Human Genetic Engineering

A new entry in the wildly successful Children of Time series from award-winning master of science fiction Adrian Tchaikovsky. After Earth fell, ark ships hunted for a new home. They sought lost worlds terraformed in Earth’s forgotten past. A ship crewed by maverick humans, spiders and a...

Humanity chose to suffer. The alternative was extinction. When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. Harsh colony worlds. Brutal selection. Children dying on planets designed to test them. Two centuries later, the Mandate has kept humanity alive, but at a price no one is allowed to question. Cadet Constantine Ramsey questions it anyway. As a frontier colonist at Earth's Space Fleet Academy, Constantine keeps flinching at the hard calls, and finds himself being outperformed by the cadets who don't. Then ...

Survival of the fittest in space just became a lot more dangerous. Eleven colonies have gone dark across Federation space. Senior cadets are being deployed to a frontier that devours ships and returns only silence. Constantine Ramsey returns to a Space Fleet Academy transformed by war. He and his fellow second-years are being thrust into leadership roles for which they're not ready. The new curriculum sets aside theory for brutal new training in surviving first contact with alien predators and making terrible decisions where every choice comes with a body count. But when their latest ...

The study of human evolution is advancing rapidly. Newly discovered fossil evidence is adding ever more pieces to the puzzle of our past, while revolutionary technological advances in the study of ancient DNA are completely reshaping theories of early human populations and migrations. In this Very Short Introduction, Bernard Wood traces the history of paleoanthropology from its beginnings in the 18th century to the very latest fossil finds.

For most of human history, life offered no safety net. Environments shifted, resources vanished, and stability was always temporary. People lived on the move—carrying knowledge, forming bonds, and adapting to constant change. This audiobook examines how human life took shape long before familiar societies appeared. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary science, it explores how early humans lived, moved, cooperated, and adapted over deep time.

The astonishing sequel to Children of Time, the award-winning novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Thousands of years ago, Earth's terraforming program took to the stars. On the world they called Nod, scientists discovered alien life -- but it was their mission to...

The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Earth failed. In a desperate bid to escape, the spaceship Enkidu and its captain, Heorest Holt, carried its precious human cargo to...

Humans are primates, much like chimps—or so we've been continually told. Yet recent discoveries show that our species has a different brain design, function, and chemistry; different eating, sleeping, mating, and rearing patterns; a different metabolism; and a different physiology than apes. Nor is our behavior much like theirs, and we don't even have the feet made for climbing trees that define the primate order. Could it be that conceiving of ourselves as primates isn't helping us understand what it is to be human?

Who are we, and how did we get here? These are two of the most fundamental and far-reaching questions facing scientists and cosmologists alike and have rested at the center of human intellectual endeavor since its beginning. They are questions that stretch across numerous disciplines. Philosophy, theology, evolutionary biology, and mathematics are just some of the fields looking to explain the emergence of human life.

She just wanted to disappear. He was bred to be a weapon. Neither planned on being trapped together in the dark. Sarah Hodges has one rule for survival: make yourself useful, or get discarded. She just needs one final, highly illegal harvest of rare bioluminescent flora from Sector 4 to pay off her debts and buy her permanent independence. But Sector 4 is the most lethal quarantine zone on the planet, and her infiltration ends with her caught in a snare by the area's apex predator. Tarn is a nightmare of biomechanical engineering. Bred in a corporate black-site and abandoned to the jungle, ...

Human! A name that strikes terror in the hearts of the galaxy. Well, maybe not terror. More like caution, actually. Since you know how hot-headed Humans can be. After the galaxy was attacked by invaders, the Milky Way was left but a shadow of its former self. In its wake, a savage, almost Wild West existence emerged, ruled by gun and muscle. And for anyone needing help in either the gun or muscle category—or both—everyone knows you . . . Hire a Human.

In 2075, humanity solves aging. Then everything begins to unravel. PSV Medical Labs has extended the human lifespan by twenty-five years, transforming society — for those who can afford it. Governments stabilize. Corporations consolidate power. The wealthy grow younger. The poor grow restless. Then a quiet junior scientist named Dean discovers something impossible. By altering mitochondrial energy at the cellular level, he doesn’t just slow aging. He reverses it. His breakthrough could free humanity from biological decline. Or lock the powerful into eternal rule. When Dean disappears ...

Evolutionary theory has long established that humans are animals: Modern Homo sapiens are primates who share an ancestor with monkeys and other great apes. Our genome is 98 percent identical to a chimpanzee's. And yet we think of ourselves as exceptional. Are we? In this original and entertaining tour of life on Earth, Adam Rutherford explores the profound paradox of the "human animal".

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Celebrated futurist Ray Kurzweil presents an “elaborate, smart, and persuasive” (The Boston Globe) view of the future course of human development. “Artfully envisions a breathtakingly better world.”—Los Angeles Times “Startling in scope and bravado...

How do you tell your part in the biggest tale in history? I ask because it's what I have to do. I'm Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to...

We humans like to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures. But if we are supposedly evolution's greatest creation, why do we have such bad knees? Why do we catch head colds so often - 200 times more often than a dog does? How come our wrists have so many useless bones? And are we really supposed to swallow and breathe through the same narrow tube? Surely there's been some kind of mistake. As professor of biology Nathan H. Lents explains in Human Errors, our evolutionary history is nothing if not a litany of mistakes, each more entertaining and enlightening than the last.

Best-selling author Brian Fagan brings early humans out of the deep freeze with his trademark mix of erudition, cutting-edge science, and vivid storytelling. Cro-Magnon reveals human society in its infancy, facing enormous environmental challenges - including a rival species of humans, the Neanderthals. For ten millennia, Cro-Magnons lived side by side with Neanderthals, an encounter that Fagan fills with drama.

A fascinating investigation of the origin of humans based on incredible new discoveries and advanced scientific technology.

Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade. In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide.

You are just 10% human. For every one of the cells that make up the vessel that you call your body, there are nine impostor cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. Over your lifetime, you will carry the equivalent weight of five African elephants in microbes. You are not an individual but a colony. Until recently, we had thought our microbes hardly mattered, but science is revealing a different story, one in which microbes run our bodies and becoming a healthy human is impossible without them.