"The Unstoppable Human Species In The Unstoppable Species John J. Shea explains how the earliest humans achieved mastery over all but the most severe, biosphere-level, extinction threats. He explores how and why we humans owe our survival skills to our global geographic range, a diaspora that was achieved during prehistoric times. By developing and integrating a suite of Ancestral Survival Skills, humans overcame survival challenges better than other...

"In a world in which most people are time poor, telling them the one thing they need to know to understand a topic and showing how everything else follows as a logical consequence is a novel and fun way to communicate a lot of deep stuff in a compact and digestible form. Divided into twenty-one short chapters, this will be a fascinating look at the one thing you need to know to understand some of science's most important ideas, from global warming...

Imagine a world without bees, butterflies, and flowering plants. That was Earth 125 million years ago. Turn back the clock 400 million years, and there were no trees. At 450 million years in the past, even the earliest insects had not yet developed. And looking back 500 million years, the land was devoid of life, which at that time flourished in a profusion of strange forms in the oceans. These and other major turning points are the amazing story...

"The award-winning Caltech physicist and author of The Particle at the End of the Universe shares sweeping perspectives into how human purpose and meaning naturally fit into a scientific worldview,"--Amazon.com. "Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are...

"How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology--and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income...

Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, Crawford takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man, taking an up-to-date look at ancient plagues and epidemics and exploring how changes in the way humans have lived throughout history have made us vulnerable to microbe attack. As we moved from hunter-gatherers to farmers to city-dwellers, microbes like malaria and smallpox moved...

'There remains the greatest of all novelists-for what else can we call the author of War And Peace? [Tolstoy's] senses, his intellect, are acute, powerful, and well nourished...Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded...Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts its tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that...