Genetic Science

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs - they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken - imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting with a few dozen silver foxes from fox farms in the USSR and attempting to recreate the evolution of wolves into dogs in real time.

A fascinating survey of the forces that shape who we are and how we act - from the author of The Calculus Diaries. Following her previous tours through the worlds of physics ( Black Bodies and Quantum Cats) and calculus ( The Calculus Diaries), acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ouellette now turns her attention to the mysteries of human identity and behavior with Me, Myself, and Why.

Posiblemente uno de los ensayos científicos más conocidos y con más predicamento en todo el planeta, "El origen de las especies" es un texto capital a la hora de entender la teoría de la evolución y la selección natural tal y como las conocemos hoy en día. En él, Charles Darwin recogió sus conclusiones a través de pruebas fósiles encontradas a lo largo de un extenso viaje a bordo de la expedición del HMS Beagle. El resultado fue una de las teorías científicas más asentadas en el mundo hoy en día.

Once, Master Commander Carter Rose was the Union’s secret weapon. An augmented, bio-engineered officer in command of the most powerful warship ever devised by human minds, Rose brought them victory against the post-human Aternien Empire. Then they cast him aside. A century later, humanity’s enemy has returned, hell-bent on revenge, and the Union's only hope is the man they had forsaken.

Сто тысяч лет назад Homo sapiens был одним из как минимум шести видов человека, живших на этой планете, — ничем не примечательным животным, которое играло в экосистеме роль не большую, чем гориллы, светлячки или медузы. Но около семидесяти тысяч лет назад загадочное изменение когнитивных способностей Homo sapiens превратило его в хозяина планеты и кошмар экосистемы. Как человек разумный сумел покорить мир? Что стало с другими видами человека? Когда и почему появились деньги, государства и религия? Как возникали и рушились империи?

In this eagerly awaited follow-up, brave bird-kid Max and her flock are discovered by an FBI agent and forced to go to "school." There is no such thing as an ordinary day as Max deciphers how and when she's supposed to save the world, and she faces her greatest enemy—a clone of herself.

It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up.

Governments, black ops, rich businessmen.... All want alien tech, and some are going to great lengths, illegal lengths, to procure it. Someone went so far as to endanger a young girls family. A young girl who wrote a letter to the Queen Bitch. Now, those that are searching for the technology will have to deal with TQB. If there is one thing that will get Bethany Anne's attention... it's mistreating the defenseless.

Short, sassy, and bold, Mean Genes reveals that our struggles for self-improvement are, in fact, battles against our own genes - genes that helped our distant ancestors flourish, but are selfish and out of place in the modern world.

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers "yes!" Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments - drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy - that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally.

In these lively and fascinating essays, scientists from around the world weigh in on the latest advances in the search for intelligent life in the universe and discuss just what that might look like. Since 2000, science has seen a surge in data and interest on several fronts related to ET (extraterrestrials); AI (artificial intelligence); and SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The debate has intensified over whether life exists outside our solar system, what that life would look like, and whether we'll ever make contact.

Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that tricks Harvard philosophers? And why do billionaires work so hard - only to give their hard-earned money away? When it comes to making decisions, the classic view is that humans are eminently rational. But growing evidence suggests instead that our choices are often irrational, biased, and occasionally even moronic. Which view is right - or is there another possibility?

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human. A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth.

Four hundred years in the future the Earth has turned primitive, following a nuclear fire that laid waste to civilization and nature. Though the radiation fallout has ended, for some unknowable reason every person is born with a twin. Of each pair one is an Alpha - physically perfect in every way - and the other an Omega burdened with deformity, small or large.

Luke Abramson, a brilliant cellular biologist who is battling lung cancer, has one joy in life: his 10-year-old granddaughter, Angela. When Angela is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and given less than six months to live, Luke wants to try a new enzyme, Mortality Factor 4 (MORF4), that he believes will kill Angela's tumor. However, the hospital bureaucracy won't let him do it because MORF4 has not yet been approved by the FDA. Knowing Angela will die before he can get the treatment approved, Luke abducts her from the hospital with plans to take her to a private research laboratory in Oregon.

How did humans come to be who we are? In his marvelous, eccentric, and widely lauded book Being a Beast, legal scholar, veterinary surgeon, and naturalist extraordinaire Charles Foster set out to understand the consciousness of animal species by living as a badger, otter, fox, deer, and swift. Now, he inhabits three crucial periods of human development to understand the consciousness of perhaps the strangest animal of all—the human being.

The domestic cat—your cat—has, from its evolutionary origins in Africa, been transformed in comparatively little time into one of the most successful and diverse species on the planet. Jonathan Losos, writing as both a scientist and a cat lover, explores how researchers today are unraveling the secrets of the cat, past and present, using all the tools of modern technology, from GPS tracking (you’d be amazed where those backyard cats roam) and genomics (what is your so-called Siamese cat . . . really?) to forensic archaeology.

Astrobiology is an exciting new subject, and one, arguably, more interdisciplinary than any other. Astrobiologists seek to understand the origin and evolution of life on Earth in order to illuminate and guide the search for life on other planets. In this Very Short Introduction, David C. Catling introduces the subject through our understanding of the factors that allowed life to arise and persist on our own planet, and for the signs we are looking for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Escaping from deranged cyborgs and a malcontent artificial intelligence had been the run of Daisy’s life, but one from which she had miraculously come out the other side, and in one piece, no less. Unfortunately for her, she had survived that ordeal only to find herself in a far deeper mess. With an even more dangerous turn of events throwing her in harm’s way, Daisy’s original plight was now dwarfed by the new issues at hand.

Lately, the most passionate advocates of the theory of evolution seem to present it as bad news. Scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, and Sam Harris tell us that our most intimate actions, thoughts, and values are mere byproducts of thousands of generations of mindless adaptation. We are just one species among multitudes and therefore no more significant than any other living creature. Now comes Brown University biologist Kenneth R. Miller to make the case that this view betrays a gross misunderstanding of evolution.