Fireflies Honey And Silk

Download or read book Fireflies, Honey, and Silk written by Gilbert Waldbauer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Gilbert Waldbauer takes us on a wild and storied ride through the insect world. Page after page, Fireflies, Honey, and Silk is highly entertaining, authoritative, encyclopedic, mesmerizing."—Erich Hoyt, author of Insect Lives and The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants "In Fireflies, Honey, and Silk, Waldbauer serves up a veritable smorgasbord of insects from around the world whose lives directly intersect our whims and desires. With wide-ranging essays, the author reveals species that not only please and inspire us, but also those we have used to nourish, adorn, and cure our bodies."—Arthur V. Evans, author of National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Insects and Spiders of North America and What's Bugging You?

Download or read book Fireflies, Honey, and Silk written by Dr. Gilbert Waldbauer and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ink our ancestors wrote with, the beeswax in altar candles, the honey on our toast, the silk we wear. This enchanting book is a highly entertaining exploration of the myriad ways insects have enriched our lives–culturally, economically, and aesthetically. Entomologist and writer Gilbert Waldbauer describes in loving, colorful detail how many of the valuable products insects have given us are made, how they were discovered, and how they have been used through time and across cultures. Along the way, he takes us on a captivating ramble through many far-flung corners of history, mythology, poetry, literature, medicine, ecology, forensics, and more. Enlivened with personal anecdotes from Waldbauer's distinguished career as an entomologist, the book also describes surprising everyday encounters we all experience that were made possible by insects. From butterfly gardens and fly-fishing to insects as jewelry and sex pheromones, this is an eye-opening ode to the wonder of insects that illuminates our extraordinary and essential relationship with the natural world.

Download or read book How Not to Be Eaten written by Gilbert Waldbauer and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “At times this informative book turns wonderfully gross and lovely, reminding us that there’s an entire universe of largely unnoticed creatures all around us.”—Audubon All animals must eat. But who eats who, and why, or why not? Because insects outnumber and collectively outweigh all other animals combined, they comprise the largest amount of animal food available for potential consumption. How do they avoid being eaten? From masterful disguises to physical and chemical lures and traps, predatory insects have devised ingenious and bizarre methods of finding food. Equally ingenious are the means of hiding, mimicry, escape, and defense waged by prospective prey in order to stay alive. This absorbing book demonstrates that the relationship between the eaten and the eater is a central—perhaps the central—aspect of what goes on in the community of organisms. By explaining the many ways in which insects avoid becoming a meal for a predator, and the ways in which predators evade their defensive strategies, Gilbert Waldbauer conveys an essential understanding of the unrelenting coevolutionary forces at work in the world around us.

Download or read book "An Insect View of Its Plain" written by Rosemary Scanlon McTier and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the nineteenth century, insects became a very fashionable subject of study, and the writing of the day reflected this popularity. However, despite an increased contemporary interest in ecocriticism and cultural entomology, scholars have largely ignored the presence of insects in nineteenth-century literature. This volume addresses that critical gap by exploring the cultural and literary position of insects in the work of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and John Muir. It examines the beliefs these authors share about the nature of our connection to insects and what insects have to teach about creation and our place in it. An important contribution to both ecocriticism and literary entomology, this work contributes much to the understanding of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Muir as nature writers, natural scientists, entomologists, and botanists, and their intimate and highly spiritual relationships with nature.

Download or read book Silk Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine written by Subhas C. Kundu and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 595 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silk is increasingly being used as a biomaterial for tissue engineering applications, as well as sutures, due to its unique mechanical and chemical properties. Silk Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine discusses the properties of silk that make it useful for medical purposes and its applications in this area. Part one introduces silk biomaterials, discussing their fundamentals and how they are processed, and considering different types of silk biomaterials. Part two focuses on the properties and behavior of silk biomaterials and the implications of this for their applications in biomedicine. These chapters focus on topics including biodegradation, bio-response to silk sericin, and capillary growth behavior in porous silk films. Finally, part three discusses the applications of silk biomaterials for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, and biomedicine, with chapters on the use of silk biomaterials for vertebral, dental, dermal, and cardiac tissue engineering. Silk Biomaterials for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine is an important resource for materials and tissue engineering scientists, R&D departments in industry and academia, and academics with an interest in the fields of biomaterials and tissue engineering. - Discusses the properties and applications of silk for medical purposes - Considers pharmaceutical and cosmeceutical applications

Download or read book Turning Points and Transformations written by Christine DeVine and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Irish Cailleach and other shape-shifters of folk legends to modern movie “transformers”; from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the moment when Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself transformed into an insect in Kafka’s novella; from conversion narratives to slave narratives, turning points and transformations have always been central to literary works and to cultural developments. In fact, with Freytag’s pyramid in mind, one could claim that all literary works focus on the trope of a transformation born of a turning point, because such moments comprise the very essence and vitality of human life and culture. But why are turning points necessarily transformational and in what way? And what brings about those turning points in language, literature, culture and human lives? These are essentially the questions the essays in this volume seek to answer. The contributors examine turning points and transformations – personal, literary and cultural – brought about through the randomness of the universe as well as through human interference, and discuss ways in which humans in general and writers in particular, through their art, experience and cope with the ineluctable results.

Download or read book The Deep Zoo written by Rikki Ducornet and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Included in Library Journal’s "25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015" Within the writer's life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early Egyptian scribe the monarch butterfly that metamorphosed into the Key of Life. Ducornet names these powers The Deep Zoo. Her essays take us from the glorious bestiary of Aloys Zötl to Abu Ghraib, from the tree of life to Sade's Silling Castle, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to virtual reality. Says Ducornet, "To write with the irresistible ink of tigers and the uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time." "Ducornet’s skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold."—Star Tribune