Physics engineer Marie Sayer feels conflicting loyalties and fear mounting after the starship Foreigner disappears with her best friend Aria on board. Would Space Link and her father let the same thing happen to her? Thrown into both an immediate and existential crisis, Marie journeys to her mother’s home world, Mirus, to address the systemic dangers and hostilities on the threatened planet. Told what to do and who she was her whole life, Marie Sayer becomes the hero she was meant to be. Mirus is an imaginative science fiction story following Marie, who experiences a life-changing tragedy. Her faith in Space Link is shaken, leading her on a journey to Mirus, to find a way to help its people and herself.

Biological Approaches and Evolutionary Trends in Plants is a collection of papers presented at the Fourth International Symposium of Plant Biosystematics held on July 10-14, 1989 in Kyoto, Japan. Contributors, some are world's leading plant biologists, discuss the findings in evolutionary biology and issues in plant biosystematics in light of the evidence and ideas brought forward at various levels of biological organization, from molecule to cell, individual, population, species, and community levels. This volume is organized into four sections encompassing 22 chapters and begins with an overview of discoveries concerning parapatric differentiation of weed populations, including adaptive evolution in herbicide resistant biotypes and complex evolutionary patterns in weed-crop complexes of various groups. The next section explores molecular approaches in plant biosystematics, focusing on amino acid sequencing of proteins; restriction-site variations of cpDNA, mitDNA, rDNA, etc.; and chromosome-banding patterns revealed by differential staining. The discussion shifts to a wave of research in plant population biology and evolutionary ecology since the 1970s and its impact on biology and biosystematics. The book considers various aspects of reproductive biology and evolutionary changes in significant reproductive parameters and attempts to demographically quantify these parameters. The final chapter is devoted to the use of functional phylogenetic systematics for predictive ecology. This book will be of interest to plant biologists and scientists and researchers in fields such as biochemistry, botany, microbiology, ecology, and evolutionary biology.