Chapter 1 Stone and Claw The stone pulsed with life. Cam jerked his hand away and stared at Dara, the village wise woman.        “What was that?” he asked.        They stood in the shadow of one of many enormous boulders that littered the village. A puddle of water that nestled in a cleft in the rock reflected the slanting light of the morning sun. Its glassy surface rippled as a cool breeze sighed down…

I’ll let you decide. In 1997, Ian Wilmut created a media storm when he successfully cloned a sheep he named Dolly. Since then, everything from mice to goats and cats to cattle have been cloned. Today, second, third, and fourth generation clones of cattle feed in the same cattle yards. The economic potential for this technology is obvious. If you have a bull with a particularly desirable characteristic, you don’t have to lose that trait…

We’ve all seen movies where archers draw back flaming arrows and launch them into the ranks of their hapless enemies. Hollywood might overuse the trope, but it is based on historical reality. Arrows are perfect vehicles for delivering incendiary missiles. The earliest and simplest incendiary missiles were arrows wrapped in combustible plant fibers such as flax, hemp, straw (called tow), cocoa fiber, jute, oakum, etc. The first chemical used was pine pitch which burns hot,…