Brief History Of Bacteria, A: The Everlasting Game Between Humans And Bacteria


Book Description

This book explains how pathogenic bacteria cause diseases, how the human immune system launches timely and effective defense mechanisms against bacterial infection, why the discovery and application of penicillin and streptomycin are so important, how scientists have created medicines to defeat bacteria, and why these bacteria might outsmart modern medicine.On the other hand, bacteria can be beneficial to humans: some bacteria live in harmony with the human body, and they are indispensable to our health. They also help in refining biological energy in the post-fossil fuel era, and in producing fermented food.With accessible language, illustrations and comics, this book tells the story of our tumultuous relationship with bacteria and how it has shaped history.




A Brief History of Bacteria


Book Description

This book explains how pathogenic bacteria cause diseases, how the human immune system launches timely and effective defense mechanisms against bacterial infection, why the discovery and application of penicillin and streptomycin are so important, how scientists have created medicines to defeat bacteria, and why these bacteria might outsmart modern medicine. On the other hand, bacteria can be beneficial to humans: some bacteria live in harmony with the human body, and they are indispensable to our health. They also help in refining biological energy in the post-fossil fuel era, and in producing fermented food. With accessible language, illustrations and comics, this book tells the story of our tumultuous relationship with bacteria and how it has shaped history.




Sustainable Nanomaterials for Biomedical Engineering


Book Description

In recent years, nanomaterials have become one of the most dynamic exploration fields in the areas of engineering, technology, and science. This new volume focuses on the use of various bionanomaterials that can be introduced into the body as clinical devices for various medical purposes. The book also provides examples of cost-effective, sustainable alternatives to traditional medical procedures. The volume discusses how these materials have diverse applications in the biomedical fields, such as for cancer treatment, for orthopedic joint replacements, for medical diagnosis, for making bone plates, for wound healing, for nerve regeneration, for breast implants, in dental procedures, and so on. In addition, the book also covers some nonbiomedical applications of nanobiomaterials, such as, for example, to grow cells in a culture medium, as a blood protein test in laboratories, etc.




Health Risks of Food Additives


Book Description

This Edited Volume Health Risks and Benefits of Food Additives - Recent Developments and Trends in Food Sector is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the field of Agricultural and Biological Sciences. The book comprises single chapters authored by various researchers and edited by an expert active in the Food Safety research area. All chapters are complete in themselves but united under a common research study topic. This publication aims to provide a thorough overview of the latest research effortsby international authors on Food Safety, and open new possible research paths for further novel developments.




Microbe Hunters


Book Description

First published in 1927.




Sophie's World


Book Description

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.




Vitals


Book Description

A harrowing thriller based on real-life discoveries in cell theory and the battle against aging and death by the bestselling author of Darwin’s Radio and War Dogs Scientist Hal Cousins is on the brink of success in his quest to determine the biological underpinnings of immortality. Funded by angel investors, the brilliant researcher makes a trip by submersible to the bottom of the sea, searching for primitive one-celled organisms that may be related to the earliest life forms on Earth. But the trip turns into a nightmare when Cousins’s pilot goes berserk and turns on him. The homicidal attack is only the first in a series of events that sends the biochemist on the run, pursued by faceless enemies who want his studies terminated and Cousins dead. Cousins must face the realization that his research has brought him into contact with a vast conspiracy. Across the country, scientists are being murdered to cover up the fact that someone has discovered how to control minds through bacterial manipulation—and that the trigger bacteria now infects much of the world’s population. Discredited and not knowing whom to trust, Cousins must gamble everything with Earth’s very survival at stake. Award-winning author Greg Bear creates a tense, stunningly plausible thriller all too firmly rooted in scientific fact.




Homo Deus


Book Description

Official U.S. edition with full color illustrations throughout. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Over the past century humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague, and war. This may seem hard to accept, but, as Harari explains in his trademark style—thorough, yet riveting—famine, plague and war have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time ever, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals put together. The average American is a thousand times more likely to die from binging at McDonalds than from being blown up by Al Qaeda. What then will replace famine, plague, and war at the top of the human agenda? As the self-made gods of planet earth, what destinies will we set ourselves, and which quests will we undertake? Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus. With the same insight and clarity that made Sapiens an international hit and a New York Times bestseller, Harari maps out our future.




Complications


Book Description

A brilliant and courageous doctor reveals, in gripping accounts of true cases, the power and limits of modern medicine. Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This book is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is -- complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high, yet decisions must be made. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad. He also shows us what happens when medicine comes up against the inexplicable: an architect with incapacitating back pain for which there is no physical cause; a young woman with nausea that won't go away; a television newscaster whose blushing is so severe that she cannot do her job. Gawande offers a richly detailed portrait of the people and the science, even as he tackles the paradoxes and imperfections inherent in caring for human lives. At once tough-minded and humane, Complications is a new kind of medical writing, nuanced and lucid, unafraid to confront the conflicts and uncertainties that lie at the heart of modern medicine, yet always alive to the possibilities of wisdom in this extraordinary endeavor. Complications is a 2002 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.




The Spell of the Sensuous


Book Description

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.