The Vital Science

Get your pulse racing with Australia's most popular scientist, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. Discover why people tell lies, why some planets are hotter than stars and how humans are terraforming the Earth. Is cockroach milk really the next Superfood? Why are birds so smart? Why do trees need each other to grow and how do they communicate? Why did a group of scientists voluntarily starve to death while surrounded by tonnes of food? How long does a decapitated head stay "alive"? What human artefacts can be seen with the naked eye from the International Space Station? Who is Bertha Benz and how did her first car trip revolutionise how we use petrol today? Finally, monitor your breathing and learn why whales are so big, why oral histories are surprisingly accurate and try the five tried-and-tested steps to becoming a wellness guru.

MENSTRUATION ISN'T JUST ABOUT HAVING BABIES Your menstrual cycle is a vital sign, just like your pulse, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure. And it provides you with essential information about your health.The Fifth Vital Sign: Master Your Cycles and Optimize Your Fertility brings together over 1,000 meticulously researched scientific references in a textbook-quality guide to understanding your menstrual cycle. In this book you’ll learn: –What a normal cycle looks like; –The best way to chart your cycle and increase your fertility awareness; –How best to manage critical aspects of your health, including better sleep, exercise and a healthier diet; –Natural methods for managing period pain and PMS; –How to successfully avoid pregnancy without the pill; and –How to plan ahead if you do want to get pregnant. The Fifth Vital Sign aims to better connect women with their menstrual cycles, to break the myth that ovulation is only important when you're ready to have a baby. READ THE FIFTH VITAL SIGN TO BETTER UNDERSTAND YOUR HEALTH AND FERTILITY Whether children are a part of your future plans or not, your health matters. Start learning more now, and take control of your health. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lisa Hendrickson-Jack is a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and Holistic Reproductive Health Practitioner. She teaches women to chart their menstrual cycles for natural birth control, conception, and overall health monitoring. In her work, Lisa draws heavily from the current scientific literature and presents an evidence-based approach to fertility awareness and menstrual cycle optimization.

"The vital signs are, by definition, the measurements of the body's most basic functions. So far, the essential number of signs that must be measured is not clear as some references consider that the body temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate and breathing rate are sufficient but other sources consider that the measurement of other variables, such as the respiratory effort and oxygen saturation, are also crucial to determine the health of the person. This book is not intended to define the critical vital signs but presents the correlation of these measurements with other variables as well as the proposition of new methods to determine these variables. It also proposes some innovative applications that relay on these signs in a way to monitor and help the human being. Thus, this book presents six chapters that deal first with the correlation between the physical training and the blood pressure level among adults as well as the stress effects for nurses on their vital signs. Added to that, the influence of the vital signs to predict and detect epileptical seizure and the analysis of neural mechanisms of major depressive disorders will be also presented. As for the other chapters, they go into some engineering applications related to vital signs as the development of a smart syringe pump that monitors the patient's crucial parameters and the introduction of a novel system that monitors the driver's health and notifies health care providers in case the driver has any health failure in order to prevent cars accidents"--

Vital signs, such as heart rate and respiration rate, are useful to health monitoring because they can provide important physiological insights for medical diagnosis and well-being management. Most traditional methods for measuring vital signs require a person to wear biomedical devices, such as a capnometer, a pulse oximeter, or an electrocardiogram sensor. These contact-based technologies are inconvenient, cumbersome, and uncomfortable to use. There is a compelling need for technologies that enable contact-free, easily deployable, and long-term monitoring of vital signs for healthcare. Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring presents a systematic and in-depth review on the principles, methodologies, and opportunities of using different wavelengths of an electromagnetic spectrum to measure vital signs from the human face and body contactlessly. The volume brings together pioneering researchers active in the field to report the latest progress made, in an intensive and structured way. It also presents various healthcare applications using camera and radio frequency-based monitoring, from clinical care to home care, to sport training and automotive, such as patient/neonatal monitoring in intensive care units, general wards, emergency department triage, MR/CT cardiac and respiratory gating, sleep centers, baby/elderly care, fitness cardio training, driver monitoring in automotive settings, and more. This book will be an important educational source for biomedical researchers, AI healthcare researchers, computer vision researchers, wireless-sensing researchers, doctors/clinicians, physicians/psychologists, and medical equipment manufacturers. Includes various contactless vital signs monitoring techniques, such as optical-based, radar-based, WiFi-based, RFID-based, and acoustic-based methods. Presents a thorough introduction to the measurement principles, methodologies, healthcare applications, hardware set-ups, and systems for contactless measurement of vital signs using camera or RF sensors. Presents the opportunities for the fusion of camera and RF sensors for contactless vital signs monitoring and healthcare.

Pediatrician Melissa Blumenthal will try any scientific method available to conceive--until the horrible secrets of an urban clinic erupt in a nightmare of staggering proportions...

In this title, first published in 1984, Peter Morton argues that in late Victorian Britain a group of novelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that were susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period between 1860 and 1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionary theory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts. Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to their own artistic or polemic ends. A fascinating and interdisciplinary title, this reissue will interest students of late Victorian literature, as well as historians of biological theory between The Origin of Species and Mendel.

Accurate clinical observations are the key to good patient care and fundamental to nursing practice. Vital Signs for Nurses will support anyone in care delivery to enhance their skills, reflect upon their own practice and assist in their continuing professional development. This practical introductory text explores how to make assessments of heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, pain and nutrition. It also looks at issues of infection control, record-keeping and legal and ethical considerations. With case studies and examples throughout, this text will be invaluable to all healthcare assistants, student nurses, Trainee Assistant Practitioners and students on foundation degrees.

Thousands of measures are in use today to assess health and health care in the United States. Although many of these measures provide useful information, their usefulness in either gauging or guiding performance improvement in health and health care is seriously limited by their sheer number, as well as their lack of consistency, compatibility, reliability, focus, and organization. To achieve better health at lower cost, all stakeholders - including health professionals, payers, policy makers, and members of the public - must be alert to what matters most. What are the core measures that will yield the clearest understanding and focus on better health and well-being for Americans? Vital Signs explores the most important issues - healthier people, better quality care, affordable care, and engaged individuals and communities - and specifies a streamlined set of 15 core measures. These measures, if standardized and applied at national, state, local, and institutional levels across the country, will transform the effectiveness, efficiency, and burden of health measurement and help accelerate focus and progress on our highest health priorities. Vital Signs also describes the leadership and activities necessary to refine, apply, maintain, and revise the measures over time, as well as how they can improve the focus and utility of measures outside the core set. If health care is to become more effective and more efficient, sharper attention is required on the elements most important to health and health care. Vital Signs lays the groundwork for the adoption of core measures that, if systematically applied, will yield better health at a lower cost for all Americans.