Emily Jones

In the late 1970s, a crew of thrill-seeking Oxford University students grew bored of rigid, bureaucratic sports and formed their own club seeking adventure.

In December of 1944, as American forces were battling their way across the Pacific and closing in on Japan, a young Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer named Hiroo Onoda landed on the small island of Lubang in the Philippines.

On March 1st, 1954, American scientist John Clark huddled inside a bunker on a remote Pacific island, waiting anxiously as he prepared to detonate the most powerful hydrogen bomb ever tested.

In a secluded grove in Northern California stands Hyperion, rising higher than any known living tree on Earth. At 380 feet tall, this giant coast redwood pierces the sky, taller than Big Ben or the Statue of Liberty.

Our tale opens under African skies in 1969, where actress Tippi Hedren (The Birds) and producer husband Noel Marshall sailed on winds of optimism. As wealthy Hollywood royalty on a glamorous safari vacation, they thrilled like giddy children to magnificent prides of lions roaming wild near their Tanzanian lodge cabin.

It's almost hard to fathom that the most prolific killer on planet Earth is a microscopic speck far tinier than the smallest bacteria. Yet viruses that infect and destroy bacteria, known as bacteriophages or simply phages, are Earth's most abundant organism with an estimated 10³¹ in number globally.