Canada's productivity expert Chris Bailey returns with a totally fresh angle on how to do more with less. Throughout his experiments and research, Bailey came across many little-known insights into how we focus, a key element of productivity. He challenges the common belief that focus is a state of heightened awareness, instead presenting it as a balance between two frames of mind.

The most recent neuroscientific research on attention reveals that our brain operates in two powerful modes that can be harnessed when we manage our attention effectively: hyperfocus, a mode of deep concentration that is the foundation for being highly productive, and scatterfocus, a creative mode that enables us to connect ideas in novel ways.

Hyperfocus guides readers in unlocking both modes so they can concentrate more deeply, think more clearly, and work and live more deliberately. Diving deep into the science and theories about how and why we bring our attention to life's big goals and everyday tasks, Bailey takes his unique approach to productivity to the next level, while retaining the approachable voice and perspective that made him a fast favorite.

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. Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial, is uniquely qualified to explore this future.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today's kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning, or getting hacked?

Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle?

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness, and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

Why do we do the things we do? Over a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle.

Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance.

The first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. What goes on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happens? Then he pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell triggers the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones act hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli which trigger the nervous system?

By now, he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened. Sapolsky keeps going—next to what features of the environment affected that person's brain, and then back to the childhood of the individual, and then to their genetic makeup.

Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual. How culture has shaped that individual's group, what ecological factors helped shape that culture, and on and on, back to evolutionary factors thousands and even millions of years old.

The result is one of the most dazzling tours de horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do...for good and for ill.

Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is a captivating narrative that takes us through the 200-million-year-long history of dinosaurs. Authored by Steve Brusatte, a renowned American paleontologist, this book draws on the latest scientific research to vividly recreate the world of the dinosaurs and shed light on their mysterious origins, their incredible diversity, and their abrupt extinction.

Brusatte's storytelling brings us closer to understanding the real story behind these magnificent creatures that once dominated our planet. We follow the evolution of dinosaurs from their humble beginnings as small creatures in the Triassic period to the dominant species we are familiar with, such as T. rex and Triceratops. The narrative doesn't end with their extinction; it also explores the living legacy of dinosaurs and their connection to modern birds.

Through his global expeditions, Brusatte shares fascinating discoveries and insights from what he calls 'a new golden age of discovery' in dinosaur research. His accounts include findings of primitive tyrannosaurs and giant carnivores that surpass the size of T. rex, as well as the significant feathered raptors from China.

This book is not just a tale of the past; it also resonates with the present, offering lessons as humanity faces a potential 'sixth extinction.' The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs is an electrifying scientific history that will stand as a definitive account for years to come.

Mary Roach meets Bill Bryson in this uproarious tour of the basest instincts and biggest mysteries of the animal world. Humans have gone to the Moon and discovered the Higgs boson, but when it comes to understanding animals, we've still got a long way to go.

Whether we're seeing a viral video of romping baby pandas or a picture of penguins holding hands, it's hard for us not to project our own values—innocence, fidelity, temperance, hard work—onto animals. So you've probably never considered if moose get drunk, penguins cheat on their mates, or worker ants lay about. They do—and that's just for starters.

In The Truth About Animals, Lucy Cooke takes us on a worldwide journey to meet everyone from a Colombian hippo castrator to a Chinese panda porn peddler, all to lay bare the secret—and often hilarious—habits of the animal kingdom.

Charming and at times downright weird, this modern bestiary is perfect for anyone who has ever suspected that virtue might be unnatural.

The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.

This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, with the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.

A transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow's Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow's Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow's Child with her.

As they dig deep into the victim's past, The Shadow's Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau's own murky past--and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars...