Science Universe

In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history, it is 1976, but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice.

The Tournament of Kings is a major milestone for Earth as it moves toward full integration. Jeremiah is doing everything possible to not only be one of those kings but also make sure his friends and allies are crowned kings as well. That won't be an easy task because his enemies are banding together and planning to do the same and have some nasty surprises waiting for him. Can Jeremiah and his friends ascend to the top or will the tournament be the beginning of the end for them?

Young Alvin returns to the town of his birth and begins his apprenticeship with Makepeace Smith, committing seven years of his life in exchange for the skills and knowledge of a blacksmith. But Alvin must also learn to control and use his own talent, that of a Maker, or else his destiny will be unfulfilled.

The year is 3030. For the past 300 years, since the Star League collapse and the rise of the Five Successor States, these mortal enemies have fought over space, land, and politics. But a new threat looms just outside the Inner Sphere. The descendants of an old Star League general, the Clans, bred to be the best military force humanity has ever seen, have come to take what they believe is rightfully theirs.

In this audiobook, astrophysicist Janna Levin blends memoir and visionary science to provide a groundbreaking personal account of her life and ideas.

Mighty Greyboar, the world's greatest professional strangler, is dissatisfied with his lot in life. The work is steady and the pay is good, but what, he wonders, is the point of it all. But when he learns that there is a Supreme Philosophy of Life, Greyboar the Strangler is born again! Still, just how can a professional man in good standing pay the bills with all this philosophical exploration getting in the way.

THE BLEED is attacking on several fronts and through different realities at once. The survivors of numerous battles are brought together through a series of ancient clockwork rooms, and their individual experiences combine to paint a picture of a multiverse on the brink of total annihilation. Gods and mortals fight alongside each other on the streets and among the stars, struggling to hold back the armies of demons doing the bidding of THE BLEED.

The Complex Logic Laws were the result of a war waged hundreds of years in the past, when two human powers threw massive AI navies at each other and nearly annihilated themselves. Being human, they blamed their tools for this near miss; they destroyed what was left of the sentient ships, and made it illegal to be, manufacture, or shelter an independent logic.

For more than a decade, the Republic of the Sphere’s army hid in silence behind the mysterious, impregnable Wall of Fortress Republic. But now the Wall has come down, and Paladin Max Ergen, commander of Operation Eruptio, has his sights set on an invaluable prize. His target: Dieron, a Draconis Combine military district capital, a former Republic world harboring secrets from past wars. His troops have spent years training in isolation behind the Wall, and they are hungry for battle, ready to remind the Inner Sphere that the wounded Republic is still a force to be reckoned with.

A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.

Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: We still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history.

One of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them. For centuries, we have searched for these laws by studying the results of experiments. Since the 1970s, however, experiments at the world's most powerful atom-smashers have offered few new clues. So some of the world's leading physicists have looked to a different source of insight: modern mathematics.

What came before the Big Bang, and what exists outside of the universe it created? Until recently, scientists could only guess at what lay past the edge of space-time. However, as pioneering theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton explains, new scientific tools are now giving us the ability to peer beyond the limits of our universe and to test our theories about what is there. And what we are finding is upending everything we thought we knew about the cosmos and our place in it.

Jon thought it was over...he was wrong. It was just the beginning. When he defeated the beast tide, he thought peace would come. But whatever he thinks never happens. The expansion he triggered attracted a much larger threat that he can't control.

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire: Behind the Scenes is a special recording that features new commentary by author Timothy Zahn and editor Betsy Mitchell, written for the 20th anniversary edition of Heir to the Empire, read by Zahn and Mitchell. Included here is audio from the that new unabridged recording to enhance their comments.

From the Demon Accords universe come six stories that delve behind the curtains. How does the FBI respond to a potential werewolf attack in an awakened world? What is it like to grow up witch? How do you assist a vampire queen? Who else lives on the world of Fairie? What does it take to prepare for alien invasion? As told by Declan, Stacia, Lydia, Chris, and introducing a few new characters to the fold. DA Compendium 3 builds upon and moves the arc of the DA storyline forward toward the battle for Earth.

What’s inside a black hole? What are the sounds we hear from the depths of space? How did the moon form? When it comes to the realm beyond our planet, there are a whole lot of questions we’re still trying to answer.

Number-one New York Times best-selling author Dava Sobel returns with the captivating, little-known true story of a group of women whose remarkable contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

And so continues the saga of the Clan invasion and the explosive struggle within the Inner Sphere. With secret aid from ComStar, the Terran-based sect that serves as the keeper of the Inner Sphere's technological secrets, the Clans' BattleMech warriors have been incredibly successful in their campaign of invasion. But ComStar has its own reasons for giving aid to the enemy, and if its strategy proves successful, the Inner Sphere worlds will finally be reunited under ComStar's rule.

Warped Passages is an altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early 20th-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature.