Science Reality

Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom: that if anything, we are too free now. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues, we are controlled by a new brand of sexual convention: one that influences all of us - woman or man, straight or gay, liberal or conservative.

Through more than 50 Koans - pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following the ancient Zen tradition - leading physicist Anthony Aguirre takes the listener across the world from West to East, and through ideas spanning the age, breadth, and depth of the Universe. Using these beguiling Koans (Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made?

In 1939, Richard Feynman, a brilliant graduate of MIT, arrived in John Wheeler's Princeton office to report for duty as his teaching assistant. A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits.

Continue Meena's incredible journey as she returns to Broken Wand Academy after crossing over to the Academy of Shifters to help Remi.

Ceasefires have one big downside: They eventually come to an end. And when they do, once again game nodes are set ablaze, and platoons of Dark Faction soldiers threaten our customary world with destruction. The enemy has grown stronger and more numerous. To make matters worse, they also got their hands on even deadlier weaponry. They have learned painful lessons from previous encounters and adjusted their tactics accordingly.

Half-norn event planner Anders Skuldsson is under strict orders from Asgard not to meddle with Fate. But with Enchanted Occasions’ latest booking - the competition for the hand of Faerie’s one true prince - crashing around his ears, it’s really, really, really difficult to toe that particular line. So...if Andy just happens to pose as a contender for the prince? It’s an emergency, damn it. Besides, it’s only temporary, so Odin can hardly blame him. Right?

A decade has passed since the city of Pittsburgh was reduced to ash. While the rest of the world has moved on, losing itself in the noise of a media-glutted future, survivor John Dominic Blaxton remains obsessed with the past. Grieving for his wife and unborn child who perished in the blast, Dominic relives his lost life by immersing in the Archive - a fully interactive digital reconstruction of Pittsburgh, accessible to anyone who wants to visit the places they remember and the people they loved.

Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions. As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an "infosphere".

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to sink, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable natural limits.

Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension. Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces: armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions.

Young and idealistic, Tori Hogan travels to Kenya as an intern for Save the Children, intent upon doing her part to improve the lives of refugees. But the cynicism of a young African boy changes Tori’s life and sets her on a course to reconsider everything she thought she knew about helping those in need. Years later, Tori returns to Africa and embarks on a journey through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, searching for the truth about what does and does not work in international aid.

Biohacker Olivia Park is obsessed with an emerging mystery within Oz, the online portal created by alien technology. What she finds is a primitive xenobot, Eno, who takes her on a mind-bending trip through time that begins as the Berlin Wall is falling, and takes her back to the origins of the modern internet and the fall of a digital Atlantis created by her father, Wesley Park, and entrepreneur William Ackerson.

Reality is all very well in small doses. It's a perfectly conventional and convenient way of neutralising the imagination. But sometimes when there's more than one reality at play, imagination just won't be neutralised, and the walls between realities come tumbling down. Unfortunately there's usually a damned good reason for there being walls between them in the first place. To keep things out. Things who want to make mischief and play havoc with the natural order.

The world's best introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value explains basic philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, such as: How can we know about the world outside our minds? Is there a God? Do we have free will? Are there objective values? What distinguishes right actions from wrong actions? The text clearly explains the most important arguments about these things, and it does so a lot less boringly than most books written by professors.

When aimless twenty-something Mara lands a job as the night-shift production assistant on her cousin’s ghost hunting/home makeover reality TV show Haunt Sweet Home, she quickly determines her new role will require a healthy attitude toward duplicity. But as she hides fog machines in the woods and improvises scares to spook new homeowners, a series of unnerving incidents on set and a creepy new coworker force Mara to confront whether the person she's truly been deceiving and hiding from all along—is herself.

Does a bear shift in the woods? Well, partially. That was what got grizzly-shifter Ted Farnsworth into trouble. He wasn’t trying to break the Secrecy Pact. He just wants people to see the real him. So he signs up with the mate-matching service Supernatural Selection - which guarantees marriage to a perfect partner. Not only will Ted never be lonely again, but once his new beaver-shifter husband arrives, they’ll build Ted’s dream wilderness retreat together. Win-win.

Bullied at school and home, Ash finds respite from his unhappy life in virtual reality games. One night, he spends his meager savings to help a stranger, who thanks him with a copy of an old fantasy game called The Glass Realm. While exploring the game, Ash meets a seemingly humble shopkeeper named Ruby. But from the start, Ruby seems different than the other townsfolk-especially when she and Ash stumble across an in-game quest designed not for the player, but for Ruby to solve.

In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle to explain the unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets.

Former Queen’s Enforcer Mal Kendrick doesn’t think his life could get any worse: He’s been exiled from Faerie with a cursed and useless right hand. When he’s not dodging random fae assassins in the Outer World, he’s going toe-to-toe with his tree-hugging neighbor. And when he discovers that the tree hugger is really a druid, he’s certain the gods have it in for him - after all, there’s always a catch with druids. Then he’s magically shackled to the man and expected to instruct him in Supernatural 101.

Dying in virtual reality isn't fun, but facing bullets from real-world criminal overlords is really the pits. In such a desperate scenario, their demand to render them a service in VR doesn't sound like such a bad alternative. The problem is, the games played by spook agencies follow much harsher rules. For them, the absence of choice doesn't sound like a good excuse - not if you end up in the grindstones of their undercover schemes.