New Science Life

In Strange New Worlds, renowned astronomer Ray Jayawardhana brings news from the front lines of the epic quest to find planets—and alien life—beyond our solar system. Only in the past two decades, after millennia of speculation, have astronomers begun to discover planets around other stars—thousands in fact. Now they are closer than ever to unraveling distant twins of the Earth. In this book, Jayawardhana vividly recounts the stories of the scientists and the remarkable breakthroughs that have ushered in this extraordinary age of exploration.

In this classic work that continues to inspire its many fans, James Lovelock deftly explains his idea that life on Earth functions as a single organism. Written for the non-scientist, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the Earth's living matter - air, ocean, and land surfaces - forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life.

Drawing on modern neuroscience, ancient wisdom, and decades of practice and teaching, Eddie Stern’s One Simple Thing, with a foreword from Deepak Chopra, explains how what we do affects who we become, and reveals how a steady routine of physical movements, activities, and attitudes are able to transform not just our bodies but our brain functions and emotions, and how we experience life.

In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all life. Perhaps the most startling discovery to come out of this new field is horizontal gene transfer (HGT), or the movement of genes across species lines. For instance, we now know that roughly eight percent of the human genome arrived not through traditional inheritance from directly ancestral forms, but sideways by viral infection - a type of HGT. In The Tangled Tree David Quammen chronicles these discoveries through the lives of the researchers who made them.

When Robert Zubrin published his classic book The Case for Mars a quarter century ago, setting foot on the Red Planet seemed a fantasy. Today, manned exploration is certain, and as Zubrin affirms in The New World on Mars, so too is colonization.

What defines who we are? For decades, the answer has seemed obvious: our genes, the "blueprint of life." In The Master Builder, biologist Alfonso Martinez Arias argues we've been missing the bigger picture. It's not our genes that define who we are, but our cells.

Miranda's disbelief turns to fear in a split second when a meteor knocks the Moon closer to the Earth. How should her family prepare for the future when worldwide tsunamis wipe out the coasts, earthquakes rock the continents, and volcanic ash blocks out the sun?

Bekoff is recognized as a preeminent voice in the media for animal sentience and dog behavior, with high-profile appearances in Time, Life, the New York Times, New Scientist, and BBC Wildlife and on Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, and 20/20, among others.

Leonard Dunning wakes up in a home he doesn’t remember—and to a face in the mirror he doesn’t recognize. He soon discovers he attends Blue Cherry High with his best friend, Josh Bernstein, who seems to be the most popular boy in school, with several girls competing for his attention. As the girls collide and clash over the oblivious Josh, Leo realizes each of them displays quirks of characters found in an anime harem comedy. So if Josh is the story’s protagonist, what does that make Leo?

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

While in France, immortal warlock Magnus Bane finds himself attempting to rescue the royal family from the horrors of the French Revolution - after being roped into this mess by a most attractive count. Naturally, the daring escape calls for invisible air balloons.… This standalone e-only short story illuminates the life of the enigmatic Magnus Bane, whose alluring personality populates the pages of the number-one New York Times best-selling series The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices.

One of the most significant and popular books in the history of human thought, and China’s earliest philosophical classic, The Dao De Jing has served for millennia as a brilliant guide to living healthily and happily, to treating the Earth with respect, and to understanding our place in the cosmos. Renowned translator J. H. Huang has spent over two decades researching the Dao, resulting in the most accurate translation to date based on the oldest known transcripts of the text.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar, earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America.

Charlie is just your average teenage boy living a normal life until it flips upside down. Learning you're adopted is hard enough, but learning that your parents are genius scientists that are labeled crazy for their work; that's an entirely new level of insane. When Charlie gets an opportunity to meet with his real parents and get his answers, they not only change his life and world view, but they also give him a choice - a choice that will irrevocably change his life.

When immortal warlock Magnus Bane attends preliminary peace talks between the Shadowhunters and the Downworlders in Victorian London, he is charmed by two very different people: the vampire Camille Belcourt and the young Shadowhunter, Edmund Herondale. Will winning hearts mean choosing sides?

Drawing on the diaries of one woman in 18th-century Maine, this intimate history illuminates the medical practices, household economies, religious rivalries, and sexual mores of the New England frontier. Between 1785 and 1812, a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine.

The Smeds (who are red) never mix with the Smoos (who are blue). So when a young Smed and Smoo fall in love, their families strongly disapprove. But peace is restored and love conquers all in this happiest of love stories. There’s even a gorgeous purple baby to celebrate!

The purpose of creating this audiobook is to help the listener to understand as much about influencing human behavior as possible. Like most things in life, it is possible for anyone, regardless of background, to learn and put this information into practice and become a truly influential individual. Learning and applying the skills herein will help the listener to win more friends and gain more influence over people even without having a form of authority over them.

While today’s business world is dominated by technology and data analysis, award-winning financial journalist and anthropology PhD Gillian Tett advocates thinking like an anthropologist to better understand consumer behavior, markets, and organizations to address some of society’s most urgent challenges.

Bestselling author and renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin delivers the political narrative, technical framework, and economic plan for the debate now taking center stage across America. The concurrence of a stranded fossil fuel assets bubble and a green political vision opens up the possibility of a massive global paradigm shift into a post-carbon ecological era, hopefully in time to prevent a temperature rise that will tip us over the edge into runaway climate change.