The Cell: A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life
Author: Jack Challoner File Type: pdf The cell is the basic building block of life. In its 3.5 billion years on the planet, it has proven to be a powerhouse, spreading life first throughout the seas, then across land, developing the rich and complex diversity of life that populates the planet today. With The Cell A Visual Tour of the Building Block of Life, Jack Challoner treats readers to a visually stunning tour of these remarkable molecular machines. Most of the living things were familiar withthe plants in our gardens, the animals we eatare composed of billions or trillions of cells. Most multicellular organisms consist of many different types of cells, each highly specialized to play a particular rolefrom building bones or producing the pigment in flower petals to fighting disease or sensing environmental cues. But the great majority of living things on our planet exist as single cell. These cellular singletons are every bit as successful and diverse as multicellular organisms, and our very existence relies on them. The book is an authoritative yet accessible account of what goes on inside every living cellfrom building proteins and producing energy to making identical copies of themselvesand the importance of these chemical reactions both on the familiar everyday scale and on the global scale. Along the way, Challoner sheds light on many of the most intriguing questions guiding current scientific research What special properties make stem cells so promising in the treatment of injury and disease? How and when did single-celled organisms first come together to form multicellular ones? And how might scientists soon be prepared to build on the basic principles of cell biology to build similar living cells from scratch. **
Author: Kathleen Frederickson
File Type: pdf
It is paradoxical that instinct becomes such a central term for late-Victorian sexual sciences working in the confessional mode of the Foucaultian consulting room given that instinct had long been defined in its opposition to self-conscious thought. The classic instinctive agents animals and savages were instinctive precisely because they were supposedly incapable of producing a self-conscious narrative about themselves or their actions. It is thus odd that instinct was so necessary to the elaboration of models of sexual subjectivity based on lack, confession, and introspection. The Ploy of Instinct argues that this paradox emerges as a result (and a cause) of changes to how instinct operates as a mechanism for governmentality as it helps gloss over contradictions and gaps in British liberal ideology that had been made palpable as writers around the turn of the twentieth century grappled with the legacy of Enlightenment humanism. As a result of these changes, instinct takes on new appeal to elite European men who identify instinct as both an agent of civilizational progress and a force that offers (in contradistinction to the lack associated with desire) a plenitude that can hold the alienation of self-consciousness at bay. Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers andor savages, this shift in instincts appeal to civilized European men nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender. The book makes this argument by examining materials such as legal and parliamentary papers about the regulation of obscenity, pornographic fiction, ethnological monographs about Aboriginal Australians, treatises on political economy, and suffragette memoirs alongside scientific texts in evolutionary theory, psychology, sexology, and early psychoanalysis.
Author: Michael Hardt
File Type: pdf
Gilles Deleuze, a major figure in the intellectual history of the late-20th century, inaugurated the radical non-Hegelianism that has marked French intellectual life during the past three decades. Many poststructuralist and postmodernist practices can be traced to Deleuzes 1962 resurrection of Nietzsche against Hegel. Hardt shows how Deleuzes early analysis of Bergsons critique of ontology and determination led him to a conception of a positive movement of differentiation and becoming, which in turn led him to the field of forces, sense, value, and the thematic of power and affirmation in Nietzsche. The theory of power in Nietzsche provided the link for Deleuze to an ethics of active expression in Spinoza Deleuzes discovery and analysis of Spinozas cultivation of joy and practice at the center of ontology finally resulted in a complete break from the Hegelian paradigm that had reigned over continental philosophy and history. Michael Hardt is the translator of Antonio Negris The Savage Anomaly the Power of Spinozas Metaphysics and Politics (Minnesota, 1990), Giorgio Agambens The Coming Community (Minnesota, 1993), and co-author (with Antonio Negri) of Labor of Dionysus (Minnesota).
Author: Michael Blumlein
File Type: epub
The politics and terrors of biotech, human engineering, and brain science are highlighted in this selection of short stories with Michael Blumleins signature mix of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and wicked humor. The title piece, Thoreaus Microscope, is a stunning mix of hypothesis and history, in which the author inhabits Thoreaus last days to explore the politics of impersonal science and personal liberationa journey as illuminating as it is disturbing.**ReviewBlumlein has an exceptional vision, and he conveys it with exceptional talent. Washington PostBlindingly brilliant . . . Blumlein is beyond any genre . . . a genuinely great writer. Katherine Dunn, author,Geek LoveA wonderful and disturbing writer. William GibsonOffbeat and unpredictable . . . a talent that bears watching. Publishers WeeklyDisturbing. More! Joe Lansdale, creator,Hap and LeonardThe title piece, original to the collection, creates a delightfully strange atmosphere of simultaneous intimacy and intellectual detachment in an autobiographical first-person narrative of how a doctor deals with the morbid curiosity of experiencing his own cancer as both patient and professional. Publishers WeeklyAbout the Author Michael Blumlein is a medical doctor and a respected SF writer, whose novels and stories have introduced new levels of both horror and wonder into the fiction of scientific speculation. His work as a cutting-edge medical researcher and internist at San Franciscos UCSF Medical Center informs his acclaimed stories and novels as they explore what it means to be trulyif only temporarilyhuman.
Author: Alexander García Düttmann
File Type: pdf
A reconstruction of aspects of the philosophy of Adorno and Heidegger. This title reconstructs the philosophy of Adorno and Heidegger in the light of the importance that these thinkers attach to two proper names Auschwitz and Germanien. In Adornos dialectical thinking, Auschwitz is the name of an incommensurable historical event that seems to put a provisional end to history as a negative totality. In Heideggers thinking of Being, Germanien is a name inscribed in an historical mission on which the fate of Western civilization seems to depend it thus becomes the name of a positive totality of history.**
Author: Nicole Starosielski
File Type: azw3
In our wireless world it is easy to take the importance of the undersea cable systems for granted, but the stakes of their successful operation are huge, as they are responsible for carrying almost all transoceanic Internet traffic. In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. In doing so, she charts the cable networks cultural, historical, geographic and environmental dimensions. Starosielski argues that the environments the cables occupy are historical and political realms, where the network and the connections it enables are made possible by the deliberate negotiation and manipulation of technology, culture, politics and geography. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.ReviewThe Undersea Network is a thrilling work of cultural analysis. Part critical travel writing, part investigative ethnography, part history of technology, Nicole Starosielskis oceanic odyssey takes her readers to out-of-the-way sites like the Honotua cable station on Tahiti, the mega-networked beaches on Guam, and to AT&Ts offices on Keawaula Beach in Oahu. She reminds us that the undersea telecommunications infrastructure is haunted by histories of maritime colonial connection, Cold War submarine conflict, and the fluctuating fortunes of finance. This superb book will transmute our common sense about the media ecologies in which we live.(Stefan Helmreich, author of Alien Ocean Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas) Nicole Starosielskis The Undersea Network is as expansive as its subject, revealing the networks that make global communication possible as vital worlds unto themselves. In most stories of new media, infrastructure fades into the background. But Starosielski flips the script, making infrastructure the star, vividly describing the places, the people, the institutions, and the politics that constantly work to make global communication possible. In the process, The Undersea Network offers new insights into globalization and digitization. It also teaches us how to study large and largely invisible technical and cultural institutions. Coupled with its groundbreaking digital companion (www.surfacing.in), The Undersea Network will transform our understanding of the networks that make modern media possible. (Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3 The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction) Starosielski offers a crucial intervention into theoretical conceptualizations of communications infrastructure. . . . This rich text also has profound implications for how citizens in an always-networked society and economy understand our lived realities. The Undersea Network makes us reconsider the wirelessness of our world by admonishing us consider it in terms of its peculiar and ongoing connectedness to geographies, cultures, and politics.(Sara Rodrigues PopMatters) [A] fascinating book that is part history, part travelogue and part socio-economic memoir. . . . Starosielskis account makes for fascinating reading, drawing together the varied threads of history, technical complexity, economic power and political will that have shaped the worlds cable networks. Despite the scale of the infrastructure under discussion, the narrative remains intensely personal, and one to be enjoyed.(John Gilbey Times Higher Education) About the AuthorNicole Starosielski is Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
Author: Julien Mailland
File Type: pdf
A decade before the Internet became a medium for the masses in the United States, tens of millions of users in France had access to a network for e-mail, e-commerce, chat, research, game playing, blogging, and even an early form of online porn. In 1983, the French government rolled out Minitel, a computer network that achieved widespread adoption in just a few years as the government distributed free terminals to every French telephone subscriber. With this volume, Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll offer the first scholarly book in English on Minitel, examining it as both a technical system and a cultural phenomenon. Mailland and Driscoll argue that Minitel was a technical marvel, a commercial success, and an ambitious social experiment. Other early networks may have introduced protocols and software standards that continue to be used today, but Minitel foretold the social effects of widespread telecomputing. They examine the unique balance of forces that enabled the growth of Minitel public and private, open and closed, centralized and decentralized. Mailland and Driscoll describe Minitels key technological components, novel online services, and thriving virtual communities. Despite the seemingly tight grip of the state, however, a lively Minitel culture emerged, characterized by spontaneity, imagination, and creativity. After three decades of continuous service, Minitel was shut down in 2012, but the history of Minitel should continue to inform our thinking about Internet policy, today and into the future.
Author: Penelope Ingram
File Type: pdf
How do we live ethically? What role do sex and race play in living or being ethically? Can ethics lead to ontology? Can literature play a role in ethical being? Drawing extensively on the work of Luce Irigaray, Frantz Fanon, and Martin Heidegger, Penelope Ingram argues that ethical questions must be understood in light of ontological ones. It is only when sexual and racial difference are viewed at an ontological level that ethics is truly possible. Central to the connection between ontology and ethics is the role of language. Ingram revisits the relationship between representation and matter in order to advance a theory of material signification. She examines a number of twentieth-century film and literary texts, including Neil Jordans The Crying Game, J. M. Coetzees Foe, Toni Morrisons Paradise, and Don DeLillos The Body Artist, to demonstrate that material signification, rather than representation, is crucial to our experience of living authentically and achieving an ethical relation with the Other. By attending closely to Heideggers, Irigarays, and Fanons positions on language, this original work argues that the literary text is indispensable to a revealing of the relationship between ontology and ethics, and through it, the reader can experience a state of authentic Being ethically.
Author: Jerry R. Mohrig
File Type: pdf
Laboratory Techniques in Organic Chemistry is the most comprehensive and detailed presentation of the lab techniques organic chemistry students need to know. Compatible with any organic chemistry lab manual or set of experiments, it combines specific instructions for three different kinds of laboratory glassware miniscale, standard taper microscale, and Williamson microscale. It is written to provide effective support for guided-inquiry and design-based experiments and projects, as well as for traditional lab experiments. **About the Author Jerry Mohrig spent his entire professional career as a college teacher. He retired in 2003 from Carleton College as Stark Professor in the Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus. Actively involved in science education reform for many years, Jerry was a founding member of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and of Project Kaleidoscope. From 1997 until 2000 he was Chair of the ACS Committee on Professional Training. During his career Jerry collaborated on chemical research with over 150 undergraduates and published many articles on the stereochemistry of organic addition-elimination and proton-transfer reactions. His first textbook for the organic chemistry laboratory was published in 1968 and over the years he developed several new experiments for the organic lab. His major recent interest is bringing more effective student learning to the organic chemistry lab through the use of guided-inquiry projects and experiments. Jerry has been honored with the CUR Fellow Award, the Briscoe Lectureship at Indiana University, the James Flack Norris Award of the ACS, and the Catalyst Award of the Chemical Manufacturers Association for excellence in the teaching of chemistry. Gretchen Hofmeister earned her Ph.D. in synthetic chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990, after receiving a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College. She was an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Professor Richard R. Schrock at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a member of the faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College, earning tenure in 2002. That same year, she moved to Carleton College, where she is now Professor of Chemistry. Professor Hofmeister has taught courses that cover the spectrum from organic to organometallic to inorganic chemistry. Her primary love is teaching organic chemistry, where she emphasizes reactivity and understanding reaction mechanisms. She has designed laboratory experiments at the intermediate and advanced levels that provide students with research-like experiences and expose them to sophisticated and modern synthetic techniques. Her research is focused on developing and understanding catalytic processes in order to improve the selectivity and efficiency of chemical transformations and reduce the adverse impacts of chemistry on the environment. After a sabbatical year (20082009) doing research in the laboratories of Karl Anker Jrgensen at Aarhus University in Denmark, she has shifted her focus to catalysts that are composed entirely of organic compounds. Professor Hofmeister has also twice served on the Organic Exams Committee of the American Chemical Society to develop the national standardized exam in organic chemistry. Christina Hammond, retired, was Lecturer and Coordinator of Laboratory Instruction in the Chemistry Department at Vassar College from 1981 to 2006. Hammond received a B.S. from the State University of New York at Albany, and came to Vassar in 1961 as a masters degree student in chemistry and a graduate teaching assistant. She joined the faculty as a laboratory instructor in 1963. Her work concentrated on developing new experiments for these courses, and several of her experiments have been published in the Journal of Chemical Education. She has coauthored six organic chemistry laboratory texts published in the last 10 years.