This book is as a detailed, but highly readable and balanced account of the history of animal space flights carried out by all nations, but principally the United States and the Soviet Union. It explores the ways in which animal high-altitude and space flight research impacted on space flight biomedicine and technology, and how the results - both successful and disappointing - allowed human beings to then undertake that same hazardous journey with far greater understanding and confidence. This complete and authoritative book will undoubtedly become the ultimate authority on animal space flights.
The International Symposium on "The Use of Space by Animals and Men," sponsored by the Animal Behavior Society, took place at the 135th Annual Meeting of the AAAS in Dallas, Texas, on December 29-31, 1968. This book presents the text of all papers and edited discus sions, as well as the contributions made by several individuals who were unable ·to attend the Symposium. The idea of holding the Symposium evolved following my presenta tion of a paper to the Animal Behavior Society in 1965 [2] on the use of space by psychiatric patients. Members in attendance at that ses sion, chaired by G. Gottlieb, shared his interest in my compilation of human data presented in a measurable spatial context. This plea sant experience persuaded me that a discussion of space might be shared as a frame of reference which could open avenues of communica tion between behavioral scientists, the design community, and the de cision makers in our society.
Since the early days of flight, animals have helped researchers learn how to survive in the sky, and their role continues as humanity voyages into outer space. In 1783, a rooster, a duck and a sheep were placed in a basket attached to the first hot-air balloon. In the age of rockets and space travel, many more animals have travelled into orbit, and most have returned safely to earth. This book tells the stories of 50 trips into space, with details about the animals and the scientists involved. The experiments, often designed by students, originate from many countries. The book offers an appealing introduction to the purposes of space exploration and the possibilities of safe space travel. It encourages young readers to engage in real science like the young people they will read about in this book.
This book examines the effects of spaceflight at cellular and organism levels. Research on the effects of gravity - or its absence - and ionizing radiation on the evolution, development, and function of living organisms is presented in layman's terms. The book describes the benefits of space biology for basic and applied research to support human space exploration and the advantages of space as a laboratory for scientific, technological, and commercial research.
“Is the tick a machine or a machine operator? Is it a mere object or a subject?” With these questions, the pioneering biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll embarks on a remarkable exploration of the unique social and physical environments that individual animal species, as well as individuals within species, build and inhabit. This concept of the umwelt has become enormously important within posthumanist philosophy, influencing such figures as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari, and, most recently, Giorgio Agamben, who has called Uexküll “a high point of modern antihumanism.” A key document in the genealogy of posthumanist thought, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans advances Uexküll’s revolutionary belief that nonhuman perceptions must be accounted for in any biology worth its name; it also contains his arguments against natural selection as an adequate explanation for the present orientation of a species’ morphology and behavior. A Theory of Meaning extends his thinking on the umwelt, while also identifying an overarching and perceptible unity in nature. Those coming to Uexküll’s work for the first time will find that his concept of the umwelt holds new possibilities for the terms of animality, life, and the framework of biopolitics.
Galileo wrote that “nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially of his bones”—a statement that wonderfully captures a long-standing scientific fascination with body size. Why are organisms the size that they are? And what determines their optimum size? This volume explores animal body size from a macroecological perspective, examining species, populations, and other large groups of animals in order to uncover the patterns and causal mechanisms of body size throughout time and across the globe. The chapters represent diverse scientific perspectives and are divided into two sections. The first includes chapters on insects, snails, birds, bats, and terrestrial mammals and discusses the body size patterns of these various organisms. The second examines some of the factors behind, and consequences of, body size patterns and includes chapters on community assembly, body mass distribution, life history, and the influence of flight on body size.
Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals explores resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. The work proposes an analysis of the carceral from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that are placed into conversation draw from a number of institutional domains, based on their form, operation, and effect. These include: the prison death row/ execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; sites of exploited prisoner and animal labor; and the prison solitary confinement cell and the zoo cage. The relationships to which I draw attention across these sites are at once structural, operational, technological, legal, and experiential / embodied. The forms of violence that span species boundaries at these sites are all a part of ordinary, everyday, industrialized violence in the United States and elsewhere, and thus this ‘carceral comparison’ amongst them is appropriate and timely.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Chicago Public Library, Outside, Publishers Weekly, BookPage ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Economist, Smithsonian Magazine, Prospect (UK), Globe & Mail, Esquire, Mental Floss, Marginalian, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.” WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON AWARD
