“No dragons, but [Crystal Singer] has all of [Anne] McCaffrey's gifts for world-building and characterization . . . an excellent book.”—Chicago Sun-Times Her name was Killashandra Ree; and after ten grueling years of musical training she was young, beautiful—and still without prospects. Then she heard of the mysterious Heptite Guild on the planet Ballybran, where the fabled Black Crystal was found. For those qualified, the Guild was said to provide careers, security, and the chance for wealth beyond imagining. The problem was, few people who landed on Ballybran ever left. To Killashandra the risks were acceptable . . .

Elevate Your Crystal Healing to the Next Level with Groundbreaking, Never-Before-Seen Techniques Heal more deeply and restore your spirit with this innovative guide to enhancing your crystal practice. Featuring a brand-new approach to wellness, Crystal Power shows you how to pair the twelve best healing crystals with a variety of spiritual tools and techniques. Every stone receives a thorough breakdown of its purposes, along with practical tips for using it with chakras, essential oils, astrological signs, goddess energy, and much more. Esteemed author and healer Kac Young, PhD, provides expert advice for working with these crystals to help improve all aspects of your health. Integrate the stones with archetypes to heal emotional wounds. Combine them with the laws of karma to repurpose your life. This revolutionary guide also provides hands-on practices, a color insert, and a step-by-step crystal healing session, making it an indispensable resource. • Clear Quartz • Amethyst • Citrine • Rose Quartz • Fluorite Black • Tourmaline • Jade • Turquoise • Red Jasper • Carnelian • Lapis Lazuli • Selenite

When scientists analyze datasets in a search for underlying phenomena, patterns or causal factors, their first step is often an automatic or semi-automatic search for structures in the data. Of these feature-extraction methods, topological ones stand out due to their solid mathematical foundation. Topologically defined structures—as found in scalar, vector and tensor fields—have proven their merit in a wide range of scientific domains, and scientists have found them to be revealing in subjects such as physics, engineering, and medicine. Full of state-of-the-art research and contemporary hot topics in the subject, this volume is a selection of peer-reviewed papers originally presented at the fourth Workshop on Topology-Based Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization, TopoInVis 2011, held in Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop brought together many of the leading lights in the field for a mixture of formal presentations and discussion. One topic currently generating a great deal of interest, and explored in several chapters here, is the search for topological structures in time-dependent flows, and their relationship with Lagrangian coherent structures. Contributors also focus on discrete topologies of scalar and vector fields, and on persistence-based simplification, among other issues of note. The new research results included in this volume relate to all three key areas in data analysis—theory, algorithms and applications.

Fifteen year old Kat had dreamed about a world full of crystals for as long as she could remember. It never occurred to her that such a world might actually exist until she found it. And what she found was more than crystals. She found friendship, love, mystery, and murder in a world that had been torn apart long ago in The Shattering.