Genetic Science

Uriel Ventris, newly ascended to the ranks of the Primaris, leads warriors of the Fourth Company from the Indomitus Crusade of Roboute Guilliman to a world on the frontiers of Ultramar. Once a battleground against the orks, Sycorax is now under furious assault from an enemy of ancient times – the necrons. The Ultramarines have faced these baleful xenos before, but Uriel senses the hand of a foe from his past at work on Sycorax, a tally unfinished and a debt to the Imperium finally come due.

In 2004, Doctor Damien Howard's 131st birthday celebration took an unexpected turn. His personal SETI project detected an extraterrestrial signal directed at Earth. Unfortunately, Dr. Howard's long-hoped-for communication contained a message of dire warning rather than greeting. In 1945, humanity had become a species of galactic interest and was given 100 years to address the issue.

It has been six years since plague, famine, and war ravaged the planet. World powers have collapsed. The human population has been reduced by 90 percent, and those who survived must always contend with a novel apex predator: human beings whose very DNA has been radically altered by the plague.

When war becomes a fight for survival… Loyalties are tested… Plans are forgotten… And Anything goes… Sergeant Pace Nix is a Commando in the canine division. Together with his war dog Riot, they carry out deadly missions behind enemy lines on a variety of worlds. While everyone else is signing up for new cybernetic combat enhancements, Pace decides to get out of the service while he and Riot are still whole. But a man with skills is valuable, and Pace is lured into re-enlisting by an easy assignment in the Protective Services devision...

Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's Calorie Man in Thailand. Under cover as a factory manager, Anderson combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs thought to be extinct, hoping to reap the bounty of history's lost calories. There, he encounters Emiko...Emiko is the Windup Girl, a strange and beautiful creature. One of the New People, Emiko is not human; instead, she is an engineered being, creche-grown and programmed to satisfy the decadent whims of a Kyoto businessman.

In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.

In this, his magnum opus, the world’s best known skeptic and critical thinker Dr. Michael Shermer—founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and perennial monthly columnist (“Skeptic”) for Scientific American—presents his comprehensive theory on how beliefs are born, formed, nourished, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished.

Arthur Winter, his wife, and daughter move to Rapture with the promise of a better life, and more importantly a new start. He intends to work hard and one day be wealthy just like Ryan promises everyone who moves to Rapture. He opens a small business. For a few years things are good, almost idyllic. The good life is shattered when one day his daughter mysteriously vanishes without a trace. The police of Rapture don't seem to want to help. So Arthur sets out to find her himself.

Charles Darwin’s theories, first published more than 150 years ago, still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of life—but scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists, one already an award-winning popular author, deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation’s worth of insights from new research.

Something in south Texas is leaving a bloody trail of human wreckage in its wake. Jake Jessup and April Flowers investigate and uncover the most dangerous mutant Section 17 has ever created. But 450-pound monsters are the least of their worries when the pair stumble onto a government conspiracy that could cost them their lives and shake the very foundation of the country.

Jack Sigler, call sign King, and the elite Chess Team operatives have been relentlessly hunting for their abducted former leader, Tom Duncan. An urgent call from George Pierce's shadowy Cerberus Group catapults them to the treacherous Southern Ocean, where they clash with ferocious prehistoric nightmares in a fight for survival.

Growing up in California, J. Craig Venter didn't appear to have much of a future. An unremarkable student, he nearly flunked out of high school. After being drafted into the army, he enlisted in the Navy and went to Vietnam, where the life-and-death struggles he encountered as a medic piqued his interest in science and medicine. After pursuing his advanced degrees, Venter quickly established himself as a brilliant and outspoken scientist.

For millennia, the Weave, an alliance of species, have fought to resist the telepathic Amplitur, who strive to unite all self-aware life-forms in their great "Purpose." The Weave is slowly losing ground, but for both sides, warfare focuses more on outthinking and outmaneuvering your foe than destruction. In fact, most regard violence as hideously barbaric, and even the thought of harming another sentient being is beyond imagining.

Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species.

Jonas kills people...with his mind. He reaches out, focuses for a moment, and feels a snap of pain between his eyes. Then his target falls over dead: a hole in the center of their brains. The cause of death is unknown to all aside from Jonas, and his lone companion, Bubbles, a sarcastic AI with aspirations to be more human, or a serial killer. One of the two. Maybe both. Jonas calls his ability...mind bullet.

Halek Cain has mysteries to solve, people to rescue, and a vendetta to carry out. But he must fix his Reaper augmentations before they kill him. He needs raw materials from Gronic, a technical specialist on Roxo III, and time to put himself right before the Union comes for him. Everything seems like it’s going to work out...until he learns Elise is in trouble. If Cain doesn’t get to her first, everything that happened on Dreadmax will have been for nothing. The Last Reaper will encounter assassins, Union special operators, and a mysterious rival from his past.

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.

In an underground club, a high-ranking public official spends his secret nights indulging in fantasies as exciting as they are depraved. For a seductive employee of the Dungeon, it's her job to fulfill them. But she's playing a far more dangerous game - one of blackmail, politics, and murder that reaches into the shadow world of the Ghostwalkers, and the creation of a spectacular, one-of-a-kind new weapon of defense. But when a dictator makes his own catastrophic moves, the Ghostwalkers have no choice but to bring in two major players - a man and woman both driven by passion and revenge.

A woman on the run collides with lethal danger in this GhostWalker novel by number one New York Times best-selling author Christine Feehan. GhostWalker Kane Cannon is pure male - animalistic, sexual, protective, and instinctive - and his past missions have prepared him for anything. But his newest assignment, to rescue hostages in Mexico, plunges him into a hot zone he never anticipated: The hiding place of Rose Patterson - a fugitive,an ex-lover, a fellow GhostWalker pregnant with his child.

In all animals, mating is a deal. But few creatures behave as if sex is a simple, even mutually beneficial, transaction. Many more treat it with reverence, suspicion, angst, and violence. In the case of the Black Grouse, the bird at the center of Matt Ridley’s investigation, the males dance and sing for hours a day, for several exhausting months, in an arduous and even deadly ritual called a “lek.” To prepare for the ordeal, they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. When achieved, consummation with a female takes seconds.