Systems Science

Late 21st-century Earth is overcrowded, her natural resources dwindling rapidly. World governments and greedy mega corporations are forced to work together toward a solution. A crew of ten humans are sent to Mars aboard Hyperion I to locate a suitable site and establish the first colony. After a months-long flight to the red planet, just as they are about to descend to the surface, problems arise. A careless accident kills a crew member, damages the ship, forcing the others to launch early. And that's just the beginning of their troubles.

In the distant future, horrible dreams torment Admiral James T. Kirk, dreams prompted by his reading of Strangers from the Sky, a book about that historic first contact. He dreams of an alternate reality where he somehow changed the course of history, and destroyed the Federation before it began.

Alec Karakatsanis doesn't think people who have gone to law school, passed the bar, and sworn to uphold the Constitution should be complicit in the mass caging of human beings - an everyday brutality inflicted disproportionately on the bodies and minds of poor people and people of color. Usual Cruelty is a profoundly radical reconsideration of the American "injustice system" by someone who is actively, wildly successfully, challenging it.

In 1983, Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, both serving life sentences at the U.S. Prison in Marion, Illinois, separately murdered two correction officers on the same day. The Bureau of Prisons condemned both men to the severest punishment that could legally be imposed, one created specifically for them. It was unofficially called "no human contact." Each initially spent nine months in a mattress-sized cell where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day. They were clothed only in boxer shorts, completely sealed off from the outside world with only their minds to occupy their time.

The Devil's Heart is a legendary object of unsurpassed power and mystery. Worlds that believe in magic consider it Darkness's mightiest talisman; and worlds of science consider it a lost artifact of some ancient and forgotten race. Some say the Heart enables its possessor to control people's minds and to amass wealth enough for a dozen lifetimes, while others think it capable of raising the dead, perhaps even changing the flow of time itself. But to all, the location of this fabled object has remained a mystery, until now.

"Resistance is futile." The greatest threat the Federation has ever faced is the half organic, half mechanical Borg. Now more dangerous than ever, the Borg threatens the Federation's past, present, and future. Read by Gates McFadden, "Beverly Crusher" on Star Trek, The Next Generation!

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

The immune system holds the key to human health. In The Beautiful Cure, leading immunologist Daniel M. Davis describes how the scientific quest to understand how the immune system works - and how it is affected by stress, sleep, age, and our state of mind - is now unlocking a revolutionary new approach to medicine and well-being. The body's ability to fight disease and heal itself is one of the great mysteries and marvels of nature. But in recent years, painstaking research has resulted in major advances in our grasp of this breathtakingly beautiful inner world....

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

The U.S.S. Enterprise is stunned when famed scientist Lynn Costa is murdered in one of the ship's science labs. She and her husband, Emil, were known as science's greatest ongoing collaboration and together had received the Federation's highest honors for their achievements in scientific research. Determined to see the culprit brought to justice, Captain Picard assigns Lt. Worf and Counselor Deanna Troi to the case. Their routine investigation of the ship's science lab soon reveals a dangerous web of deceit, betrayal, and madness.

Want to Implement AI Agents in Your Organization? Heard of Agentic AI & Wonder What It Is About? Need a No-BS Guide to Implementing AI Agents Today? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then keep reading ... Amazon-bestselling author and AI consultant David M. Patel is going to show in this comprehensive hands-on executive guide to AI Agents everything you need to know to implement and harness the full potential of AI Agents & Agentic AI in your organization.

Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California, in the 1980s and '90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner-city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men.

The battle for paradise has begun. Starfleet has discovered a secret that could transform the future of the entire Federation - a secret that presents Picard and his crew with an agonizing moral dilemma. Faced with orders he cannot obey and a crisis he cannot ignore, Picard finds himself torn between his conscience and his uniform.

Despite being immensely popular - and immensely lucrative - education is grossly overrated. In this explosive book, Bryan Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skill but to certify their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity - in other words, to signal the qualities of a good employee.

The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to five percent of the global population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners - a total of over two million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500 percent.

In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.

In a colonised and crumbling future solar system, humanity is struggling to survive the catastrophic loss of centuries of precious knowledge. The beings that caused this loss, the machine intelligences known as the Configurations, are spoken of with hatred and with fear. Have they left humanity to its own fate? Could they be buried still, deep in the infrastructure? Engage-Assault Li, a brash, young soldier, is hired as a bodyguard for Qira, an academic with knowledge of the infrastructure. Together they travel into the wild lands of Titan, to a remote monastery where a mysterious, ...

We can encounter chaos in every system around us - even the smallest and simplest ones. Any system can fall into chaos, which prevents us to accurately predict its behavior. Even a small change in the initial conditions can lead to unexpectedly large-scale consequences. Therefore, we can often enter in panic, blame actors for events they are not responsible for, and our sense of security in the world can generally decrease.

The powerful, long-awaited sequel to Yesterday's Son. Waves of distorted time are crashing through the universe - destroying everything in their path. Federation scientists pinpoint the source: the Guardian of Forever, the portal to the past where Spock had once journeyed back to meet his son, Zar. Featuring a dramatic reading by Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan, and enhanced with sound effects and an original score.

A compelling new set of interviews on our changing and turbulent times with Noam Chomsky, one of the world's foremost thinkers...

In this new collection of conversations, conducted from 2010 to 2012, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: the future of democracy in the Arab world, the implications of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the European financial crisis, the breakdown of American mainstream political institutions, and the rise of the Occupy movement. As always, Chomsky presents his ideas vividly and accessibly, with uncompromising principle and clarifying insight.