Why does our behavior betray our own intentions to be lean and healthy? The problem, argues obesity and neuroscience researcher Stephan J. Guyenet, is not necessarily a lack of willpower or an incorrect understanding of what to eat.

Sanda and Biran Greeve were siblings destined for greatness. A high-flying sergeant, Sanda has the skills to take down any enemy combatant. Biran is a savvy politician who aims to use his new political position to prevent conflict from escalating to total destruction. However, on a routine maneuver, Sanda loses consciousness when her gunship is blown out of the sky. Instead of finding herself in friendly hands, she awakens 230 years later on a deserted enemy warship controlled by an AI who calls himself Bero. The war is lost.

To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today's most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish.

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 ?

For millennia, the Weave, an alliance of species, have fought to resist the telepathic Amplitur, who strive to unite all self-aware life-forms in their great "Purpose." The Weave is slowly losing ground, but for both sides, warfare focuses more on outthinking and outmaneuvering your foe than destruction. In fact, most regard violence as hideously barbaric, and even the thought of harming another sentient being is beyond imagining.

The renowned biologist Paul Nurse has spent his career revealing how living cells work. In What Is Life?, he takes up the challenge of describing what it means to be alive in a way that every listener can understand. It is a shared journey of discovery; step-by-step Nurse illuminates five great ideas that underpin biology - the Cell, the Gene, Evolution by Natural Selection, Life as Chemistry, and Life as Information.

When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the southeast United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea.

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences", leads the listener through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge. In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.

Jack Sigler, call sign King, and the elite Chess Team operatives have been relentlessly hunting for their abducted former leader, Tom Duncan. An urgent call from George Pierce's shadowy Cerberus Group catapults them to the treacherous Southern Ocean, where they clash with ferocious prehistoric nightmares in a fight for survival.

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.

In this landmark book of popular science, Daniel E. Lieberman - chair of the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University and a leader in the field - gives us a lucid and engaging account of how the human body evolved over millions of years, even as it shows how the increasing disparity between the jumble of adaptations in our Stone Age bodies and advancements in the modern world is occasioning this paradox: greater longevity but increased chronic disease.

C'est en étudiant la faune et la flore d'Amérique du Sud, lors de son voyage à bord du Beagle (de 1831 à 1836) que Charles Darwin va avoir l'intuition de la sélection naturelle, point central de sa théorie future de l'évolution des espèces. Publié en 1859, "L'origine des espèces" est un livre fondamental de la science moderne. À l'origine des théories de l'évolution, ce texte va révolutionner la compréhension du monde et fonder les bases de la biologie moderne, de la génétique, de l'éthologie et de l'écologie.

A preeminent geneticist hunts the Neanderthal genome to answer the biggest question of them all: what does it mean to be human? What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Pbo’s mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009.

For decades medical science has believed that genes determined our biological destiny. Now the new genetics has changed that assumption forever. You will always have the genes you were born with, but genes are dynamic, responding to everything we think, say, and do. Suddenly they've become our strongest allies for personal transformation. When you make lifestyle choices that optimize how your genes behave, you can reach for a state of health and fulfillment undreamed of even a decade ago.

The thesis of Human Diversity is that advances in genetics and neuroscience are overthrowing an intellectual orthodoxy that has ruled the social sciences for decades. The core of the orthodoxy consists of three dogmas: Gender is a social construct. Race is a social construct. Class is a function of privilege. The problem is that all three dogmas are half-truths. They have stifled progress in understanding the rich texture that biology adds to our understanding of the social, political, and economic worlds we live in. It is not a story to be feared. But it is a story that needs telling.

One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy.... Genetically engineered alpha males designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime....