"Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment in Martha Wells's New York Times bestselling Murderbot Diaries series. Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse. Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there's an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza...

"An original collection of interwoven short stories set in the Wild Cards universe, where an alien virus mutates some and grants superpowers to others, created by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Game of Thrones. An alien virus ravages the world, with effects as random as a hand of cards. Those infected either draw the black queen and die, draw an ace and receive superpowers, or draw the joker and are bizarrely mutated. Croyd Crenson...

"Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale -- and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump. Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments,...

"The accident came quickly. With no warning. In the dead of night, a precipitous plunge into a freezing river trapped everyone inside the bus. It was then that Army veteran John Reiff's life came to an end. Extinguished in the sudden rush of frigid water. There was no expectation of survival. None. Let alone waking up beneath blinding hospital lights. Struggling to move, or see, or even breathe. But the doctors assure him that everything is normal....

"Anna Sinjari -- refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker -- has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past. Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other ... While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If...

This is a 2022 revised version of the book first published in 2020. A lot of new information has become available since then. A manned mission to Mars has been the dream of humanity at least since the nineteenth century when we first saw details of the surface and thought there might be canals filled with water there. Here I've looked at the history of unmanned exploration of Mars over the last fifty plus years, proposed missions to Mars, Mars Settlements,...

"In the vein of acclaimed popular-science bestsellers such as Atlas Obscura, Astrophysics for Young People in a Hurry, The Way Things Work, What If?, and Undeniable, the co-founders of the global science organization Nerd Nite bring readers a collection of wacky, yet fascinating STEM topics. For 20 years, Nerd Nite has delivered to live audiences around the world, the most interesting, fun, and informative presentations about science, history, the...

Every living thing with a brain has some form of Consciousness, or an awareness of who or what they are and the role they play in the universe. But few of the living really know what to do with that information.Electrons make up the first state of Consciousness. We now know that they can learn about each other and bind together for life like a marriage in what's known as 'Entanglements.' Whenever the state of one 'Entangled' electron is changed, the...

In all aspects of life, humans are crossing lines of no return. Modern science is leading us into vast uncharted territory-far beyond the invention of nuclear weapons or taking us to the moon. Today, in labs all over the world, scientists are performing experiments that threaten to fundamentally alter the practical character and ethical color of our everyday lives. In The End of Life as We Know It: Ominous News from the Frontiers of Science, bestselling...

Leah Elson draws upon her wildly popular web series, 60 Seconds of Science, for an irreverent debut that answers all sorts of scientific questions-from the age-old to the ridiculous to the sublime-posed by her fans around the world. There Are (No) Stupid Questions … in Science was born from Leah's popular web series, 60 Seconds of Science, wherein her avid followers, from all around the world, suggest topics to be explained within sixty seconds. In...