Why does mystery create a mental itch that must be scratched? New York Times bestselling author Jonah Lehrer unlocks the secrets of mystery's allure, putting together recent discoveries in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology and shining a new light on everything from the formulas of our favorite detective shows to the tricks of successful advertising campaigns and the calculated risks of the stock market.Why is mystery so compelling? What draws us to the unknown? Jonah Lehrer sets out to answer these questions in a vividly entertaining and surprisingly profound journey through the science of suspense. He finds that nothing is proven to capture a person's attention as strongly as mystery, making mystery the key principle in how humans see and learn to understand the world. Whenever patterns are broken, we are hard-wired to find out why. Without our curiosity driving us to pursue new discoveries and persevere in solving stubborn problems, we...

The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack selects 25 more modern and classic science fiction stories, by talented authors new and old. Included in this volume: Mary A. Turzillo, E.C. Tubb, Murray Leinster, Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, Katherine MacLean, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Jason Andrew, Larry Hodges, Carmelo Rafala, Ray Cluley, Henry Kuttner, Cynthia Ward, George H. Scithers, John Gregory Betancourt, James C. Stewart, Milton Lesser, John Russell Fearn, Marissa Lingen, Donald A. Wollheim, James K. Moran, Harry Harrison, Edgar Pangborn, Isaac Asimov, and Ayn Rand

The Last Light 1-3. Read this to get the first three books in Emil's ongoing saga.

Gritty and scientifically accurate science fiction adventure from New York Times best-selling author Ben Bova and NASA space scientist Les Johnson. The first human mission to Mars meets with near-disaster when a meteoroid strikes the spacecraft, almost destroying it. The ship is too far from Earth to simply turn around and return home. The eight-person crew must ride their crippled ship to Mars while they desperately struggle to survive.  On Earth, powerful political forces that oppose human spaceflight try to use the accident as proof that sending humans into space is too dangerous to continue. The whole human space flight program hangs in the balance. And if the astronauts can’t nurse their ship to Mars and back, the voyagers will become either the first Martian colonists—or the first humans to perish on another planet.About Mars, Inc.:"The Hugo winner returns to his most popular subject: the quest for Mars."—Publishers Weekly About the award winning novels of Ben Bova:“Technically accurate and absorbing . . .”—Kirkus “[Bova is] the science fiction author who will have the greatest effect on the world.”—Ray Bradbury “A masterful storyteller”—Vector “Gives a good read while turning your eyes to what might be in the not so distant future, just like Clarke and Asimov used to do so well.”—SFX**

A lively and provocative look at how evolution shapes our behavior and our lives.Contrary to conventional wisdom, our brains and bodies are hardwired to carry out an evolutionary mission that determines much of what we do, from life plans to everyday decisions.With an accessible tone and a healthy disregard for political correctness, this lively and eminently readable book popularizes the latest research in a cutting-edge field of study–one that turns much of what we thought we knew about human nature upside-down.Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, enjoy watching a favorite TV show, or feel scared–walking alone at night, we are in part behaving as a human animal with its own unique nature–a nature that essentially stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa re-examine some of the most popular and controversial topics of modern life-and shed a whole new light on why we do the things we do.Reader beware: You may never look at human nature the same way again.

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary imagination, and new fossil discoveries are often hailed in headlines as revealing the elusive transitional step, the moment when we stopped being “animal” and started being “human.” In The Accidental Species, Henry Gee, longtime paleontology editor at Nature, takes aim at this misleading notion, arguing that it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how evolution works and, when applied to the evolution of our own species, supports mistaken ideas about our own place in the universe. Gee presents a robust and stark challenge to our tendency to see ourselves as the acme of creation. Far from being a quirk of religious fundamentalism, human exceptionalism, Gee argues, is an error that also infects scientific thought. Touring the many features of human beings that have recurrently been used to distinguish us from the rest of the animal world, Gee shows that our evolutionary outcome is one possibility among many, one that owes more to chance than to an organized progression to supremacy. He starts with bipedality, which he shows could have arisen entirely by accident, as a by-product of sexual selection, moves on to technology, large brain size, intelligence, language, and, finally, sentience. He reveals each of these attributes to be alive and well throughout the animal world—they are not, indeed, unique to our species. The Accidental Species combines Gee’s firsthand experience on the editorial side of many incredible paleontological findings with healthy skepticism and humor to create a book that aims to overturn popular thinking on human evolution—the key is not what’s missing, but how we’re linked.

A delectable true-crime story of scandal and murder at America's most celebrated university.On November 23, 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor—some leads put Parkman at sea or in Manhattan—but a Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never even left the Medical School building. His shocking discovery engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials, The Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. John White Webster, Harvard's professor of chemistry. A baffling case of red herrings, grave robbing, and dismemberment, it became a landmark in the use of medical forensics. Rich in characters and atmosphere, Blood & Ivy explores the fatal entanglement of new science and old money in one of America's greatest...