Animal Electricity

Animal Electricity PDF Author: Robert B. Campenot
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674495586
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Like all cellular organisms humans run on electricity. Cells work like batteries: slight imbalances of electric charge across cell membranes, caused by ions moving in and out of cells, result in sensation, movement, awareness, and thinking—the things we associate with being alive. Robert Campenot offers an accessible overview of animal electricity.

Animal Electricity

Animal Electricity PDF Author: Robert B. Campenot
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674495586
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Like all cellular organisms humans run on electricity. Cells work like batteries: slight imbalances of electric charge across cell membranes, caused by ions moving in and out of cells, result in sensation, movement, awareness, and thinking—the things we associate with being alive. Robert Campenot offers an accessible overview of animal electricity.

On Animal Electricity

On Animal Electricity PDF Author: Augustus Désiré Waller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electrophysiology
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Electric Animal

Electric Animal PDF Author: Akira Mizuta Lippit
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816634859
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Differentiation from animals helped to establish the notion of a human being, but the disappearance of animals now threatens that identity. This is the argument underlying Electric Animal, a probing exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows us the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity -- essential to developments in the natural sciences and technology, radical transformations in modern philosophy and literature, and the advent of psychoanalysis and the cinema. Moving beyond the dialectical framework that has traditionally bound animal and human being, Electric Animal raises a series of questions regarding the idea of animality in Western thought. Can animals communicate? Do they have consciousness? Are they aware of death? By tracing questions such as these through a wide range of texts by writers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud to Vicki Heame, Lewis Carroll to Franz Kafka, and Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze, Lippit arrives at a remarkable thesis, revealing an extraordinary logical consensus in Western thought: animals do not have language and hence cannot die. The animal has, accordingly, haunted thought as a form of spectral and undead being. Lippit demonstrates how, in the late nineteenth century; this phantasmic concept of animal being reached the proportions of an epistemological crisis, engendering the disciplines and media of psychoanalysis, modern literature, and cinema, among others. Against the prohibitive logic of Western philosophy, these fields opened a space for rethinking animality. Technology, usually thought of in opposition to nature, came to serve as therepository for an unmournable animality -- a kind of vast wildlife museum. A highly original work that charts new territory in current debates over language and mortality, subjectivity and technology, Electric Animal brings to light fundamental questions about the status of representation -- of the animal and of ourselves -- in the age of biomechanical reproduction.

Shocking Frogs

Shocking Frogs PDF Author: Marco Piccolino
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199782164
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Shocking frogs offers a completely new perspective on a fundamental episode of eighteenth-century science--leading, on one hand, to the discovery of the electric nature of nervous signals, and, on the other, to the invention of the electric battery.

The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body

The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body PDF Author: Frances Ashcroft
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089541
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
"This is a wonderful book. Frances Ashcroft has a rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating." —Bill Bryson, author of The Body: A Guide for Occupants What happens during a heart attack? Can someone really die of fright? What is death, anyway? How does electroshock treatment affect the brain? What is consciousness? The answers to these questions lie in the electrical signals constantly traveling through our bodies, driving our thoughts, our movements, and even the beating of our hearts. The history of how scientists discovered the role of electricity in the human body is a colorful one, filled with extraordinary personalities, fierce debates, and brilliant experiments. Moreover, present-day research on electricity and ion channels has created one of the most exciting fields in science, shedding light on conditions ranging from diabetes and allergies to cystic fibrosis, migraines, and male infertility. With inimitable wit and a clear, fresh voice, award-winning researcher Frances Ashcroft weaves together compelling real-life stories with the latest scientific findings, giving us a spectacular account of the body electric.

Spark from the Deep

Spark from the Deep PDF Author: William J. Turkel
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142140981X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity. Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals have the ability to shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges. William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people’s interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries.

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments PDF Author: George Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 140003423X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
A dazzling, irresistible collection of the ten most groundbreaking and beautiful experiments in scientific history. With the attention to detail of a historian and the storytelling ability of a novelist, New York Times science writer George Johnson celebrates these groundbreaking experiments and re-creates a time when the world seemed filled with mysterious forces and scientists were in awe of light, electricity, and the human body. Here, we see Galileo staring down gravity, Newton breaking apart light, and Pavlov studying his now famous dogs. This is science in its most creative, hands-on form, when ingenuity of the mind is the most useful tool in the lab and the rewards of a well-considered experiment are on exquisite display.

Brain, Mind and Medicine:

Brain, Mind and Medicine: PDF Author: Harry Whitaker
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387709673
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
No books have been published on the practice of neuroscience in the eighteenth century, a time of transition and discovery in science and medicine. This volume explores neuroscience and reviews developments in anatomy, physiology, and medicine in the era some call the Age of Reason, and others the Enlightenment. Topics include how neuroscience adopted electricity as the nerve force, how disorders such as aphasia and hysteria were treated, Mesmerism, and more.

Generating Electricity

Generating Electricity PDF Author: Gregory Vogt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780531101179
Category : Electric generators
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
Describes how common and uncommon forms of electricity are produced or generated. Includes instructions for several experiments and a glossary of terms.

Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840

Literature, Electricity and Politics 1740–1840 PDF Author: Mary Fairclough
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137593156
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book investigates the science of electricity in the long eighteenth century and its textual life in literary and political writings. Electricity was celebrated as a symbol of enlightened progress, but its operation and its utility were unsettlingly obscure. As a result, debates about the nature of electricity dovetailed with discussions of the relation between body and soul, the nature of sexual attraction, the properties of revolutionary communication and the mysteries of vitality. This study explores the complex textual manifestations of electricity between 1740 and 1840, in which commentators describe it both as a material force and as a purely figurative one. The book analyses attempts by both elite and popular practitioners of electricity to elucidate the mysteries of electricity, and traces the figurative uses of electrical language in the works of writers including Mary Robinson, Edmund Burke, Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall, Mary Shelley and Richard Carlile.