This title looks at how three kinds of strongly electric fishes became electrical, and how they helped to change the sciences and medicine. These fishes are the flat torpedo rays common to the Mediterranean, the electric catfishes of Africa, and an eel from South America.--[Source inconnue].

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly book examines the importance of electric fishes in science and medicine and how three species in particular shaped neurophysiology. Anchored in the philosophy and science of past epochs, it is the story of one of Nature's greatest puzzles. Over a long and tortuous path, it focuses on how some numbing fishes helped to make physiology modern.

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.

A fundamental goal of neuroscience is to understand how the nervous system extracts biologically relevant information from the natural environment and how it uses that information to guide and coordinate behavior necessary for reproduction and survival. The electrosensory systems of weakly electric teleost fishes and those of nonteleost fishes are attractive systems for addressing basic questions about neuronal information processing and its relationship to natural behavior. Comparative approaches in these fishes have led to the identification of fundamental mechanisms that have shaped the adaptive evolution of sensory systems across animal taxa. Understanding how sensory systems encode and integrate information about the natural world has far reaching implications for advancing our knowledge in the basic biomedical sciences and in understanding how the nervous system has evolved to control behavior. The primary goal of this book is to provide a comparative perspective on the topic of electroreception and review some of the fundamental insights gained from studies of electrosensory and electromotor systems. Although totally independent, this book follows from volume 21 in the Springer Handbook of Auditory Research series, Electroreception (Bullock, T. H., Hopkins, C. D., Popper, A. N., and Fay, R. R., 2005, Springer-Verlag, New York).

Science journalist Sally Adee breaks open the field of bioelectricity—the electric currents that run through our bodies and every living thing—its misunderstood history, and why new discoveries will lead to new ways around antibiotic resistance, cleared arteries, and new ways to combat cancer. You may be familiar with the idea of our body's biome: the bacterial fauna that populate our gut and can so profoundly affect our health. In We Are Electric we cross into new scientific understanding: discovering your body's electrome. Every cell in our bodies—bones, skin, nerves, muscle—has a voltage, like a tiny battery. It is the reason our brain can send signals to the rest of our body, how we develop in the womb, and why our body knows to heal itself from injury. When bioelectricity goes awry, illness, deformity, and cancer can result. But if we can control or correct this bioelectricity, the implications for our health are remarkable: an undo switch for cancer that could flip malignant cells back into healthy ones; the ability to regenerate cells, organs, even limbs; to slow aging and so much more. The next scientific frontier might be decrypting the bioelectric code, much the way we did the genetic code. Yet the field is still emerging from two centuries of skepticism and entanglement with medical quackery, all stemming from an 18th-century scientific war about the nature of electricity between Luigi Galvani (father of bioelectricity, famous for shocking frogs) and Alessandro Volta (inventor of the battery). In We Are Electric, award-winning science writer Sally Adee takes readers through the thrilling history of bioelectricity and into the future: from the Victorian medical charlatans claiming to use electricity to cure everything from paralysis to diarrhea, to the advances helped along by the giant axons of squids, and finally to the brain implants and electric drugs that await us—and the moral implications therein. The bioelectric revolution starts here.

Na Channels from Phyla to Function, the latest volume in the Current Topics in Membranes series, is targeted toward scientists and researchers in biochemistry and molecular and cellular biology, providing the necessary membrane research to assist them in discovering the current state of a particular field and in learning where that field is heading. This volume offers an up-to-date presentation of the current knowledge in the field of Na Channels. Written by leading experts in the field of Na Channels Contains original material, both textual and illustrative, that make it a very relevant reference Presented in a very comprehensive manner Both researchers in the field and general readers will find this book relevant and up-to-date with regard to its information

Casual stargazers are familiar with many classical figures and asterisms composed of bright stars (e.g., Orion and the Plough), but this book reveals not just the constellations of today but those of yesteryear. The history of the human identification of constellations among the stars is explored through the stories of some influential celestial cartographers whose works determined whether new inventions survived. The history of how the modern set of 88 constellations was defined by the professional astronomy community is recounted, explaining how the constellations described in the book became permanently “extinct.” Dr. Barentine addresses why some figures were tried and discarded, and also directs observers to how those figures can still be picked out on a clear night if one knows where to look. These lost constellations are described in great detail using historical references, enabling observers to rediscover them on their own surveys of the sky. Treatment of the obsolete constellations as extant features of the night sky adds a new dimension to stargazing that merges history with the accessibility and immediacy of the night sky.

Every year, hundreds of millions of animals are used in the service of biomedical research, despite the risk of extreme cruelty to these animal subjects. The expansion of the pharmaceutical industry and university research funding rapidly normalized its practice. What exactly are these experiments supposed to achieve from the scientific point of view and how effective are they? Working scientists answer these questions by saying that their research is absolutely necessary if we are to develop new therapies for human diseases. But is this really the case? Written by a scientist with over 40 years of laboratory experience, The Rise and Fall of Animal Experimentation critically examines this assumption and asks whether it is true that animal-based research achieves its aims and, if so, how often this occurs and if there are alternatives to performing animal-based science. The book takes readers through the history of animal experimentation: its early beginnings in antiquity, how it advanced in the seventeenth century during the Scientific Revolution until the present day, and explores the diverse scientific, theological, and philosophical influences that formed the basis for these ideas about animal-based science. Referencing developments in various fields including stem cell biology, genetic sequencing, and live imaging, the book describes the scientific advancements that bring the value of animal experimentation into question and encourages biomedical research to consider more anthropocentric paradigms that reflect the entire spectrum of human diversity.

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.

"... and still we could never suppose that fortune were to be so friendly to us, such as to allow us to be perhaps the first in handling, as it were, the electricity concealed in nerves, in extracting it from nerves, and, in some way, in putting it under everyone's eyes." With these words, Luigi Galvani announced to the world in 1791 his discovery that nervous conduction and muscle excitation are electrical phenomena. The result of more than years of intense experimental work, Galvani's milestone achievement concluded a thousand-year scientific search, in a field long dominated by the antiquated beliefs of classical science. Besides laying the grounds for the development of the modern neurosciences, Galvani's discovery also brought to light an invention that would forever change humankind's everyday life: the electric battery of Alessandro Volta. In an accessible style, written for specialists and general readers alike, Shocking Frogs retraces the steps of both scientific discoveries, starting with the initial hypotheses of the Enlightenment on the involvement of electricity in life processes. So doing, it also reveals the inconsistency of the many stereotypes that an uncritical cultural tradition has imparted to the legacies of Galvani and Volta, and proposes a decidedly new image of these monumental figures.