It's finally time for Jyothky and eight other misfit adolescent dragons to go off to an unexplored, dragon-free universe and decide who will marry whom. They're astral dragons, mighty and arrogant, with devastating breath weapons and vast magical powers, and they're not even there to conquer the place. What kind of trouble could the natives possibly be — even civilized and technologically sophisticated natives? Or the mind-controlling parasite worms, or the undead god, or any of Hove's other surprises? …Maybe quite a lot of trouble, but not as much as they will bring upon themselves.

Dr. Sheleigh OBrien was supposed to be a scientific observer, not mated to the future ruler of a planet on the cusp of civil war. She came to study his people. Instead, Kleet Kryszan, heir to the planet, claimed her as his mate, unlocking the passion between them and the secrets of Avera no outsider has ever seen. But their secret hides a darker one--a deep unrest among a faction considered inferior. Rating: Contains graphic adult language and sexual content.

Jyothky and her fellow dragons were supposed to have a nice simple mating flight on Hove. Instead they got tangled up in everything — accidentally conquering a sophisticated, unwilling country, unleashing an undead god upon an innocent city, discovering horrible mind-controlling parasites, an invasion by some of their older and more powerful friends, and massive violations of draconic etiquette. How can they possibly get out of this with their honor or even their hides intact?

Biological and natural processes have been a continuous source of inspiration for the sciences and engineering. For instance, the work of Wiener in cybernetics was influenced by feedback control processes observable in biological systems; McCulloch and Pitts description of the artificial neuron was instigated by biological observations of neural mechanisms; the idea of survival of the fittest inspired the field of evolutionary algorithms and similarly, artificial immune systems, ant colony optimisation, automated self-assembling programming, membrane computing, etc. also have their roots in natural phenomena. The second International Workshop on Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO), was held in Acireale, Italy, during November 8-10, 2007. The aim for NICSO 2007 was to provide a forum were the latest ideas and state of the art research related to cooperative strategies for problem solving arising from Nature could be discussed. The contributions collected in this book were strictly peer reviewed by at least three members of the international programme committee, to whom we are indebted for their support and assistance. The topics covered by the contributions include several well established nature inspired techniques like Genetic Algorithms, Ant Colonies, Artificial Immune Systems, Evolutionary Robotics, Evolvable Systems, Membrane Computing, Quantum Computing, Software Self Assembly, Swarm Intelligence, etc.

"Report of Pennsylvania Forestry Commission", published in 1896: 1895, pt. 2.