Science Reality

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.

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of the quest to find this “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called “dark energy”. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize.

Delving deeply into each of these major focuses, Consciousness Reality & Purpose sets the listener upon a journey into themselves, the reality around them, and towards a fulfilling sense of purpose in the lives we each have to experience.

In the late 1940s, a handful of visionaries were working to steer Europe toward a more peaceful future through science, and CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, was duly born. James Gillies tells the gripping story of particle physics, from the original atomists of ancient Greece through the people who made the crucial breakthroughs to CERN itself, one of the most ambitious scientific undertakings of our time, and its eventual confirmation of the Higgs boson.

On the surface, Iron Man appears to be a straightforward superhero, another rich guy fighting crime with fancy gadgets. But beneath the shiny armor and flashy technology lies Tony Stark, brilliant inventor and eccentric playboy, struggling to balance his desires, addictions, and relationships with his duties as the Armored Avenger. Iron Man and Philosophy explores the many philosophical issues that emerge from the essential conflicts found in the decades of Iron Man stories in comics and movies.

Lovelorn kangaroo shifter Hamish Mulherne, drummer for the mega-hit rock band Hunter’s Moon, waited years for the band’s jaguar shifter bassist to notice him. Instead, she’s just gotten married and is in a thriving poly relationship. How is Hamish supposed to compete with that? But with everyone else in the band mated and revoltingly happy, he needs somebody. Since he can’t expect true love to strike twice, he signs up with Supernatural Selection. Because what the hell?

In Vita Nostra, Sasha Samokhina, a third-year student at the Institute of Special Technologies, was in the middle of taking the final exam that would transform her into a part of the Great Speech. After defying her teachers’ expectations, Sasha emerges from the exam as Password, a unique and powerful part of speech. Accomplished and ready to embrace her new role, she soon learns her powers threaten the old world, and despite her hard work, Sasha is set to fail.

Braving Britannia is an oral history of the groundbreaking PC video game, Ultima Online, which launched in 1997 and still operates today. The audiobook features interviews with players as they share how the game affected their lives. In a fantasy world of limitless potential, the only thing players seem to enjoy more than playing the game is talking about it, and yet, the true stories behind the avatars have largely gone unpublished for the past 20 years. Until now.

Can an apprentice Huntress, a grizzled veteran, a lone sorceress, and a tech witch find a way to stop a newer, even greater evil? As Quinn finds her way with her new abilities, she and her new clan continue their work to counter the efforts of demons bent on invading our world. Caught in an epic battle between the light and the dark as old as time, the Huntress and her team may only have one chance to save those she's sworn to protect. Will it be enough? Join Quinn and her friends as she continues to learn and explore what it means to be the Huntress.

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.

You've probably heard that the metaverse—a word that seemingly went from nonexistent to everywhere—is the next big thing in technology. What is it? Written by a leading futurist, Metaverse For Dummies unravels the mysteries of the metaverse, for the curious and for anyone looking to get in on the ground floor. Discover how to carve out your niche in the metaverse with easy-to-understand breakdowns of the major technologies and platforms, a guide to doing business in the metaverse, and explorations of what meta means for sports, education, and just about every other area of life.

Temp worker David Evans has been dreaming of Dr. Alun Kendrick ever since that one transcription job for him, because holy cats, that voice. Swoon. So when his agency offers him a position as Dr. Kendrick’s temporary office manager, David neglects to mention that he’s been permanently banished from offices. Because, forgiveness? Way easier than permission. But cheeky David isn’t intimidated, and despite himself, Alun is drawn to David in a way that can only spell disaster: When fae consort with humans, it never ends well. And if the human has secrets of his own?

Skin of Your Teeth Survival is a reality show made famous for pairing part-time survivalists with a real-life survival situation. Always carefully planned out by world-famous Prepper and Survivalist Wolf Henderson, season 10 promises to be different. This time none of the contestants are survivalists. They’ve all been picked to fail. But when an EMP hits, the cast scatters and Wolf is left to care for a husband and wife team, a quietly scrappy chick and a bumbling scientist.

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.

None of them wanted to leave Earth. It might have been nightmarish, but it was all they knew. Gary wanted to concentrate on his exams in hopes of leaving the CityBlock and its bullies far behind. Kailee wanted to become an actress. Darrin merely wanted to live. But when the three teenagers win a competition, they find themselves taking the trip of a lifetime, a voyage to a colony world where they can see how the colonists live.

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.

A war has broken out in the galaxy! The great spacefaring races are all entangled in the fight, and even at the very edge of the known universe, humanity can hear the echoes of its distant bloody battles. Gnat is with the Shiamiru crew on the front lines. He's just changed class to Listener, and his friends find themselves right in the thick of this grand interstellar war....

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

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.

Deadly competition. Deep desert. A dying tyrant. Finn Harris was declared the Mage Guild's champion. However, that was only the beginning of the Emir's competition. The next stage will send Finn and his companions deep into the desert north of Lahab in search of a long-lost relic. The magical artifact is said to be held within the Abyss. Except, this time, he's not just facing novice mages. Everyone in the region seems to be arrayed against him, god and man alike.