Science Mysteries

The year is 2012, and China, India, and the United States are waging an infowar for economic domination. With innocent gamers mere pawns in the hands of electronic intelligence agencies, programmer Jack Reed is tasked with ferreting out the plot of those who would gladly trade global turmoil for personal gain.

Andy McGee and Vicky Tomlinson participated in a drug experiment run by a veiled government agency known as The Shop. One year later, they marry. Two years later, their little girl, Charlie, sets her teddy bear on fire by simply staring at it. Now that Charlie is eight, she doesn't start fires anymore. Her parents have taught her to control her pyrokinesis, the ability to set anything - toys, clothes, even people - aflame. But The Shop knows about and wants this pigtailed "ultimate weapon".

For more than 40 years, the US government has researched extrasensory perception, using it in attempts to locate hostages, fugitives, secret bases, and downed fighter jets, to divine other nations' secrets, and even to predict future threats to national security. The intelligence agencies and military services involved include CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the navy, air force, and army - and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, for the first time, New York Times best-selling author Annie Jacobsen tells the story of these radical, controversial programs.

A collection of Smith's apace adventure stories featuring Captain Volmar, including the never before published novella, "Red World of Polaris."

When I arrive in Oakleaf Glade to claim an inheritance, I imagine it'll run to a few hundred in a savings account. Instead, I receive an entire house! I'd thank my lucky stars except for the experiences that come part and parcel with the arrangement. Things like my hair turning bright pink and trending skywards, or a kitten who I swear can understand me when I talk. But when a ghost shrieks me awake at night, warning that if I stay I'll die just like my great aunt Esmerelda, I'm ready to put my boots on.

A missing scientist and deep pockets pull Colonel Carl Butler out of retirement, investigating another mystery that puts him and his team - and the future of relations with alien species - in danger in Colonyside, the exciting follow-up to Planetside and Spaceside. A military hero is coming out of disgrace - straight into the line of fire...Carl Butler was once a decorated colonel. Now he’s a disgraced recluse, hoping to live out the rest of his life on a backwater planet where no one cares about his “crimes” and everyone leaves him alone.

Vampires don't exist, do they? That is a question Private Detective Tony Mandolin finds himself pondering as the evidence piles up in a case involving a string of dead redheads and the usual dose of weirdness San Francisco has to offer. To complicate things, Mandolin has to deal with the perception that he has become the latest golden boy of the fog city's crime boss. Then there's his cross-dressing friend Frankie.... Just another day in San Francisco.

A mysterious murder in a dystopian future leads a novice investigator to question what she's learned about the foundation of her population-controlled society. Decades after economic and environmental collapse destroys much of civilization in the United States, the Coast Road region isn't just surviving but thriving by some accounts, building something new on the ruins of what came before.

A mysterious convergence of natural disasters threatens to destroy life as we know it, and people across the United States are going missing. With no one left to investigate, Special Agent Kendra Baker takes the case, trying to solve the disappearances before she’s out of time. Among those abducted is Valeria Miller, the daughter of ex-Marine Corporal Andrew Miller, and he’ll stop at nothing to find her. With the help of an unstable conspiracy theorist, they find themselves on the trail of a reclusive billionaire who just might have all the answers.

On a hotter and more volatile Earth in the 23rd century, humans like Clare and Jon live in utopia, hunting and gathering in small tribal bands, engaged in daily art and ritual, reunited with old friends like the shaggy mammoth and giant ground sloth. Even better, they still have solar-powered laptops and can communicate with each other around the world. The understanding of physics has also advanced.

Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family - and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship USS Libra - a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows firsthand the mental trauma of time travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Based on the hit feature in National Geographic Kids magazine, Amazing Animals, we bring you three heartwarming tales of animals with incredible talents, including the stories of Norman the bike-riding dog and Eddie the otter who shoots hoops! These action-packed stories will leave listeners thirsty for more.

Upon the cliffs of a remote Scottish island, Lòn Haven, stands a lighthouse. A lighthouse that weathered more than storms. Mysterious and terrible events have happened on this island. It started with a witch hunt. Now, centuries later, islanders are vanishing without explanation. Coincidence? Or curse? Liv Stay flees to the island with her three daughters, in search of a home. She doesn’t believe in witches, or dark omens, or hauntings. But within months, her daughter Luna will be the only one of them left.

For years, like millions of other Americans, John Thomas Rourke had planned for what seemed inevitable — the destruction of civilization. There were various possible causes: global economic collapse, some uncontrollable pestilence, a world famine — or nuclear war. And the rumbling signaling the coming of Total War was becoming increasingly strong as Rourke, ex-CIA Covert Operations Officer, weapons expert, and survival authority, made his last desperate gambit to save his estranged wife and two children before the button was pressed.

A spaceport in the Andes! A computer chart in Egyptian ruins! Primitive sculptures of figures wearing space suits! Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods stunned the world with the archaeological discovery that alien beings once colonized earth.

Margrethe Amelia Linden (Daisy to her friends) is a young woman of gentle upbringing, some talent as a watercolorist, and firm opinions that often get her into trouble. Determined to find her missing father, in the summer of 1895 she sets out for the last place he was seen: the Wild West. It's a rude shock when her younger sister stows away on the airship - such behavior no doubt the result of her unsuitable friendship with Maggie Polgarth and the Carrick House set.

When Lewis Barnavelt and Rose Rita Pottinger explore an abandoned theater, they discover an unpublished opera score entitled "The Day of Doom". Ignoring a strange omen, they show it to their music teacher, who heralds "The Day of Doom" as a masterpiece. Little do they know that the eerie Henry Vanderhelm, the composer's grandson, arrives - with a plan. A plan to awaken the dead and enslave the world!

Callis Rose is a girl blessed with a gift from above or cursed with a ruthless power she barely understands; it's really just a matter of degrees. As her family life is turned asunder she is thrown into an indifferent Social Services program where she defends herself the only way she knows how. Callis is moved from home to home until she finally settles at the Lowries. As she starts her first day of high school she meets both her favorite and least favorite person. Both happen to be part of the same household.

Quinn Quicksilver was born a mystery—abandoned at three days old on a desert highway in Arizona. Raised in an orphanage, never knowing his parents, Quinn had a happy if unexceptional life. Until the day of “strange magnetism.” It compelled him to drive out to the middle of nowhere. It helped him find a coin worth a lot of money. And it practically saved his life when two government agents showed up in the diner in pursuit of him. Now Quinn is on the run from those agents and who knows what else, fleeing for his life.

In the present day, as the man-made apocalypse unfolds, three strangers navigate the chaos. Lila, a doctor and an expectant mother, is so shattered by the spread of violence and infection that she continues to plan for her child’s arrival even as society dissolves around her. Kittridge, known to the world as "Last Stand in Denver", has been forced to flee his stronghold and is now on the road, dodging the infected, armed but alone and well aware that a tank of gas will get him only so far. April is a teenager fighting to guide her little brother safely through a landscape of death.