Showing results by narrator "Sean Runnette" in All Categories

American political leaders failed to heed the warnings as two bullies of the world unite. North Korea and Iran - the Axis of Evil - bring the battle to American soil. Most of the country is without power, and the new president must decide whether to retaliate and risk escalation of hostilities or focus on recovery to minimize loss of life. Through careful, prudent planning and protection of their power grid, the state of Texas emerged relatively unscathed from the EMP attack. But what now?

What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.

Ancient writers observed that forests always recede as civilizations develop and grow. The great Roman poet Ovid wrote that before civilization began, “even the pine tree stood on its own very hills” but when civilization took over, “the mountain oak, the pine were felled.” This happened for a simple reason: trees have been the principal fuel and building material of every society over the millennia, from the time urban areas were settled until the middle of the nineteenth century. To this day trees still fulfill these roles for a good portion of the world’s population.

Danger lurks in the Ruins. Three survivors travel the ruins of a collapsed society, sifting through the rusted relics of the ancients' civilization as they search for a better future, hoping to escape the horrors of the past. But among those treasures lurks danger. And what they discover might be worse than what they left behind.

The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed - as many at the time feared it would - it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.

Months after the war with Borland and his vicious werebrood, Kirk and Morris are experiencing curious aftereffects. They’re stronger, faster, and no longer vulnerable to the sharp sting of silver. On the other hand, they're forever hungry, and nothing they eat provides the same nourishment as what they consumed on the island of Newfoundland.

Tim is back. After suffering a series of defeats at the hands of his archenemy, Yorley, he has found a new and unique way to continue his quest for the absolute destruction of mankind. And specifically Yorley. What better way to defeat a woman than to take one over? Follow along as our antihero, Tim, tracks down and obliterates his prey.

Albert Corde is a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago university. He and his wife, Minna, travel to Bucharest, Romania, where Minna's mother has suffered a stroke and is lying semiconscious in the local state hospital. As Corde tries to adapt to life in his mother-in-law's small apartment and cope with her relations and friends, news filters through to him of problems he left behind in Chicago: one of his students has been murdered.

How did life begin? It is perhaps the most important question science has ever asked. Over the centuries, the search for an answer has been entwined with some of science's most revolutionary advances, including van Leeuwenhoek's microscope, Darwin's theory of evolution, and Crick and Watson's unveiling of DNA.

Crafting smash hits with Van Halen, the Doobie Brothers, Nicolette Larson, and Van Morrison, legendary music producer Ted Templeman changed the course of rock history.

Money has great power in our lives. Used wisely, it is one key to accomplishing our goals, providing for our needs, and fulfilling our life purpose. In recent years, many of us ignored the wisdom of the past when it came to managing and spending our money. Credit card debt soared, savings rates plummeted, and our home equity became something to be tapped into and spent rather than a source of security in retirement. We felt an insatiable desire for more. And we found ourselves spending tomorrow's money today in order to have what we hoped would satisfy.

A massive solar storm induced EMP of apocalyptic proportions knocks out power and fries circuits for most of the planet. Transportation, communications, and constraints on human nature are gone. Within hours, store shelves are empty; gangs and desperate people with guns rampage. Survival for those ill-equipped and unprepared will be short-lived. This will be the new normal for many months, possibly years.

Long before the New Testament was a document, it was a sacrament. Jesus called the Eucharist by the name Christians subsequently gave to the latter books of the Holy Bible. It was the "New Covenant," the "New Testament," in his blood. Christians later extended the phrase to cover the books produced by the apostles and their companions; but they did so because these were the books that could be read at Mass.

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators.

Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger were friends and comrades-in-arms against what they considered the most preposterous aspects of quantum physics: its indeterminacy. Einstein famously quipped that God does not play dice with the universe, and Schrödinger is equally well known for his thought experiment about the cat in the box who ends up "spread out" in a probabilistic state, neither wholly alive nor wholly dead.

In industrialised nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise.

In the last three decades of the 19th century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million animals was reduced to 23. It was the era of Manifest Destiny, a gilded age that viewed the West as nothing more than a treasure chest of resources to be dug up or shot down. Supporting hide hunters was the US Army, which considered the eradication of the buffalo essential to victory in its ongoing war on Native Americans.

The Lycan King Xavier is making his final march on the embattled humans to bring on the end of one age and usher in the dawning of a new, fiercer one where he will dominate his subjects with an iron claw. Follow along with Michael, a half vampire; Mathieu, the werewolf; Azile, the witch; Bailey, the warrior; and Lana, the young woman who is so much more than anyone knows as they attempt to bring Xavier and his army to heel.

The Talbot clan has settled in to life at Etna Station. Mike has earned the rank of Lieutenant, but there’s no time to rest. Colonel Bennington has ordered Mike and his squad of misfits on a secretive mission to New York City, where they are tasked to complete a complicated rescue that rapidly becomes nearly impossible to accomplish. Cut off from all support, they face what may be the single most dangerous threat to all mankind as a super predator emerges from the rubble of the once vibrant city, now a broken shadow of its former self.

Inside a beautiful house in Philadelphia's ritzy Main Line section lay the body of a young mother - dead of an apparent drowning in her bathtub. With no sign of a break-in, no history of marital problems, and the naïve belief that these things sometimes just happen, Stefanie Rabinowitz's family prepared to bury the 29-year-old wife and mother. But at the 11th hour, because Stefanie was so young, and because there were no witnesses to her death, an autopsy was ordered. And what it revealed was unthinkable: Stefanie had been murdered.