Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, journalist Beth Macy endeavors to answer a grieving mother's question -- why her only son died -- and comes away with a harrowing story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy parses how America embraced a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm....

"An ordinary man undergoes a startling transformation--and fears that all of humanity may be next--in the mindblowing new thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter and Recursion. Logan Ramsay can feel his brain...changing. And his body too. He's becoming something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human. As he sets out to discover who did this to him, and why, his transformation threatens everything--his...

It's been over thirty years since New York City medical examiner Jack Stapleton's college days and almost as long since he'd been in touch with former classmates Shawn Doherty and Kevin Murray. Now a renowned archeologist and biblical scholar, Shawn has made a discovery with startling implications. And when Kevin, now Bishop of the Archdiocese of New York, gets wind of it, he asks Jack to help him keep Shawn's findings from the public.

"It's the largest oil spill in history: a crashed supertanker in San Francisco Bay. Desperate to avert environmental damage--and a PR disaster--the multinational oil company releases an untested "designer microbe" to break up the spill.An "oil-eating" microbe, designed to consume anything made of petrocarbons: oil, gasoline, synthetic fabrics, and of course plastic.What the company doesn't realize is that their microbe propagates through the air....

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama made his now-famous pronouncement that because "the major alternatives to liberal democracy had exhausted themselves," history as we knew it had reached its end. Ten years later, he revised his argument: we hadn't reached the end of history, he wrote, because we hadn't yet reached the end of science. Arguing that our greatest advances still to come will be in the life sciences, Fukuyama now asks how the ability to modify...

"Weaving together vivid storytelling and groundbreaking science, The Body Builders explores the current revolution in human augmentation, which is helping us to triumph over the limitations and constraints we have long accepted as an inevitable part of being human."--Publisher's website.

A young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company - a biotech firm now derelict - and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as a salvage is little more than a green lump - plant or animal? - but exudes a strange charisma....

As achievements in engineering and manufacturing move us toward 21st century lifestyles, problems emerge as a result of these processes. Moreover, cleanup concerns plague us as a legacy of the industrial revolution. This program focuses on an innovative yet natural solution science proposes for the cleanup of polluting by-products. Discover how science is cleaning up with microbes. Throughout the world, scientists are exploring the use of living organisms...

"Amina Khan believes that nature does it best. In Adapt, she presents fascinating examples of how nature effortlessly solves the problems that humans attempt to solve with decades worth of the latest and greatest technologies, time, and money. Humans are animals too, and animals are incredibly good at doing more with less. If a fly's eye can see without hundreds of fancy lenses, and termite mounds can stay cool in the desert without air conditioning,...