"This is a wonderful book. Frances Ashcroft has a rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating." —Bill Bryson, author of The Body: A Guide for Occupants 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tap into the extraordinary power of electricity to heal your body and empower your life Everything is electric. This seemingly simple observation has transformational repercussions on the way we think about and approach physical, mental, and emotional health. Electric Body, Electric Health is a manifesto for personal empowerment based on an electrical view of life. Author of Tuning the Human Biofield, Eileen Day McKusick is an expert in the emerging field of electric health and has taught thousands how to transform effortlessly through learning to “think electrically.” By illuminating the biological nature of our electrical bodies, McKusick empowers readers to clear the static, noise, and resistance from this system and experience greater energy, clarity, and order. Electric Body, Electric Health makes use of simple, easy-to-implement practices such as: - Awareness practices - Perspective shifts - Breathing practices - Simple lifestyle changes - Improved emotional management - and more... in order to help readers improve their health and enhance their daily lives. It will give you the tools to transform your relationship with your body, your mind, your emotions, and the electrical world around you.