The Rhythms Of Life
eBook - ePub

The Rhythms Of Life

The Biological Clocks That Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Rhythms Of Life

The Biological Clocks That Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing

About this book

Popular science at its most exciting: the breaking new world of chronobiology - understanding the rhythm of life in humans and all plants and animals. The entire natural world is full of rhythms. The early bird catches the worm -and migrates to an internal calendar. Dormice hibernate away the winter. Plants open and close their flowers at the same hour each day. Bees search out nectar-rich flowers day after day. There are cicadas that can breed for only two weeks every 17 years. And in humans: why are people who work anti-social shifts more illness prone and die younger? What is jet-lag and can anything help? Why do teenagers refuse to get up in the morning, and are the rest of us really 'larks' or 'owls'? Why are most people born (and die) between 3am-5am? And should patients be given medicines (and operations) at set times of day, because the body reacts so differently in the morning, evening and at night? The answers lie in our biological clocks the mechanisms which give order to all living things. They impose a structure that enables us to change our behaviour in relation to the time of day, month or year. They are reset at sunrise and sunset each day to link astronomical time with an organism's internal time.

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Yes, you can access The Rhythms Of Life by Leon Kreitzman,Russell Foster in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Science General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Introduction
  8. 1 The day within and the day without
  9. 2 Telling time
  10. 3 Oscillators, clocks and hourglasses
  11. 4 The challenge of daily change
  12. 5 The search for the clock
  13. 6 Light on the clock
  14. 7 The molecular clock: protein ‘tick’ and RNA ‘tock’
  15. 8 A few species and many clocks
  16. 9 The changing seasons
  17. 10 Clockwork evolution
  18. 11 Sleep and performance
  19. 12 SAD shifts
  20. 13 Time to take your medicine
  21. 14 Future times: Uchronia or Dyschronia
  22. Glossary of common terms
  23. Appendix I Rhythms in humans
  24. Appendix II Coping with jet-lag
  25. References
  26. Index
  27. Footnotes