What is life? Humans have been asking this question for thousands of years. But as technology has advanced and our understanding of biology has deepened, the answer has evolved. For decades, scientists have been exploring the limits of nature by modifying and manipulating DNA, cells and whole organisms to create new ones that could never have existed on their own. In Creation, science writer Adam Rutherford explains how we are now radically exceeding...

Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force set out to discover a truth tied to the fall of the Roman Empire, to a mystery going back to the birth of Christianity, and to a weapon hidden for centuries that holds the fate of humanity.

In this book Bill Bryson explores the most intriguing and consequential questions that science seeks to answer and attempts to understand everything that has transpired from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. To that end, Bill Bryson apprenticed himself to a host of the world's most profound scientific minds, living and dead. His challenge is to take subjects like geology, chemistry, paleontology, astronomy, and particle physics and see if...

J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there? At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited. As he writes, "The work of lifetimes has been put at risk, reputations have been damaged,...

"Longlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, PEN America" "One of Waterstones' Books of the Year 2020: Popular Science" "Longlisted for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books for Young Adults" Sean B. Carroll is an award-winning scientist, writer, educator, and film producer. He is Vice President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Balo-Simon Chair of Biology at the University...

Draws on St. Paul's letters and other early sources to reveal the apostles' sharply competing ideas about the significance of Jesus and his teachings while demonstrating how St. Paul independently shaped Christianity as it is known today.

In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species--births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away--until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely...

In the first weeks after World War II, a squeaky-clean new second lieutenant named James D. Cronley Jr. is spotted and recruited for a new enterprise that will eventually be transformed into something called the CIA. In his first assignment, he's got seven days to extract a vital piece of information from a Soviet agent, but there are enemies everywhere--and, as Cronley is about to find out, some of them even wear the same uniform he does.

"A riveting scientific journey exploring the enigma of the Neanderthal and the species’ unique form of intelligence. What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals? For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. More recently, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in paleoanthropology...

Charles Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. In what is known today as the "Cambrian explosion," 530 million years ago many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin's Doubt Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life -- a mystery that has intensified, not only because...