Dark Biology

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Blazing...Visceral" (Los Angeles Times) · "Exceptional" (Newsweek) · "Bold...Heartfelt" (New York Times Book Review) · "Thought-provoking and thrilling" (GMA) · "Suspenseful and poignant" (Scientific American)· "Gripping" (The Sydney Morning Herald) From...

The biggest joke in existence is that all of it was rejected by the Peer Review Committee. Universe Under Review is an absurd, sharply satirical take on evolution, told through the universe’s hopeless struggle against a catastrophically cautious Peer Review Committee. Every breakthrough that shaped reality is rejected on principle. The Peer Review Committee hated all of them. Particles? Too unstable. Stars? Too dramatic. Cells? Too experimental. Multicellularity? Absolutely not. Skeletons, lungs, warm blood? Denied for budgetary reasons. Fire? Introduces catastrophic risk without ...

A routine mining detonation in the remote Sonoran Desert shatters the canyon floor to reveal a gateway into a terrifying past. Paleontologist Nora Calder and a heavily armed corporate security team descend into a massive sealed subterranean world. They anticipate finding ancient trace fossils and silent geological wonders. Instead they are immediately thrust into a brutal Mesozoic ecosystem ruled by ferocious apex predators that hunt with terrifying intelligence. Trapped deep beneath the earth with their only exit compromised, the survivors must fight their way through a hostile jungle ...

An action adventure like Indiana Jones, a science adventure like Jurassic Park and a human feel-good story like Slumdog Millionaire. Masters of the Broken Watches is a must-read. Sebastian Miles and his team of marine biologists stare at their watches. Time outside their lab has jumped forward by twenty-two hours. Minutes before this illogical space-time event, they were analyzing a mysterious glowing nodule extracted from an unknown marine specimen. News of this marine life reaches powerful governments, inadvertently triggering a race to hunt, capture and control it. But these governments ...

The ocean was never empty. It was waiting. For forty-three elite passengers, the maiden voyage of the Aurelia was supposed to be the ultimate luxury experience: a front-row seat to the Mariana Trench from behind three inches of aerospace-grade polymer. For marine systems engineer Nora Caldwell, it was a rushed safety inspection she never should have signed off on. At one thousand meters down, the champagne is still pouring when the first impact hits. It isn’t a structural failure. It isn’t a seismic event. Something massive, ancient, and perfectly adapted to the crushing blackness has ...

In this brilliant exploration of our cosmic environment, the renowned particle physicist and New York Times bestselling author of Warped Passages and Knocking on Heaven’s Door uses her research into dark matter to illuminate the startling connections between the furthest reaches of space and...

In this hugely entertaining sequel to the New York Times bestselling memoir An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins delves deeply into his intellectual life spent kick-starting new conversations about science, culture, and religion and writing yet another of the most audacious and widely read...

For decades after the identification of the structure of DNA, scientists focused only on genes, the regions of the genome that contain codes for the production of proteins. Other regions that make up 98 percent of the human genome were dismissed as "junk," sequences that serve no purpose. But researchers have recently discovered variations and modulations in this junk DNA that are involved with a number of intractable diseases. Junk DNA can play vital and unanticipated roles in the control of gene expression, from fine-tuning individual genes to switching off entire chromosomes.

Subject 734 isn’t a man. He is a thesis.Dr. Katrin Vane deals in hard data. As the university’s leading Anomalous Biologist, she knows that the thing floating in the amber vat in the sub-basement isn’t a folklore legend. He is a biological specimen. A career-maker. A set of variables to be measured, cataloged, and ignored.Until the cooling system fails.When a facility-wide lockdown seals Katrin inside the lab with the specimen, the variables change. The ice melts. The heartbeat returns. And Valeric wakes up with a hunger that has been building for five hundred years.He is ancient, ...

High above the scorching, toxic surface of a hostile world, the floating city of Astraea is a marvel of human engineering. But beneath the golden clouds, something ancient is waking up. Elena Ward thought she was taking a routine maintenance job on a low-altitude operations station. But when an impossibly massive radar return begins tracking her ship through violent lightning storms, the mission becomes a desperate bid for her life. The corporation has been suppressing sensor alerts for over a year to protect their bottom line, and now, Elena and her crew are trapped in a crushing, high-...

An accessible guide to more than 95 of the most important discoveries and theories in the history of biology. Why do bees know how to dance? Where do plants get sugar? How do animals know their mothers? Who discovered germs? The science of biology is the story of our quest to understand the...

Welcome to the Blackwater Fossil Preserve. The apex hunters of the past are no longer history and the containment grid just failed. Paleobiologist Tessa Harlan knew resurrecting the ancient beast was a catastrophic mistake. The thousand pound reptile is not a slow river dweller. It is an armored and fully terrestrial pursuit hunter with interlocking tusks and terrifying speed. When a massive Gulf Coast storm floods the preserve and kills the power the grand opening turns into a slaughter. Trapped behind high concrete walls with a sinking escape route Tessa and a small group of tourists must...

Brought to you by Penguin. Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very...

*BONUS: Includes the viral essay sensation "The Crane Wife"* "An innovative work of climate fiction, a nuanced and empathic family story, and, for my money, the summer's best novel thus far." --NPR.org "The most oddly enticing novel you will read this year...Keenly satirical yet unashamedly...

The microbiome is the missing link in modern medicine: a vast genetic universe of bacteria, yeasts, viruses and parasites that live inside us, influencing every aspect of our health, even the way we think and feel. In this mindblowing book, scientist and surgeon James Kinross explains how the organisms that live within us have helped us evolve, shaped our biology and defined the success of our species. With dazzling science and fascinating stories, this pioneering book will change the way you think about human health forever.

Brought to you by Penguin. The half a million species of plant alive today are a mere 3% of the vast number of plant species ever to have existed. All share a single common origin: the first plant-like algae to wash up on land 484 million years ago. Through the stories of sixteen plant families...

A young college student signs up for a research class on planet Divinity, and helps discover a new animal species. But as the class spends more time on the new planet, they find out how little they actually know.

The Biology Book is packed with short, pithy explanations of more than 95 momentous ideas in science, from cell theory to evolution by natural selection. Themed chapters explore key areas of the life sciences including ecology, zoology and biotechnology, tracing the history of scientific thought and introducing the scientists who shaped the subject, such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel. Coverage of topical issues such as cloning, neuroscience, human evolution and gene-editing brings the story right up to date.

Brought to you by Penguin. At night the senses become reordered. Hearing becomes privileged over vision, and we edge forward arms outstretched, feeling our way through the inky blackness. It is after dark that the human being becomes more ‘animal’, more sensitive to Nature. But the lights of...

Brought to you by Penguin. How much light is too much light? The Darkness Manifesto urges us to cherish natural darkness for the sake of the environment, our own wellbeing, and all life on earth. The world's flora and fauna have evolved to operate in the natural cycle of day and night. But...