Science fiction movie audiences may sometimes wonder how fictitious the science in a film really is. Yet for many--call them the "Jurassic Park generation"--film and popular media can present a seemingly plausible melding of science and fiction that forms a distorted understanding of scientific facts and concepts. Recognizing that film is both the dominant entertainment medium and an effective tool for teaching, this book--featuring articles originally published in the magazine Scary Monsters--separates biological reality from fantasy in dozens of science fiction films, including The Island of Lost Souls (1933), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), War of the Worlds (1953), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Scanners (1980), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1987) and Outbreak (1995).

"For the contemporary film audience, science fiction has become a key locus for displaying-and imaginatively addressing-its most pressing concerns. Those concerns increasingly surface not just as displaced subjects, injected into conventional sf narratives, but as inflections in the very nature of the genre. We might describe these issues that bulk so large in our everyday world as angling into the world of science and technology, becoming a kind of slant presence in the genre, and in the process altering the thrust of our sf films and other screen media, resulting in what seems like a proliferation of sub-genre labels that mark off a substantially "new" group of sf cinemas. These cinemas challenge us to view or "read" them differently, from perspectives that are just coming into focus. Through an introductory overview and series of articles on various of these contemporary "slants" and the theories that drive them, this volume offers a guide to both what the new sf cinemas are about and how we have come to think about or "read" them differently. In the process, it also links these fragments of the constantly growing sf supertext to our changing sense of how genres function as a process, marked by consistent growth and evolution, and discussed in ways that reflect contemporary culture's own constant changes"--

Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence scientific controversies and shape policy concerning evolution, genetics, and genomics.

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas.

This volume contains papers based on the workshop ?Energy and Information Transfer in Biological Systems: How Physics Could Enrich Biological Understanding?, held in Italy in 2002. The meeting was a forum aimed at evaluating the potential and outlooks of a modern physics approach to understanding and describing biological processes, especially regarding the transition from the microscopic chemical scenario to the macroscopic functional configurations of living matter. In this frame some leading researchers presented and discussed several basic topics, such as the photon interaction with biological systems also from the viewpoint of photon information processes and of possible applications; the influence of electromagnetic fields on the self-organization of biosystems including the nonlinear mechanism for energy transfer and storage; and the influence of the structure of water on the properties of biological matter.

This volume contains papers based on the workshop “Energy and Information Transfer in Biological Systems: How Physics Could Enrich Biological Understanding”, held in Italy in 2002. The meeting was a forum aimed at evaluating the potential and outlooks of a modern physics approach to understanding and describing biological processes, especially regarding the transition from the microscopic chemical scenario to the macroscopic functional configurations of living matter. In this frame some leading researchers presented and discussed several basic topics, such as the photon interaction with biological systems also from the viewpoint of photon information processes and of possible applications; the influence of electromagnetic fields on the self-organization of biosystems including the nonlinear mechanism for energy transfer and storage; and the influence of the structure of water on the properties of biological matter. Contents:Soliton Mechanism of Charge, Energy and Information Transfer in Biosystems (L Brizhik)Delayed Luminescence and Motional Harmonicity (L Cordone et al.)62 AMEV Proton Beam for the Treatment of Ocular Melanoma at LNS — INFN (G Cuttone et al.)Search for Quantum and Classical Modes of Information Processing in Microtubules: Implications for “the Living State” (S Hameroff et al.)From ‘Molecular Machines’ to Coherent Organisms (M-W Ho)On the Physics of Ultraweak Bioluminescence and Intercellular Photon Signaling (V S Letokhov & A L Dobryakov)Nonlinearity in Biological Systems: How Can Physics Help? (A A Marino & C Frilot)Life as a Fourth Level of Quantum Organization of Nature (S P Sit'ko)Concept of Photon Storage Capacity in Cell Biology (R van Wijk)and other papers Readership: Graduate students and researchers in physics and biology. Keywords:Biophysics;Delayed Luminescence;Consciousness;Structure of Water;Electromagnetic Field and Biology;Nonlinearity in Biological Systems;Solitons in Biological Systems;Information and Life

This interdisciplinary reader offers a fascinating exploration of the intersection of biopolitics and utopia by employing a range of theoretical approaches. Each essay provides a unique application of the two concepts to topics spanning the social sciences and humanities.