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Frances Ashcroft is a professor of Physiology at Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College and the Royal Society. She divides her time between research on insulin (the hormone that controls the blood sugar level), teaching and writing books. She has experienced several of the extremes discussed in Life At The Extremes, but has yet to try spaceflight. This is her first work for the general reader.
September 2009 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Penny Smith... Life At The Extremes: The Science Of Survival by Dr Frances Ashcroft is full of derring-do and really mad scientists trying to prove what they think they know. You know QI (Quite Interesting)? Well this should be VI because I find it Very Interesting. For example, when they tell you to put on your mask first in a plane it’s because the 15 seconds before the oxygen becomes too thin is the only time you are capable of doing anything. That’s worth knowing! GMTV presenter Penny Smith is passionate about books and is now a novelist herself; her latest fiction, After The Break, is published by Harper Perennial.
'A wonderful book' Bill Bryson 'Ashcroft achieves the sort of rich simplicity most science writers can only dream about ... this book carries the eponymous spark of life' Sunday Telegraph From before birth to the last breath we draw, from consciousness to sexual attraction, fighting infection to the beating of our hearts, electricity is essential to everything we think and do. In The Spark of Life award-winning physiologist Frances Ashcroft reveals the secrets of ion channels, which produce the electrical signals in our cells. Can someone really die of fright? How do cocaine, LSD and morphine work? Why do chilli peppers taste hot? Ashcroft explains all this and more with wit and clarity. Anyone who has ever wondered about what makes us human will find this book a revelation. 'A rare gift for making difficult subjects accessible and fascinating' Bill Bryson 'She communicates complex science with engaging passion and eloquence' Helen Dunmore, Observer 'Compelling and very readable, an excellent writer' Literary Review 'Riveting ... she has a stock of good tales' New Scientist 'Lively, conversational prose, refreshingly accessible to any lay reader ... a positively charged little book' Daily Telegraph Frances Ashcroft is Professor of Physiology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College Oxford. She is also Director of OXION, a consortium of scientists studying ion channels, the heroes of this book. Her scientific research focuses on how a rise in your blood sugar level stimulates the release of insulin and what why this process goes wrong in diabetes. She has won many prizes for her research, most recently the L'Oreal/UNESCO 2012 Women in Science award. She is also a recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing for The Spark of Life. Her first book for the general reader was Life at the Extremes: The Science of Survival.
September 2009 Good Housekeeping selection. On My Bookshelf by Penny Smith... Life At The Extremes: The Science Of Survival by Dr Frances Ashcroft is full of derring-do and really mad scientists trying to prove what they think they know. You know QI (Quite Interesting)? Well this should be VI because I find it Very Interesting. For example, when they tell you to put on your mask first in a plane it’s because the 15 seconds before the oxygen becomes too thin is the only time you are capable of doing anything. That’s worth knowing! GMTV presenter Penny Smith is passionate about books and is now a novelist herself; her latest fiction, After The Break, is published by Harper Perennial.
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