Cats Paws And Catapults

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393352951
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People written by Steven Vogel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2000-01-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Full of ideas and well-explained principles that will bring new understanding of everyday things to both scientists and non-scientists alike."—R. McNeill Alexander, Nature Nature and humans build their devices with the same earthly materials and use them in the same air and water, pulled by the same gravity. Why, then, do their designs diverge so sharply? Humans, for instance, love right angles, while nature's angles are rarely right and usually rounded. Our technology goes around on wheels—and on rotating pulleys, gears, shafts, and cams—yet in nature only the tiny propellers of bacteria spin as true wheels. Our hinges turn because hard parts slide around each other, whereas nature's hinges (a rabbit's ear, for example) more often swing by bending flexible materials. In this marvelously surprising, witty book, Steven Vogel compares these two mechanical worlds, introduces the reader to his field of biomechanics, and explains how the nexus of physical law, size, and convenience of construction determine the designs of both people and nature. "This elegant comparison of human and biological technology will forever change the way you look at each."—Michael LaBarbera, American Scientist

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393319903
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cats' Paws and Catapults written by Steven Vogel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the differences in the mechanical workings of nature and technology and attempts to determine whether the designs of nature, such as the functions of animals; or the designs of man, such as the functions of cars; should be viewed as superior.

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140277333
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Cats' Paws and Catapults written by Steven Vogel and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human designers love right angles, but nature prefers to be round and curved; we like to be dry, whereas nature tends to be wet; we use wheels in diverse ways, but nature's only true wheels occur in bacteria. This text introduces us to the world of biomechanics and explains how physical law and historical accident became our world's most supreme architects.

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691209499
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life's Devices written by Steven Vogel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This entertaining and informative book describes how living things bump up against non-biological reality. "My immodest aim," says the author, "is to change how you view your immediate surroundings." He asks us to wonder about the design of plants and animals around us: why a fish swims more rapidly than a duck can paddle, why healthy trees more commonly uproot than break, how a shark manages with such a flimsy skeleton, or how a mouse can easily survive a fall onto any surface from any height. The book will not only fascinate the general reader but will also serve as an introductory survey of biomechanics. On one hand, organisms cannot alter the earth's gravity, the properties of water, the compressibility of air, or the behavior of diffusing molecules. On the other, such physical factors form both constraints with which the evolutionary process must contend and opportunities upon which it might capitalize. Life's Devices includes examples from every major group of animals and plants, with references to recent work, with illustrative problems, and with suggestions of experiments that need only common household materials.

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226859398
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Life of a Leaf written by Steven Vogel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In its essence, science is a way of looking at and thinking about the world. In The Life of a Leaf, Steven Vogel illuminates this approach, using the humble leaf as a model. Whether plant or person, every organism must contend with its immediate physical environment, a world that both limits what organisms can do and offers innumerable opportunities for evolving fascinating ways of challenging those limits. Here, Vogel explains these interactions, examining through the example of the leaf the extraordinary designs that enable life to adapt to its physical world. In Vogel’s account, the leaf serves as a biological everyman, an ordinary and ubiquitous living thing that nonetheless speaks volumes about our environment as well as its own. Thus in exploring the leaf’s world, Vogel simultaneously explores our own. A companion website with demonstrations and teaching tools can be found here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/vogel/index.html

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0195082699
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vital Circuits written by Steven Vogel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does dust collect on the blades of a fan? Why should you wear support hose on a long airplane flight? Vogel ranges across physics, fluid mechanics, and chemistry to show how an enormous system of pumps and pipes works to keep the human body functioning. Anyone curious about the workings of the body will want to read this book. 64 line drawings.

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400847826
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Comparative Biomechanics written by Steven Vogel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic textbook on comparative biomechanics—revised and expanded Why do you switch from walking to running at a specific speed? Why do tall trees rarely blow over in high winds? And why does a spore ejected into air at seventy miles per hour travel only a fraction of an inch? Comparative Biomechanics is the first and only textbook that takes a comprehensive look at the mechanical aspects of life—covering animals and plants, structure and movement, and solids and fluids. An ideal entry point into the ways living creatures interact with their immediate physical world, this revised and updated edition examines how the forms and activities of animals and plants reflect the materials available to nature, considers rules for fluid flow and structural design, and explores how organisms contend with environmental forces. Drawing on physics and mechanical engineering, Steven Vogel looks at how animals swim and fly, modes of terrestrial locomotion, organism responses to winds and water currents, circulatory and suspension-feeding systems, and the relationship between size and mechanical design. He also investigates links between the properties of biological materials—such as spider silk, jellyfish jelly, and muscle—and their structural and functional roles. Early chapters and appendices introduce relevant physical variables for quantification, and problem sets are provided at the end of each chapter. Comparative Biomechanics is useful for physical scientists and engineers seeking a guide to state-of-the-art biomechanics. For a wider audience, the textbook establishes the basic biological context for applied areas—including ergonomics, orthopedics, mechanical prosthetics, kinesiology, sports medicine, and biomimetics—and provides materials for exhibit designers at science museums. Problem sets at the ends of chapters Appendices cover basic background information Updated and expanded documentation and materials Revised figures and text Increased coverage of friction, viscoelastic materials, surface tension, diverse modes of locomotion, and biomimetics

Author : Philip Ball
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400865336
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Made to Measure written by Philip Ball and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Made to Measure introduces a general audience to one of today's most exciting areas of scientific research: materials science. Philip Ball describes how scientists are currently inventing thousands of new materials, ranging from synthetic skin, blood, and bone to substances that repair themselves and adapt to their environment, that swell and flex like muscles, that repel any ink or paint, and that capture and store the energy of the Sun. He shows how all this is being accomplished precisely because, for the first time in history, materials are being "made to measure": designed for particular applications, rather than discovered in nature or by haphazard experimentation. Now scientists literally put new materials together on the drawing board in the same way that a blueprint is specified for a house or an electronic circuit. But the designers are working not with skylights and alcoves, not with transistors and capacitors, but with molecules and atoms. This book is written in the same engaging manner as Ball's popular book on chemistry, Designing the Molecular World, and it links insights from chemistry, biology, and physics with those from engineering as it outlines the various areas in which new materials will transform our lives in the twenty-first century. The chapters provide vignettes from a broad range of selected areas of materials science and can be read as separate essays. The subjects include photonic materials, materials for information storage, smart materials, biomaterials, biomedical materials, materials for clean energy, porous materials, diamond and hard materials, new polymers, and surfaces and interfaces.

Author : Jay Harman
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1857889312
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Shark's Paintbrush written by Jay Harman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wave of the future has been around since the beginning of times: it's called Nature. Let inventor and entrepreneur Jay Harman introduce you to stunning solutions to some of the world's thorniest problems. Why does the bumblebee have better aerodynamics than a 747? How can copying a butterfly wing reduce the world's lighting energy bill by 80%? How will fleas' knees and bees' shoulders help scientists formulate a near-perfect rubber? Today an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists, inventors and engineers is turning to nature to innovate and find elegant solutions to human problems. The principle driving this transformation is called biomimicry, and Harman shares a wide range of examples of how we're borrowing from natural models to invent profitable, green solutions to pressing industrial challenges. Aimed at a business audience, aspiring entrepreneurs, environmentalists and general science readers, The Shark's Paintbrush reflects a force of change in the new global economy that does more than simply gratify human industrial ambition; it teaches us how to live in harmony with nature and opens bright opportunities for a better future.

Author : Steven Vogel
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393324631
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Prime Mover written by Steven Vogel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we blink an eye or throw a ball, we are using a muscle. This text discusses how form and performance make these things happen - illustrating nature at work.