Academic literature on the topic 'Mystère animal'

This chapter considers some of the possible influences on Misty, drawing links with other comics as well as a wider tradition of horror across multiple media in 1970s Britain. It explores the surrounding atmosphere of cultural horror, looking closely at the political context of 1970s Britain, which manifests in the presence of social commentary in Misty. It explores the large number of tales that revolve around animal rights, environmental issues, or social commentary (delinquency, poverty, and so forth). It then considers the surrounding atmosphere of British cultural and literary horror, with a particular focus on the horror and mystery stories being offered to children and shown on television and in schools. It argues that Misty’s stories are strongly influenced by the atmosphere of cultural horror emerging in Britain in the 1970s and particularly by ideas of transgression and punishment expressed in horror cinema and public information films.

An enduring problem of social life is what to do about the future. Can we predict it? Can we control it? How much sacrifice are we willing to make in the present for the promise of a better future? The questions are harrowing, and agreement comes hard. The year 1921 was a time of famine in some parts of the newly formed Soviet Union. An American journalist, visiting a refugee camp on the Volga, reported that almost half of the people had died of starvation. Noticing some sacks of grain stacked on an adjacent field, he asked the patriarch of the refugee community why the people did not simply overpower the lone soldier guarding the grain and help themselves. The patriarch impatiently explained that the seed was being saved for next season's planting. "We do not steal from the future," he said. It would be too much to claim that only the human animal is capable of imagining what is yet to come, but it is difficult to believe that any other animal can have so keen an appreciation of the demands of the future. Alfred Korbzybski (1879- 1950) called man "the time-binding animal." Binding the future to the present makes sense only if understandable mechanisms connect the two. This understanding was notably missing in the writings of the anarchist-journalist William Godwin. Unlike Malthus, he could make no sense of the fluctuations of human numbers. "Population," he said, "if we consider it historically, appears to be a fitful principle, operating intermittedly and by starts. This is the great mystery of the subject.. .. One of the first ideas that will occur to a reflecting mind is, that the cause of these irregularities cannot be of itself of regular and uniform operation. It cannot be [as Malthus says] 'the numbers of mankind at all times pressing hard against the limits of the means of subsistence.'" Rather than trying to see how appearances might be reconciled with natural laws, Godwin simply said there were no natural laws. His proposal to replace law with "fhfulness" led one of his critics to comment: "Perhaps Godwin was simply carrying his dislike of law one step farther. Having applied it to politics (1793) and to style (1797), he now applied it to nature (1820). He deliberately placed a whole army of facts out of the range of science."

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide and are projected to remain in the lead through 2025. Heart-related diseases include angina, arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, hypertension, atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction (heart attack), and sudden cardiac death. More than 300,000 Americans suffer sudden heart attacks each year. In addition, one of the more important recently identified drug-induced cardiac events, which has occasionally resulted in drugs being withdrawn, is drug-induced torsade des pointes. This is a rare, fatal arrhythmia that has been associated with some drugs that prolong the QT interval of the electrocardiogram (ECG). Hypertension is America’s number one chronic disease. Fifty million Americans, one in six, suffer from high blood pressure. Similarly, high blood pressure affects about one-sixth of the world’s population (1 billion people) worldwide—mostly in the developed world. If uncontrolled, it can lead to heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and other potentially fatal events. Great strides have been made during the past 50 years in conquering cardiovascular diseases. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) was developed by a group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in 1961. The 1960s also saw the emergence of beta-blockers. Calcium channel blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, and statins appeared in the 1980s and the 1990s. Angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) also emerged in the 1990s. The heart, about the size of a person’s fist, beats about 2.8 billion times in a lifetime, pumping blood and oxygen through the body. Although its function was shrouded in mystery for centuries, mankind has come a long way in understanding how the heart works anatomically and physiologically, although we haven’t made much progress in understanding its “emotional” nature. Greek philosopher and anatomist Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was the founder of biology. He was very interested in human and animal anatomy, especially the cardiovascular systems in higher animals. In his books he described, for the first time, the human blood system with an emphasis on the deeper-lying vessels. He incorrectly believed that the heart was the organ in which emotions were generated, whereas the function of the brain was to cool the blood. More than 500 years later, the German-born Roman physician Galen (130–200 A.D.) made two revolutionary discoveries about the cardiovascular system.

Every piece of science writing has a trajectory, a life history. You decide you want to write something, you find a subject to write about, you find someone to publish it, you research it, you write it, and then—if all goes well—it eventually turns up in print. These milestones mark the life history of every piece of science writing, whether it's a magazine feature, a newswire story, a post on a Web log, or a book. But these genres are a bit like animals. Every species has its own life history. All animals are born, grow, and reach maturity, but each species takes its own route from one milestone to the next. You can't equate the life of a mayfly with the life of a tortoise. Here, then, is the life history of a science book. I hope that in describing it, I convince you that the science book is not simply a very long article, but an altogether separate beast. Book ideas come about in many different ways. The idea for my first book, At the Water's Edge, occurred to me one day in 1996 as I was sitting at my desk at Discover. I had just written an article about how our fish-like ancestors crawled on land 360 million years ago. I was flipping through the published article, sometimes glancing up at my stack of notes and papers. The stack was a foot thick. (I'm very slow about clearing off my desk.) I probably managed to get half an inch of that information into the story. All the rest of those wonderful stories within the story—about the evolutionary principles these animals illustrate, about the 150 years of scientific debate over this central mystery of our heritage—would never see the light of day. I thought about the other articles I had written on other great evolutionary transformations, and all the details I had left out of them because of space constraints. I decided to write a book. I suspect this is a common route to many first science books. Others are born when authors are approached to write a companion book to a television series, or to serve as a co-author with a scientist.

On the morning of Monday, October 12, 1931, early risers in northern Portland noticed a strange creature with smooth black skin in Columbia Slough, right next to the Jantzen Beach Amusement Park. Locals debated its identity. Some argued it was a sturgeon, others a sei whale all the way from Japan. Finally, an old salt tagged it as a small “blackfish.” News of the novelty spread like wildfire, drawing thousands of spectators and causing gridlock on the interstate bridge between Portland and Vancouver, Washington. A local newspaper warned that killer whales were one of the ocean’s “most vicious” creatures, but this one promptly stole Portland’s heart. “From the looks of things,” declared Deputy Sheriff Martin T. Pratt, “nearly everyone in the city is determined to see the visitor,” and when some locals began shooting at the animal, Pratt and his men arrested them. The number of sightseers grew each day, and that weekend, tens of thousands crowded into Jantzen Beach to catch a glimpse of the whale, while enterprising fishermen charged twenty-five cents for whale-watching rides. By that time, someone had dubbed the orca Ethelbert, and the name stuck. Why the little whale had arrived there, a hundred miles up the Columbia, remains a mystery. It had probably become separated from its mother and lost its bearings, wandering up the great river that divides western Oregon from Washington State. But Columbia Slough was no place for an orca. In addition to lacking salt water, it was the main outlet for Portland’s sewage. In summer, the waterway grew so foul that workers refused to handle timber passing through it. As the days passed, observers grew worried. The whale seemed sluggish, and its skin began to show unsightly blotches. The owner of Jantzen Beach proposed capturing the animal with a net and placing it in a saltwater tank. It would have been an extraordinary attraction for his amusement park—already known as the Coney Island of the West. But members of the Oregon Humane Society denounced the scheme as rank cruelty. Instead, they proposed blowing the young orca up with dynamite.