A Study Guide for Terry Bisson's "Toxic Doughnut, The (Bears Discover Fire)," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

The Hugo and Nebula award-winning author of Voyage to the Red Planet presents a new collection of original science fiction short stories.

A thought-provoking and dramatic account two families who hope to start a new life in the boglands of New Jersey only to discover, much too late, that their new living environment was riddled with radiation and toxic waste. Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation. Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental, fusing fact with meditation. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream.

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

New York Times Bestseller Discover the critical link between your brain and the food you eat and change the way your brain ages, in this cutting-edge, practical guide to eliminating brain fog, optimizing brain health, and achieving peak mental performance from media personality and leading voice in health Max Lugavere. After his mother was diagnosed with a mysterious form of dementia, Max Lugavere put his successful media career on hold to learn everything he could about brain health and performance. For the better half of a decade, he consumed the most up-to-date scientific research, talked to dozens of leading scientists and clinicians around the world, and visited the country’s best neurology departments—all in the hopes of understanding his mother’s condition. Now, in Genius Foods, Lugavere presents a comprehensive guide to brain optimization. He uncovers the stunning link between our dietary and lifestyle choices and our brain functions, revealing how the foods you eat directly affect your ability to focus, learn, remember, create, analyze new ideas, and maintain a balanced mood. Weaving together pioneering research on dementia prevention, cognitive optimization, and nutritional psychiatry, Lugavere distills groundbreaking science into actionable lifestyle changes. He shares invaluable insights into how to improve your brain power, including the nutrients that can boost your memory and improve mental clarity (and where to find them); the foods and tactics that can energize and rejuvenate your brain, no matter your age; a brain-boosting fat-loss method so powerful it has been called “biochemical liposuction”; and the foods that can improve your happiness, both now and for the long term. With Genius Foods, Lugavere offers a cutting-edge yet practical road map to eliminating brain fog and optimizing the brain’s health and performance today—and decades into the future.

Beyond Lies the Wub was the first story ever published by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. In this short story Peterson buys a "wub" from a local before his departure from Mars and takes it back aboard the ship on which he is a crew member. But the captain Franco cites his concerns about the extra weight of having this huge pig-like creature on-board, although he really seems more interested in how it might taste. Once in space however, the crew realize that the wub is an intelligent being, able to use telepathy and perhaps even control people's minds.