The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body PDF Download

Author: Frances Ashcroft
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393089541
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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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 At Home: A Short History of Private Life 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.

Author: Timothy J. Jorgensen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069124815X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A fresh look at electricity and its powerful role in life on Earth When we think of electricity, we likely imagine the energy humming inside our home appliances or lighting up our electronic devices—or perhaps we envision the lightning-streaked clouds of a stormy sky. But electricity is more than an external source of power, heat, or illumination. Life at its essence is nothing if not electrical. The story of how we came to understand electricity’s essential role in all life is rooted in our observations of its influences on the body—influences governed by the body’s central nervous system. Spark explains the science of electricity from this fresh, biological perspective. Through vivid tales of scientists and individuals—from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk—Timothy Jorgensen shows how our views of electricity and the nervous system evolved in tandem, and how progress in one area enabled advancements in the other. He explains how these developments have allowed us to understand—and replicate—the ways electricity enables the body’s essential functions of sight, hearing, touch, and movement itself. Throughout, Jorgensen examines our fascination with electricity and how it can help or harm us. He explores a broad range of topics and events, including the Nobel Prize–winning discoveries of the electron and neuron, the history of experimentation involving electricity’s effects on the body, and recent breakthroughs in the use of electricity to treat disease. Filled with gripping adventures in scientific exploration, Spark offers an indispensable look at electricity, how it works, and how it animates our lives from within and without.

Author: Daniel Keown
Publisher: Singing Dragon
ISBN: 0857011545
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Why can salamanders grow new legs, and young children grow new finger tips, but adult humans can't regenerate? What is the electricity that flows through the human body? Is it the same thing that the Chinese call Qi? If so, what does Chinese medicine know, that western medicine ignores? Dan Keown's highly accessible, witty, and original book shows how western medicine validates the theories of Chinese medicine, and how Chinese medicine explains the mysteries of the body that western medicine largely ignores. He explains the generative force of embryology, how the hearts of two people in love (or in scientific terms `quantum entanglement') truly beat as one, how a cheating heart is also an ill heart (which is why men are twice as likely to die of a sudden heart attack with their mistress than with their wife), how neural crest cells determine our lifespan, and why Proust's madeleines evoked the memories they did. The book shows how the theories of western and Chinese medicine support each other, and how the integrated theory enlarges our understanding of how bodies work on every level. Full of good stories and surprising details, Dan Keown's book is essential reading for anyone who has ever wanted to know how the body really works.

Author: Frances Ashcroft
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520234208
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Explores the limits of human survival and the physiological adaptations that enable us to exist under extreme conditions. The author reviews limits to human life underwater, at high altitudes, at high speeds, at micro levels, and at freezing and hot temperatures.

Author: Alex Boese
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 075222686X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller Have you ever wondered if a severed head retains consciousness long enough to see what happened to it? Or whether your dog would run to fetch help, if you fell down a disused mineshaft? And what would happen if you were to give an elephant the largest ever single dose of LSD? The chances are that someone, somewhere has conducted a scientific experiment to find out... 'Excellent accounts of some of the most important and interesting experiments in biology and psychology' Simon Singh If left to their own devices, would babies instinctively choose a well-balanced diet? Discover the secret of how to sleep on planes Which really tastes better in a blind tasting - Coke or Pepsi?

Author: Robert O. Becker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0874776090
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
“A fascinating, thoughtful, and accessible account of the emerging field of electromedicine. A timely and eloquent warning on the hazards of electronic pollution.”—Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Hydrogen Economy At the same time that exciting insights about electromedicine’s powerful ability to use the body’s inherent healing abilities are emerging, electromagnetic fields radiating from power lines, radar, microwave ovens, VDTs, satellites, radios, and even electric blankets are putting our health at serious risk. Researchers are finding that this radiation correlates with increases in cancer, birth defects, depression, learning disabilities, chronic fatigue syndrome, Alzheimer’s, AIDS, and sudden infant death syndrome. In this groundbreaking book, Robert O Becker explains how new and nontraditional healing techniques such as acupuncture, homeopathy, visualization, hypnosis, and electrotherapy work through an invisible common source—the body’s electrical system. He also offers practical ways to protect ourselves in our homes and offices from the hazardous effects of electromagnetic pollution and teaches us how to engage the healing energies of electromagnetism. Dr. Becker’s powerful synthesis reshapes the future of medicine by putting life energy into our medical perspective and enabling us to see the body in its total living environment—the earth’s electromagnetic field.

Author: Katherine E. Standefer
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
ISBN: 0316450359
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

Author: Denie Hiestand
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101161922
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Completely revised and updated, this groundbreaking self-published book has sold more than 15,000 copies through limited exposure and distribution. Electrical Nutrition outlines the authors' revolutionary theories on health and nutrition based on an electrical model. Everything we think, feel, eat, and do triggers electrical responses in our bodies. Each of our cells is electrically charged, and therefore the electrical availability of what we eat has a profound effect on our health, vitality, and well-being. Instead of focusing on the chemical reactions that occur in every system of the human body, the authors contend that there is a simultaneous electrical reaction that has an equally, if not even more, important impact on our ability to digest and benefit from the food we consume. Any interruption to the flow of the body's natural electrical circuitry will have a negative effect on a cellular level which, in turn, will promote disease. Electrical Nutrition offers a practical program that includes menu plans and a listing of the best "electrically available" foods-a plan that will dramatically increase stamina, vitality, and even libido. By eliminating foods that are "electrically dead," we can rid the body of toxins that promote obesity and a host of illnesses, from chronic fatigue to heart disease, while boosting the body's natural energy and immune function.

Author: Linda Simon
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156032445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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From the invention of the telegraph to the discovery of X rays, Simon has created a revealing portrait of an anxious age when Americans welcomed electricity into their bodies even as they kept it from their homes.

Author: Robert Becker
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0688069711
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
The Body Electric tells the fascinating story of our bioelectric selves. Robert O. Becker, a pioneer in the filed of regeneration and its relationship to electrical currents in living things, challenges the established mechanistic understanding of the body. He found clues to the healing process in the long-discarded theory that electricity is vital to life. But as exciting as Becker's discoveries are, pointing to the day when human limbs, spinal cords, and organs may be regenerated after they have been damaged, equally fascinating is the story of Becker's struggle to do such original work. The Body Electric explores new pathways in our understanding of evolution, acupuncture, psychic phenomena, and healing.