Human Body Size and the Laws of Scaling PDF Download
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Author: Thomas T. Samaras
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781600214080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
Several books have been published on scaling in biology and its ramifications in the animal kingdom. However, none has specifically examined the multifaceted effects of how changes in human height create disproportionately larger changes in weight, surface area, strength and other physiological parameters. Yet, the impact of these non-linear effects on individual humans as well as our world's environment is enormous. Since increasing human body size has widespread ramifications, this book presents findings on the human species and its ecological niche. its community and how the species interacts with its environment. Thus, a few chapters provide an ecological overview of how increasing human body size relates to human evolution, fitness, health, survival and the environment. This book provides a unique purview of the laws of scaling on human performance, health, longevity and the environment. Numerous examples from various research disciplines are used to illustrate the impact of increasing body size on many aspects of human enterprises, including work output, athletics and intellectual performance.
Author: Thomas T. Samaras
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781600214080
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Get Book Here
Book Description
Several books have been published on scaling in biology and its ramifications in the animal kingdom. However, none has specifically examined the multifaceted effects of how changes in human height create disproportionately larger changes in weight, surface area, strength and other physiological parameters. Yet, the impact of these non-linear effects on individual humans as well as our world's environment is enormous. Since increasing human body size has widespread ramifications, this book presents findings on the human species and its ecological niche. its community and how the species interacts with its environment. Thus, a few chapters provide an ecological overview of how increasing human body size relates to human evolution, fitness, health, survival and the environment. This book provides a unique purview of the laws of scaling on human performance, health, longevity and the environment. Numerous examples from various research disciplines are used to illustrate the impact of increasing body size on many aspects of human enterprises, including work output, athletics and intellectual performance.
Author: Geoffrey West
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 014311090X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498
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Book Description
"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body. West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.
Author: James H. Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195131428
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Scaling relationships have been a persistent theme in biology at least since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo. While there have been many excellent empirical and theoretical investigations, there has been little attempt to synthesize this diverse but interrelated area of biology. In an effort to fill this void, Scaling in Biology, the first general treatment of scaling in biology in over 15 years, covers a broad spectrum of the most relevant topics in a series of chapters written by experts in the field. Some of those topics discussed include allometry and fractal structure, branching of vascular systems of mammals and plants, biomechanical and life history of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, and species-area patterns of biological diversity.
Author: Knut Schmidt-Nielsen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521319874
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
This book is about the importance of animal size. We tend to think of animal function in chemical terms and talk of water, salts, proteins, enzymes, oxygen, energy, and so on. We should not forget, however, that physical laws are equally important, for they determine rates of diffusion and heat transfer, transfer of force and momentum, the strength of structures, the dynamics of locomotion, and other aspects of the functioning of animal bodies. Physical laws provide possibilities and opportunities for an organism, yet they also impose constraints, setting limits to what is physically possible. This book aims to give an understanding of these rules because of their profound implications when we deal with animals of widely different size and scale. The reader will find that the book raises many questions. Remarkable and puzzling information makes it read a little like a detective story, but the last chapter, instead of giving the final solution, neither answers all questions nor provides one great unifying principle.
Author: Thomas T. Samaras
Publisher: Nova Science Publishers
ISBN: 9781624170744
Category : Body size
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
Author: Max Kleiber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
A study of the evolution of bioenergetics, this book examines total starvation and the physical aspects of metabolism, as well as the metabolism of the starving animal. It discusses food as fuel and looks at food and population.
Author: Karl J. Niklas
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226580807
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 424
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Book Description
Allometry, the study of the growth rate of an organism's parts in relation to the whole, has produced exciting results in research on animals. Now distinguished plant biologist Karl J. Niklas has written the first book to apply allometry to studies of the evolution, morphology, physiology, and reproduction of plants. Niklas covers a broad spectrum of plant life, from unicellular algae to towering trees, including fossil as well as extant taxa. He examines the relation between organic size and variations in plant form, metabolism, reproduction, and evolution, and draws on the zoological literature to develop allometric techniques for the peculiar problems of plant height, the relation between body mass and body length, and size-correlated variations in rates of growth. For readers unfamiliar with the basics of allometry, an appendix explains basic statistical methods. For botanists interested in an original, quantitative approach to plant evolution and function, and for zoologists who want to learn more about the value of allometric techniques for studying evolution, Plant Allometry makes a major contribution to the study of plant life.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309037751
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 507
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Book Description
Pharmacokinetics, the study of the movement of chemicals within the body, is a vital tool in assessing the risk of exposure to environmental chemicals. This bookâ€"a collection of papers authored by experts in academia, industry, and governmentâ€"reviews the progress of the risk-assessment process and discusses the role of pharmacokinetic principles in evaluating risk. In addition, the authors discuss software packages used to analyze data and to build models simulating biological phenomena. A summary chapter provides a view of trends in pharmacokinetic modeling and notes some prospective fields of study.
Author: Hans Petter Langtangen
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319327267
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
The book serves both as a reference for various scaled models with corresponding dimensionless numbers, and as a resource for learning the art of scaling. A special feature of the book is the emphasis on how to create software for scaled models, based on existing software for unscaled models. Scaling (or non-dimensionalization) is a mathematical technique that greatly simplifies the setting of input parameters in numerical simulations. Moreover, scaling enhances the understanding of how different physical processes interact in a differential equation model. Compared to the existing literature, where the topic of scaling is frequently encountered, but very often in only a brief and shallow setting, the present book gives much more thorough explanations of how to reason about finding the right scales. This process is highly problem dependent, and therefore the book features a lot of worked examples, from very simple ODEs to systems of PDEs, especially from fluid mechanics. The text is easily accessible and example-driven. The first part on ODEs fits even a lower undergraduate level, while the most advanced multiphysics fluid mechanics examples target the graduate level. The scientific literature is full of scaled models, but in most of the cases, the scales are just stated without thorough mathematical reasoning. This book explains how the scales are found mathematically. This book will be a valuable read for anyone doing numerical simulations based on ordinary or partial differential equations.
Author: Hans V. Westerhoff
Publisher: Elsevier Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 608
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Book Description
This book contains a description of how quantitative notions from physics and chemistry may be applied to biological systems, in particular those involved in biological free energy transduction. Researchers in the fields of bioenergetics and biochemistry will find this volume to be an excellent, in-depth review of the subject and an invaluable source of information.
