Genetic Science

Maternal instinct - the all-consuming, utterly selfless love that mothers lavish on their children - has long been assumed to be an innate, indeed defining element of a woman's nature. But is it? In this provocative, groundbreaking audiobook, renowned anthropologist (and mother) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shares a radical new vision of motherhood and its crucial role in human evolution. Hrdy strips away stereotypes and gender-biased myths to demonstrate that traditional views of maternal behavior are essentially wishful thinking codified as objective observation.

Tony Platz had the respect of his peers, a career on the fast track, and the body of an Olympian. There was only one problem: It was an open secret he carried a torch for his already-married partner. When a raid put her in the hospital and finally exposed her husband's ongoing infidelity, Tony got shipped out to Oolytau. Tayra Manes worked hard, graduated the academy, and became the first of her kind to join the Non-Human Investigative Corps. There was only one problem: She was a griffin, and not everyone approved of her being allowed to serve in the previously all-human NHIC.

Colton Beck has a new lease on life. Their alliance is confident they can find their enemy in the Alruna system, and it’s all hands on deck. After the revelation of his origins from the mysterious woman on Dicore, Colton is at odds with where his loyalties stand. The truth behind Indie Hart’s dedication to the Angor is revealed, making Colton doubt her motives as well as the Angor’s. When Earth is threatened, it’ll take a lot more than one man to save the planet. All pieces come together for a cataclysmic resolution, but who can Colton truly trust?

What is animal welfare? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as "health and animals having what they want", a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare.

In November 2018, the world was shocked to learn that two babies had been born in China with DNA edited while they were embryos - as dramatic a development in genetics as the cloning of Dolly the sheep was in 1996. In this book, Hank Greely, a leading authority on law and genetics, tells the fascinating story of this human experiment and its consequences. Greely explains what Chinese scientist He Jiankui did, how he did it, and how the public and other scientists learned about and reacted to this unprecedented genetic intervention.

It's been 10 years since Handry was wrenched away from his family and friends, forced to wander a world he no longer understood. But with the help of the Ancients, he has cobbled together a life, of sorts, for himself and his fellow outcasts. Wandering from village to village, welcoming the folk that the townships abandon, fighting the monsters the villagers cannot - or dare not - his ever-growing band of misfits has become the stuff of legend, a story told by parents to keep unruly children in line.

In 2022, the United States commissioned a group of scientists to experiment with genetic mutations. Their goal was to create a serum that would alter the human genetic code, making the subject stronger and faster. But not only had they created a super serum, but also an airborne virus. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's population had perished. Ally is an Ordinary - a human who is immune to the virus. She lives in a settlement outside the City with her mother and twin brother, but lately it doesn't seem to be enough.

It seems likely that scientists will someday discover how life can emerge on habitable planets like the early Earth and Mars. In Origin of Life: What Everyone Needs to Know, David W. Deamer has written a comprehensive guide to the origin of life that is organized in three sections.

The seemingly endless war with the Grutex has caused many inconveniences for Amanda, but none of those have been as bad as losing the funding for the project she is working on, which is supposed to help save humanity. When she foolishly risks her life to continue her research, Amanda is thrown into the path of an alien, the likes of which she has never seen, who claims she is his mate. The problem is, he isn’t the only one making that claim.

Who are we, and how did we get here? These are two of the most fundamental and far-reaching questions facing scientists and cosmologists alike and have rested at the center of human intellectual endeavor since its beginning. They are questions that stretch across numerous disciplines. Philosophy, theology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics are just some of the fields looking to explain the emergence of human life.

All of us would like to live longer, or to slow the debilitating effects of age. In How We Age, Coleen Murphy shows how recent research on longevity and aging may be bringing us closer to this goal. Murphy, a leading scholar of aging, explains that the study of model systems, particularly simple invertebrate animals, combined with breakthroughs in genomic methods, have allowed scientists to probe the molecular mechanisms of longevity and aging.

Within the verdant green of the slime forests, new slimes are born and new evolutions are found. Doc watches on as his slimes take on new life and form the budding beginnings of tribal life, complete with leaders, goals, and increasing rivalries. The martial grey slimes, the productive herb slimes, the swarming bug slimes, and the elusive mimic slimes all seek to stake their claim, even as the lieutenants work to strengthen their abilities as true bosses.

Screams come next. Then the hunters. With a staccato flicker, the light disappears and everything within a hundred-yard radius goes with it. A massive crater is all that remains where a chunk of the world has gone missing. As the deadly phenomenon repeats and expands amidst the world's most densely populated cities—carving apartment buildings in half, scooping away entire city blocks, and claiming thousands of lives—Jack Sigler, call sign King, and his black ops team take action.

The Martians explores the CIA's top-secret search for the Martians, multiple photos of strange anomalies, and the latest revelations about the environment and water on Mars. And most tantalizing of all: Did an ailing Martian race come to Earth in past eons and were they confused with gods? The questions concerning life on Mars - then and now - are many. The answers are astounding.

The study of human evolution is advancing rapidly. Newly discovered fossil evidence is adding ever more pieces to the puzzle of our past, while revolutionary technological advances in the study of ancient DNA are completely reshaping theories of early human populations and migrations. In this Very Short Introduction, Bernard Wood traces the history of paleoanthropology from its beginnings in the 18th century to the very latest fossil finds.

There is no one better qualified than Jared Diamond - renowned expert in the fields of physiology and evolutionary biology and award-winning author - to explain the evolutionary forces that operated on our ancestors to make us sexually different. With wit and a wealth of fascinating examples, he explains how our sexuality has been as crucial as our large brains and upright posture in our rise to human status.

In 2004, Doctor Damien Howard's 131st birthday celebration took an unexpected turn. His personal SETI project detected an extraterrestrial signal directed at Earth. Unfortunately, Dr. Howard's long-hoped-for communication contained a message of dire warning rather than greeting. In 1945, humanity had become a species of galactic interest and was given 100 years to address the issue.

Did you know women walk more, eat less, socialize more, meet more men, dance more, and flirt more when they're ovulating? Or that PMS may have evolved to get rid of boyfriends with unfit sperm? Behind the "fickle" differences in what women find sexy about men, or what they like to wear, there's a hidden adaptive intelligence shaped over eons. Rather than making women irrational - as the conventional and irredeemably sexist wisdom goes - the female hormonal cycle has been exquisitely fine-tuned to give women the advantages they needed to succeed in our ancestral environments, and perhaps also today.

Scientists have accidentally tapped into the deepest recesses of the human mind—and unleash a terrifying force. Now, with an infected creature loose in the Alaskan wilderness, the America military asks expert tracker Nathaniel Hunter to locate the beast before it destroys mankind. A top-secret project brings CIA hit man Roth Tiberius Cain back to life as the ultimate predator. But this killing machine has the soul of a devil. On an Icelandic island, a biological weapons experiment has transformed an innocent creature into the biblical Leviathan that once terrorized the world.

In 1959, nine hikers of the Dyatlov expedition perished while crossing a remote mountain range in the Soviet Union. More than sixty-five years later, the circumstances surrounding their deaths remain a mystery. In 1995, Julie Sigler was killed in an Air Force training exercise crash, but the circumstances of her death are never called into question... until she appears on TV, twenty years later, standing beside the current President of the United States.