What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.

Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet. Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives—and they intersect with our own in surprising ways.

When he was six years old, Roger Penrose discovered a sundial in a clearing near his house. Through that machine made of light, shadow, and time, Roger glimpsed a “world behind the world” of transcendently beautiful geometry. It spurred him on a journey to become one of the world’s most influential mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists. Penrose would prove the limitations of general relativity, set a new agenda for theoretical physics, and astound colleagues and admirers with the elegance and beauty of his discoveries.

Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets, priests, and schoolgirls. The world began to change in the 1830s, while Darwin was exploring the Pacific aboard the Beagle and Dickinson was a student in Amherst, Massachusetts. Poetry and science started to grow apart, and modern thinkers challenged the old orthodoxies, offering thrilling new perspectives that suddenly felt radical—and too dangerous for women.

In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world’s largest collection of seeds—more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous explorer, geneticist, and dissident Nikolai Vavilov, who had recently been disappeared by the Soviet government.

Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London’s Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge.

Beginning in 2018, a powerful app for secure communications, called Anom, began to take root among drug dealers and other criminals. It had extraordinary safeguards to keep out prying eyes--the power to quickly wipe data, voice-masking technology, and more. It was better than other apps popular among organized crime syndicates, except for one thing: it was secretly run by law enforcement. Over the next few years, the FBI, along with law enforcement partners in Australia and parts of Europe, got a front row seat to the global criminal underworld.

For thousands of years, people have argued about whether humanity is selfish or generous, cruel or kind. But recently, our answers have changed. In 1972, half of Americans agreed that most people can be trusted; by 2018, only a third did. Different generations, genders, religions, and political parties can’t seem to agree on anything, except that they all think human virtue is evaporating.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that flows like a thriller.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system.

A Crack in Everything is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging audiobook that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science.

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration that pulled in Germany, Russia, Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria.

We are in the midst of a global mental health crisis, and mental illnesses are on the rise. But what causes mental illness? And why are mental health problems so hard to treat? Drawing on decades of research, Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines a revolutionary new understanding that for the first time unites our existing knowledge about mental illness within a single framework: mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. Brain Energy will transform the field of mental health, and the lives of countless people around the world.

My Big TOE: Awakening, written by a nuclear physicist in the language of contemporary culture, unifies science and philosophy, physics and metaphysics, mind and matter, purpose and meaning, the normal and the paranormal. The entirety of human experience (mind, body, and spirit) including both our objective and subjective worlds is brought together under one seamless scientific understanding.

How the Earth Works takes you on an astonishing journey through time and space. In 48 lectures, you will look at what went into making our planet - from the big bang, to the formation of the solar system, to the subsequent evolution of Earth.

Richard Dawkins' brilliant reformulation of the theory of natural selection has the rare distinction of having provoked as much excitement and interest outside the scientific community as within it. His theories have helped change the whole nature of the study of social biology, and have forced thousands to rethink their beliefs about life.

Hilarious, fascinating, and a roller coaster of dizzying, historical what-ifs, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids is a potpourri for serious historians and casual history buffs. In one of Phil Mason's many revelations, you'll learn that Communist jets were two minutes away from opening fire on American planes during the Cuban missile crisis, when they had to turn back as they were running out of fuel. You'll discover that before the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon's painful hemorrhoids prevented him from mounting his horse to survey the battlefield.

How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has attracted one of the world’s largest online followings with his fascinating, widely accessible insights into science and our universe. Now, Tyson invites us to go behind the scenes of his public fame by unveiling his candid correspondence with people across the globe who have sought him out in search of answers. In this hand-picked collection of 100 letters, Tyson draws upon cosmic perspectives to address a vast array of questions about science, faith, philosophy, life, and of course, Pluto.

Welcome to the Universe is a personal guided tour of the cosmos by three of today's leading astrophysicists. Inspired by the enormously popular introductory astronomy course that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton, this book covers it all - from planets, stars, and galaxies to black holes, wormholes, and time travel.

The real stories behind the scenery of America’s national parks. For 12 years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it.

In The Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw approach the world of quantum mechanics in the same way they did in Why Does E=mc2? and make fundamental scientific principles accessible - and fascinating - to everyone.The subatomic realm has a reputation for weirdness, spawning any number of profound misunderstandings, journeys into Eastern mysticism, and woolly pronouncements on the interconnectedness of all things. Cox and Forshaw's contention? There is no need for quantum mechanics to be viewed this way.

In the summer of 1941, German troops surrounded the Russian city of Leningrad—now St. Petersburg—and began the longest blockade in recorded history, one that would ultimately claim the lives of nearly three-quarters of a million people. At the center of the besieged city stood a converted palace that housed the world’s largest collection of seeds—more than 250,000 samples hand-collected over two decades from all over the globe by world-famous explorer, geneticist, and dissident Nikolai Vavilov, who had recently been disappeared by the Soviet government.

Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.

Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

A gripping journey of discovery, The Catalyst moves from the early experiments that first hinted at RNA's spectacular powers, to Cech's own paradigm-shifting finding that it can catalyze cellular reactions, to the cutting-edge biotechnologies poised to reshape our health.

No animal is so entangled in human history as the horse. The thread starts in prehistory, with a slight, shy animal, hunted for food. Domesticating the horse allowed early humans to settle the vast Eurasian steppe; later, their horses enabled new forms of warfare, encouraged long-distance trade routes, and ended up acquiring deep cultural and religious significance.

One of humanity’s oldest beliefs is that our world is alive. Though once ridiculed by some scientists, the idea of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. We, and all living things, are more than inhabitants of Earth—we are Earth, an outgrowth of its structure and an engine of its evolution. Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming a lump of orbiting rock into a cosmic oasis—a planet that breathes, metabolizes, and regulates its climate.

In Origin Story, medical historian Howard Markel recounts the two-year period (1858 to 1860) of Darwin's writing of On the Origin of Species through its spectacular success and controversy. Simultaneously, Markel delves into the mysterious health symptoms Darwin developed, combing the literature to emerge with a cogent diagnosis of a case that has long fascinated medical historians.

What makes us moral beings? How do we decide what is good and what is evil? And has it always been that way? Hanno Sauer's sweeping new history of humanity, covering five million years of our universal moral values, comes at a crucial moment of crisis for those values, and helps to explain how they arose—and why we need them. Modern societies are in crisis: a shared universal morality seems to be a thing of the past. Hanno Sauer explains why this appearance is deceptive: in fact, there are universal values that all people share.

In this engaging, accessible account, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including disguises, invisible inks, and even poisons. Drawing on a vast array of archival sources, they show how understanding the tricks and tools of espionage allows us to reimagine well-known stories such as the Babington and Gunpowder plots.

Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London’s Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge.

The world today is undergoing the most rapid environmental transformation in human history—from climate change to deforestation. Scientists, ethnobotanists, indigenous peoples, and collectives of all kinds are closely studying trees and their biology to understand how and why trees function individually and collectively in the ways they do. In Twelve Trees, Daniel Lewis, curator and historian at one of the world’s most renowned research libraries, travels the world to learn about these trees in their habitats.

No city stirs the imagination more than Venice. From the richly ornamented palaces emerging from the waters of the Grand Canal to the dazzling sites of Piazza San Marco, visitors and residents alike sense they are entering, as fourteenth-century poet Petrarch remarked, “another world.” During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Venice was celebrated as a model republic in an age of monarchs. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became famous for its freewheeling lifestyle characterized by courtesans, casinos, and Carnival.

Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland.

A leading national security expert, who publicly predicted Vladimir Putin's intention to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine months before it took place, lays out the case for why China's Xi Jinping is preparing to conquer Taiwan in the coming years and the dire stakes for America and the whole world if he is not deterred.

Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible.