[PDF] Viruses More Friends Than Foes Revised Edition eBook

Author : Karin Moelling
Publisher : World Scientific
Page : 446 pages
File Size : 30,48 MB
Release : 2020-08-26
Category : Science
ISBN : 9811224765

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Coronavirus, AIDS, and Ebola: Viruses are normally defined as pathogens. Most viruses are, however, not enemies or killers. Well-known virologist and cancer researcher Karin Moelling describes surprising insights about a completely new and unexpected world of viruses. Viruses are ubiquitous, in the oceans, our environment, in animals, plants, bacteria, in our body, even in our genomes. They influence our weather, can contribute to control obesity, and can surprisingly be applied against threatening multi-resistant bacteria. The success story of the viruses started more than 3.5 billion years ago in the dawn of life when even cells did not exist. They are the superpower of life. There are more viruses on earth than stars in the sky. Viruses are everywhere. Some of them are incredibly ancient. Many viruses are hundredfold smaller than bacteria, but others are tenfold bigger and they were discovered only recently — the giant viruses, even deep within the permafrost where they were reactivated after 30,000 years.The author talks about a completely new world of viruses, which are based on the most recent, in part her own research results. Could viruses have been our oldest ancestors? Have viruses even 'invented' social behavior, do they lead to geniuses such as Mozart or Einstein — or alternatively to cancer? They can help to cure cancer. In this book, the author made a clear distinction between what is fact and what is her vision. This book is written for a general audience and not just for the experts. Its aim is to stimulate thinking, and perhaps to attract more young scientists to enter this field of research.This revised edition is brought up to date by a new chapter on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Related Link(s)

Author : Karin Moelling
Publisher : World Scientific Publishing Company
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 12,90 MB
Release : 2020-08-20
Category : Science
ISBN : 9789811224744

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Reviews of the Previous Edition: "Her style is chatty, and just when you want to break into the conversation and ask a question, she's thrown in an aside about a spat at a scientific meeting or discussed how we should dispose of our tissues when we have a cold. If this sort of mental gymnastics on top of some heavyweight science doesn't put you off, you'll like her book and learn much from it." Times Higher Education "Moëlling uses her successful career in the discipline to structure much of the book and includes numerous interesting personal anecdotes to underscore her points. The writing style is conversational and will be accessible to non-scientists. " CHOICE connect Reviews of the German edition: "The author describes a real success story of viruses which is fascinating and unconventional. What is presented with respect to knowledge, personal evaluations, amusing anecdotes from everyday life in research, is impressive." Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Zurich "I find your book excellent, instructive, and yet very entertaining." Emeritus Professor Charles Weissmann The Scripps Research Institute, Florida "Very amusing are the descriptions of the author's personal experiences with contemporary famous scientists. Rich with facts, this book is very worth reading also for non-specialists who would get to know the abundance of non-pathogenic viruses." Biology in Our Time Coronavirus, AIDS, and Ebola: Viruses are normally defined as pathogens. Most viruses are, however, not enemies or killers. Well-known virologist and cancer researcher Karin Moelling describes surprising insights about a completely new and unexpected world of viruses. Viruses are ubiquitous, in the oceans, our environment, in animals, plants, bacteria, in our body, even in our genomes. They influence our weather, can contribute to control obesity, and can surprisingly be applied against threatening multi-resistant bacteria. The success story of the viruses started more than 3.5 billion years ago in the dawn of life when even cells did not exist. They are the superpower of life. There are more viruses on earth than stars in the sky. Viruses are everywhere. Some of them are incredibly ancient. Many viruses are hundredfold smaller than bacteria, but others are tenfold bigger and they were discovered only recently -- the giant viruses, even deep within the permafrost where they were reactivated after 30,000 years. The author talks about a completely new world of viruses, which are based on the most recent, in part her own research results. Could viruses have been our oldest ancestors? Have viruses even "invented" social behavior, do they lead to geniuses such as Mozart or Einstein -- or alternatively to cancer? They can help to cure cancer. In this book, the author made a clear distinction between what is fact and what is her vision. This book is written for a general audience and not just for the experts. Its aim is to stimulate thinking, and perhaps to attract more young scientists to enter this field of research. This revised edition is brought up to date by a new chapter on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Author : Roberta Buiani
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 36,7 MB
Release : 2024-08-22
Category : Art
ISBN : 1350419443

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In a new era of global virology that requires novel methodologies to improve the comprehension of viruses and viral phenomena, Viral Behaviors explores the cultural, material, and artistic significance of viral agents. Across a rich variety of case studies stemming from different areas of interest-covering literature, the graphic arts and scientific visualization, as well as performance, installation and bioart-this book asks whether embracing the complexity of viruses, rather than obsessively measuring, dissecting, or precisely mapping their parts and manifestations, may provide new methodological directions in the intersection of scientific thinking and artistic practice. The book examines the struggles and successes of science and technology to tame the elusive nature and behavior of viruses, and the potential of art-based and cross-disciplinary collaborations to better communicate their complex making and intense entanglement with the world at large. Combining perspectives from art, philosophy, science and technology, it places biological and informational viruses alongside each other, revealing that, while the two types of agents affect the world in very different ways, their histories and manifestations contain surprising similarities that speak to a cultural continuum. Viral Behaviors unravels the extraordinary mobility of viruses across disciplines, and their intersection with all aspects of culture, rather than their import within one specific disciplinary realm. It shows how the numerous attempts by artists, scientists and professionals to tackle, represent and appropriate viruses, and their intricate dynamism, can lead to new nuanced and sophisticated understandings of these substances and their related phenomena, and reveals the contribution of non-measurable or non-traditional practices in their construction and dissemination.

Author : Jeremy Rifkin
Publisher : St. Martin's Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 15,14 MB
Release : 2022-11-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1250093554

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A sweeping new interpretation of the history of civilization and a transformative vision of how our species will thrive on an unpredictable Earth. The viruses keep coming, the climate is warming, and the Earth is rewilding. Our human family has no playbook to address the mayhem unfolding around us. If there is a change to reckon with, argues the renowned economic and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin, it’s that we are beginning to realize that the human race never had dominion over the Earth and that nature is far more formidable than we thought, while our species seems much smaller and less significant in the bigger picture of life on Earth, undermining our long-cherished worldview. The Age of Progress, once considered sacrosanct, is on a deathwatch while a powerful new narrative, the Age of Resilience, is ascending. In The Age of Resilience, Rifkin takes us on a new journey beginning with how we reconceptualize time and navigate space. During the Age of Progress, efficiency was the gold standard for organizing time, locking our species into the quest to optimize the expropriation, commodification, and consumption of the Earth’s bounty, at ever-greater speeds and in ever-shrinking time intervals, with the objective of increasing the opulence of human society, but at the expense of the depletion of nature. Space, observes Rifkin, became synonymous with passive natural resources, while a principal role of government and the economy was to manage nature as property. This long adhered to temporal-spatial orientation, writes Rifkin, has taken humanity to the commanding heights as the dominant species on Earth and to the ruin of the natural world. In the emerging era, says Rifkin, efficiency is giving way to adaptivity as the all-encompassing temporal value while space is perceived as animated, self-organizing, and fluid. A younger generation, in turn, is pivoting from growth to flourishing, finance capital to ecological capital, productivity to regenerativity, Gross Domestic Product to Quality of Life Indicators, hyper-consumption to eco-stewardship, globalization to glocalization, geopolitics to biosphere politics, nation-state sovereignty to bioregional governance, and representative democracy to citizen assemblies and distributed peerocracy. Future generations, suggests Rifkin, will likely experience existence less as objects and structures and more as patterns and processes and come to understand that each of us is literally an ecosystem made up of the microorganisms and elements that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The autonomous self of the Age of Progress is giving way to the ecological self of the Age of Resilience. The now worn scientific method that underwrote the Age of Progress is also falling by the wayside, making room for a new approach to science called Complex Adaptive Systems modeling. Likewise, detached reason is losing cachet while empathy and biophilia become the norm. At a moment when the human family is deeply despairing of the future, Rifkin gives us a window into a promising new world and a radically different future that can bring us back into nature’s fold, giving life a second chance to flourish on Earth.

Author : Carl Zimmer
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 23,62 MB
Release : 2021-03-29
Category : Medical
ISBN : 022678259X

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Introduction. "A contagious living fluid" : tobacco mosaic virus and the discovery of the virosphere -- Old companions. The uncommon cold : how rhinoviruses gently conquered the world ; Looking down from the stars : influenza's never-ending reinvention ; Rabbits with horns : human papillomavirus and infectious cancer -- Everywhere, in all things. The enemy of our enemy : bacteriophages as viral medicine ; The infected ocean : how marine phages rule the sea ; Our inner parasites : endogenous retroviruses and our virus-riddled genomes -- The viral future. The young scourge : human immunodeficiency virus and the animal origins of disease ; Becoming an American : the globalization of West Nile virus ; The pandemic age : why COVID-19 should have come as no surprise ; The long goodbye : the delayed oblivion of Smallpox -- Epilogue. The alien in the water cooler : giant viruses and what it means to be a virus.

Author : Kristen Roupenian
Publisher : Random House
Page : 72 pages
File Size : 36,3 MB
Release : 2018-05-03
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 147356123X

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She thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing. Margot meets Robert. They exchange numbers. They text, flirt and eventually have sex – the type of sex you attempt to forget. How could one date go so wrong? Everything that takes place in Cat Person happens to countless people every day. But Cat Person is not an everyday story. In less than a week, Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker debut became the most read and shared short story in their website’s history. This is the bad date that went viral. This is the conversation we’re all having. This gift edition contains photographs by celebrated photographer Elinor Carucci, who was commissioned by the New Yorker to capture the image that accompanied Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person when it appeared in the magazine. You Know You Want This, Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, will be published in February 2019.

Author : David Quammen
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 591 pages
File Size : 16,38 MB
Release : 2012-10
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0393066800

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A masterpiece of science reporting that tracks the animal origins of emerginghuman diseases.

Author : Steven W. Thrasher
Publisher : Celadon Books
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 32,11 MB
Release : 2022-08-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1250796652

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**LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION** **LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDALS FOR EXCELLENCE** **WINNER OF THE 2022 POZ AWARD FOR BEST IN LITERATURE** "An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class...readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddled times: a clear lens through which to see the world." —Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society. Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.