Inanimate Things Research Articles

A book review on Vrkshaayurveda

One-Health, although a relatively recent term, gained global acceptance years ago. In India, as part of ecosystem preservation, they integrated various domains—animals, plants, and more—under the umbrella of One-Health. These living beings were revered and protected with utmost intensity. While safeguarding inanimate things is relatively straightforward, protecting living beings poses challenges due to diseases, often encountered on a daily basis. Consequently, developing a robust healthcare system for these domains becomes essential. This led to the evolution of Mrugayurveda and Vrkshayurveda. The Vedas were the earliest texts to mention treatments for animals and trees. On vrkshayurveda, Later works by authors like Salihotra and Surapala delve into comprehensive scripts on Vrkshayurveda. Among these, the renowned Upavana Vinoda, a chapter from Sarngadhara Padhadi by Sarngadharacharya (16 CE), focuses entirely on plant life. It covers everything from land examination for tree planting (bhoomi niroopana) to botanical marvels (vrkshayurveda parishishtam), including techniques to enhance plant product yields. Building upon this foundation, Vidvan K. Vasu Panikker published a Malayalam commentary on Vrkshayurveda in 1945–1946. In 2022, Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala’s publication division released the first edition of the same book as part of the P.K. Warrier Commemoration series, complete with English and Malayalam commentary, aiming to enhance global acceptance. The current edition spans 136 pages and is priced at Rs. 250

Ограничение прав собственников домашних животных, содержащихся в жилых помещениях, как способ защиты публичных интересов

The article determines that the circle of responsibilities of the owner of the animal is much larger than the burden that the owner of an inanimate thing bears. It is considered which animals can own citizens, and in what sense the term “pet” is understood in the legislation. The evolution of legislation ensures the duties of pets is analyzed. It is stated that at first the failure of the responsibilities of animal owners almost did not entail the application of sanctions to them, but the responsibility for this kind of violation is gradually introduced. It is proposed at the federal level to consolidate the need for state registration of pets in order to emphasize public interest in fulfilling the duties of their owners. It is concluded that educational work is necessary with the owners of pets, and not just the tightening of sanctions for violation of the legislation on responsible treatment of animals.

Objects as Agents (Some Comments on O.L. Gubarev’s Response)

This article builds on the earlier discussion about the actor traits associated with North Germanic weapons. The historical theories and evidence used by O.L. Gubarev to support his approach are analyzed. It is argued that he seems to echo the historiographical tradition relying on oversimplified a priori assertions, rather than a comprehensive analysis of the concept of “living” things in certain cultures. In his polemical response, he misinterpreted some historical sources and the views of other researchers, while also presenting his own controversial ideas as undeniable facts. In conclusion, it is suggested that the beliefs in the ability of inanimate things to have person-like qualities and play an actual social role, the distinction between living and non-living nature, as well as the practice of attributing souls to non-living entities, should be regarded as separate problems that are not clearly related in all cultures.

A review of the most influential research papers on COVID-19: An excerpt with comments and insights

For the past two years, COVID-19 has been a global nightmare for human civilization. It genuinely poses a serious threat to public health because of its rapid proliferation. The deadly SARS-COV-2 virus is being researched on a global scale to determine its biology, origin, and potential treatment. Numerous research publications covering various aspects of the COVID-19 issue have already been published as a result of the burgeoning interest in this hot topic. The reputable and well-known search engine SCOPUS is used to compile crucial information. In order to emphasize a thorough and extensive assessment of research output using COVID-19 publications, we looked at 100 research and review papers that received the majority of citations. It discovers a list of keywords that appear more than 14 times. It can be seen that the terms "Human/Humans," "Coronavirus Disease 2019," "Coronavirus Infection/Coronavirus Infections," "Pneumonia viral," and "Virus pneumonia" held the top five positions. The New England Journal of Medicine is in the first place, having published 15 research papers delineating different features of SARS-CoV-2. In addition to this, a significant number of publications connected to the Covid-19 issue were also published in "The Lancet," "Nature," "JAMA Journal of the American Medical Association," and "Cell." Regarding papers published on COVID-19, China is also performing well. The USA and the UK placed second and third, respectively, in terms of the quantity of Covid-related articles published. This work outlines a detailed global research scenario of COVID-19 describing its origin, nature, identification, way of entry in a human cell, symptoms of the infected patients, way of prevention, fatal effects on comorbid and aged patients with the help of correlation between comorbidity and mortality, the effect of on newborn baby and children, the emergence of telemedicine, persistence of the virus on inanimate things, the efficacy of drugs like remdesivir, lopinavir, ritonavir and so on, the progress of vaccine development, usefulness gloves, masks, sanitizer, the advantage of maintaining physical and social distance, infrastructure development. Finally, we conclude by summarizing the main points of the 100 research papers, which will undoubtedly aid in identifying the research gap and future research directions.

Is "earth" an animate thing? Cross-language and inter-age analyses of animacy word ratings in European Portuguese and British English young and older adults.

Animacy plays an important role in cognition (e.g., memory and language). Across languages, a processing advantage for animate words (representing living beings), comparatively to inanimate words (i.e., non-living things), has been found mostly in young adults. Evidence in older adults, though, is still unclear, possibly due to the use of stimuli not properly characterised for this age group. Indeed, whereas several animacy word-rating studies already exist for young adults, these are non-existent for older adults. This work provides animacy ratings for 500 British English and 224 European Portuguese words, rated by young and older adults from the corresponding countries. The comparisons across languages and ages revealed a high interrater agreement. Nonetheless, the Portuguese samples provided higher mean ratings of animacy than the British samples. Also, the older adults assigned, on average, higher animacy ratings than the young adults. The Age X Language interaction was non-significant. These results suggest an inter-age and inter-language consistency in whether a word represents an animate or an inanimate thing, although with some differences, emphasising the need for age- and language-specific word rating data. The animacy ratings are available via OSF: https://osf.io/6xjyv/.

Spirits and the Prolongation of Life in Francis Bacon: Commonality and Difference between the Inanimate and the Animate

Abstract This study reconsiders Francis Bacon’s ideas on spirits, death, and the prolongation of life through a chronological examination of his works. His conception of death has often been considered unique because it presupposed a common material basis for the dissolution of inanimate things and the death of human beings. However, his focus on this commonality seems to have faded gradually – though not completely – as his works progressed, from De viis mortis to his later works, including Historia vitae et mortis. He became increasingly conscious of the difference between the inanimate and the animate. While De viis mortis insisted on the role of inanimate spirits in aging and death, Historia vitae et mortis tended to consider vital spirits as the chief cause of human death. My suggestion in this article is that as Bacon’s ideas developed, they came closer to traditional conceptions of aging and death.

Development and validation of the Attribution of Mental States Questionnaire (AMS-Q): A reference tool for assessing anthropomorphism.

Attributing mental states to others, such as feelings, beliefs, goals, desires, and attitudes, is an important interpersonal ability, necessary for adaptive relationships, which underlies the ability to mentalize. To evaluate the attribution of mental and sensory states, a new 23-item measure, the Attribution of Mental States Questionnaire (AMS-Q), has been developed. The present study aimed to investigate the dimensionality of the AMS-Q and its psychometric proprieties in two studies. Study 1 focused on the development of the questionnaire and its factorial structure in a sample of Italian adults (N = 378). Study 2 aimed to confirm the findings in a new sample (N = 271). Besides the AMS-Q, Study 2 included assessments of Theory of Mind (ToM), mentalization, and alexithymia. A Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and a Parallel Analysis (PA) of the data from Study 1 yielded three factors assessing mental states with positive or neutral valence (AMS-NP), mental states with negative valence (AMS-N), and sensory states (AMS-S). These showed satisfactory reliability indexes. AMS-Q's whole-scale internal consistency was excellent. Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) further confirmed the three-factor structure. The AMS-Q subscales also showed a consistent pattern of correlation with associated constructs in the theoretically predicted ways, relating positively to ToM and mentalization and negatively to alexithymia. Thus, the questionnaire is considered suitable to be easily administered and sensitive for assessing the attribution of mental and sensory states to humans. The AMS-Q can also be administered with stimuli of nonhuman agents (e.g., animals, inanimate things, and even God); this allows the level of mental anthropomorphization of other agents to be assessed using the human as a term of comparison, providing important hints in the perception of nonhuman entities as more or less mentalistic compared to human beings, and identifying what factors are required for the attribution of human mental traits to nonhuman agents, further helping to delineate the perception of others' minds.

Materials are social constructs, but they also have agency

A puzzling matter about materials, particularly structural materials, is that they exhibit both a rather extraordinary extension in time, bridging over many historical and prehistorical ages, and a dynamic dimension, changing as they are in time to the point that materials may not be easily recognized as similar today as thousands of years ago. To understand this dichotomy, it is necessary to reach beyond materials science and STEM disciplines and to collect concepts and methods from SSH. Materials and energy are at the core of the physical world in which society functions: they provide the structure of the artifacts that we need, along with the ability to make and use them. They do not exist in an absolute, Aristotelian world, but are invented along historical time, by people to meet their needs, hic et nunc. Materials are social constructs, as is the “theory” (technology, science in modern language) that gives us the keys for making them. As society changes historically, people’s needs evolve and “new” materials are created on the shoulders of older ones, in a kind of evolutionary process. This is the view of social constructivism. This evolutionary metaphor is a first explanation of the continuity between, say, iron from a Roman bloomery and steel, as a contemporary commercial product. This has been formulated as the Social Cycle of Materials (SCM) by sociologists of Knowledge and Innovation, as a process of continuous innovation in which materials are socially constructed over and over again, a process often called “progress”. The continuity from old to new materials needs to be explained by some other model, however, to be fully understood: indeed, why is iron enduring so much, when it might have been displaced by another material at each evolutionary step and it didn’t. The explanation we propose is to accept that “materials have agency”, i.e. that they themselves are the actors of their own perenniality. This refers to another model, the Actor Network Theory (ANT) of Latour et al., which analyzes how change is pulled by a combined network of actors, that include people, organizations, non-human living entities and inanimate things as well.

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Falling Stories: Cinematic Naturalism and Disability in Frank Norris’ and Stephen Crane's City Sketches

Detection of Cadmium Genotoxicity on Fatty Acids Desaturase-2 Genes in Safflower (Carthamus tinctorius)

Environmental pollution negatively affects the life activities of the living things of the environment and causes structural damages on the all living and inanimate things. The extent of the damage caused by human-made pollution to nature and the environment is increasing day by day. Heavy metal pollution is one of the most important causes of environmental pollution. Cadmium, which is one of the most important pollutants, is a highly toxic metal and is not used by living things, even in trace amounts. Cadmium is also a very toxic heavy metal for plants. As with other heavy metals, it triggers oxidative stress by increasing the production of reactive oxygen species in plant cells, causing DNA damage and abnormalities in DNA and RNA production. Safflower is a very important oil plant with high economic value and intensive use as a raw material in many sectors. In this study, in experimental groups prepared at different cadmium concentrations, the negative/genotoxic effects of cadmium on the mRNA expression levels of the FAD2 (FAD2-6, FAD2-7, FAD2-11) genes, which is responsible for the conversion of oleic acid to linoleic acid in different safflower varieties (Balci, Bdyas-04, Linas and Asol) has been determined by quantitative Real-Time PCR method. As a result, it has been detected that the decrease firstly in the expression of FAD2 genes at increasing cadmium concentrations in all cultivars. And also, re-increase at 160 and 320 mg L-1 which can be considered as critical points, have been accepted as an indication that the defense mechanism against stress is activated and FAD2 genes play a role in the defense against stress. In conclusion, the obtained data showed that FAD2 genes in safflower cultivars not only in the conversion of fatty acids but also play a critical role in defense against cadmium heavy metal stress.

How the Arrangement of Attitude Resources Can Strengthen the Objectivity of News Reports

As Xiongan New Area in China is designed to attract international innovation elements, its publicity to the international community has become a prerequisite for the realization of its designed goal. Innovative talents who have a higher critical thinking ability constitute one essential part of the target readers of English news reports about Xiongan. In order to convince them of the brilliant future of the city, reporters need to arrange attitude resources in an objective way when expressing reporters’ appraisal about this city. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the current study finds that reporters attempt to use attitude resources to modify inanimate things in present and past tenses, as well as in passive voice. In addition, there is no attitude resources in expressing the essential concept guiding the construction of the city. All of these are considered to contribute to the enhancement of the objectivity of news reports and be of great help to present a more convincing image of Xiongan.

Disentangling five dimensions of animacy in human brain and behaviour

Distinguishing animate from inanimate things is of great behavioural importance. Despite distinct brain and behavioural responses to animate and inanimate things, it remains unclear which object properties drive these responses. Here, we investigate the importance of five object dimensions related to animacy (“being alive”, “looking like an animal”, “having agency”, “having mobility”, and “being unpredictable”) in brain (fMRI, EEG) and behaviour (property and similarity judgements) of 19 participants. We used a stimulus set of 128 images, optimized by a genetic algorithm to disentangle these five dimensions. The five dimensions explained much variance in the similarity judgments. Each dimension explained significant variance in the brain representations (except, surprisingly, “being alive”), however, to a lesser extent than in behaviour. Different brain regions sensitive to animacy may represent distinct dimensions, either as accessible perceptual stepping stones toward detecting whether something is alive or because they are of behavioural importance in their own right.

사물에 홀린 이들의 이야기—『시스터 캐리』

This study aims to analyze Sister Carrie, one of the representative works of naturalism, focusing on things and their influences on characters. First, as a follow-up to the previous studies, this paper argues that the American theme of the conflicts between society and individuals is implied in Sister Carrie as the gendered conflicts. Second, in Sister Carrie, Carrie, who becomes “value,” “idol,” and “capital,” represents the thing, a commodity, and the urban space that early modern Americans project both charm and aversion. Sister Carrie demonstrates the human investment in things and the mutual constitution of the human subject and inanimate object. Things in Sister Carrie gain “a voice” of their own, act freely, and become a part of the human subject. Not only that, things allure the possessor to be possessed rather than dissolve into the parts of the possessor. Carrie, the object that Hurstwood badly wanted to possess has in fact possessed him. When surrounded by the voice of inanimate things which delude the unlimited possibility, Hurstwood loses control over objects and the position of the subject. In this regard, Sister Carrie could be read as the tale of being possessed by the possessions as well as a novel of things.

Care and the Cowboy Boot: Interspecies Responsibility and the Wobbly Boundaries of Lab Animal Personhood

Of what relevance is a cowboy boot to understandings of the moral underpinnings of lab animal care, value, and personhood? I trace the movement of chimpanzees from laboratories to sanctuaries, wherein associated forms of care in the latter expose efforts to foster emergent chimpanzee personhood. Staff of one sanctuary view chimps’ former lives as constrained by standardized, impersonal forms of care: as lab subjects, they were confined to small quarters and valued primarily as sources of scientific data. In contrast, sanctuary care entails efforts to individualize animals through quirky, creative strategies that jostle interspecies boundaries. In one instance, a pair of cowboy boots embodies associated challenges and triumphs. I argue that attentiveness to the values assigned to nonhuman ways of being, interspecies encounters, and inanimate things together uncover otherwise hidden efforts to redirect entrenched notions of professional responsibility, compassion, and the morality of care. I ask, if anthropological definitions of personhood are anchored in forms of human sociality, under what conditions can practices, objects, and other creatures rattle, alter, or redirect premises of personhood to incorporate interspecies understandings? How might the wobbly boundaries of sanctuary life loop back to transform, rather than denigrate, the works and lives of laboratory staff?

Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, when seen from the perspective of “thing theory” and other new materialist discourses, challenges the dominant anthropocentric mode of relationship between humans and things. In the novel, ostensibly inanimate things exert their agencies over the survival, less physical than spiritual, of socially oppressed African Americans. Morrison complicates “thing theory” and extremist new materialist thinking by initiating the development of an eclectic new materialism, which foregrounds the vibrancy of quotidian objects while also integrating it into human agency through the co-habitation of space, thus creating a harmonious and balanced network of hybrid agencies that can be both troubling and stabilizing.

A Review on the IOT System

The advancement of computer science and communication technologies is being enabled by something called the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is being used in many fields, so maintaining its Security is becoming an increasingly important concern. The IoT industry as a whole is going to be significantly impacted as a result of this. This study examines the IoT security problem at the IoT system's perception, network, and application levels suggests a secure way to build IoT and explains how to make it safe based on the problems that already exist in the IoT framework. The study begins with the concept of IoT, its characteristics, and how it functions as a system. Finally, the theoretical foundations necessary to construct a trustworthy IoT security system will be presented. The IoT will enable inanimate things to participate in human activities. IoT security is notoriously difficult to handle because items are often integrated into the control procedures of more complicated systems. In practice, the IoT is a complicated paradigm in which people interact with a technological ecosystem based on intelligent devices via various complicated procedures. Interactions between a person, an intelligent object, a technical environment, and a process show IoT security's cognitive and systemic components.

Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils

AbstractStudies of material objects in the field of memory studies have followed diverse epistemological and disciplinary trajectories, but their shared characteristic has been the questioning of philosophical assumptions concerning human relations with inanimate things and lower-level organic objects, such as plants, within the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Rather than accept at face value their categorizations as passive or deficient in comparison to the human subject, critical scholarship has reformulated the place and role of nonhuman entities in culture. This essay examines the nexus of materiality and memory in the work of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with the focus on the questions of mnemonic affordance of things and plants. The essay proposes that Didi-Huberman’s project can be approached from the perspective of “undoing” the key binaries of Western historiography of art and material culture: surface/depth, exteriority/interiority, visibility/invisibility, and malleability/rigidity. Focusing on imaginal representations of memory objects in Didi-Huberman’s two essays Bark and Being a Skull, the essay situates these texts within the context of his philosophical reading of Aby Warburg’s iconology, and argues that Didi-Huberman’s undoing of the binaries that have traditionally structured thinking about materiality and memory could be productively approached as a philosophical project of transvaluating surface.

Pagan Gods as Figures of Speech: Dante’s Use of Servius in the Vita Nova

ABSTRACT The article sets out to show the ideological significance of the quotations from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Homer, and Ovid found in Vita Nova 16 [XXV], the celebrated passage where Dante cites these poets as examples of personification in classical literature. In the quotations from Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeolus and Juno speak to each other, and Apollo speaks to the Trojans. In his framing of the quotations, Dante appears implicitly to regard pagan deities like Aeolus, Juno, and Apollo as inanimate things, raising the question as to why the author of the Vita Nova understood pagan gods in terms of poetic tropes. Focusing on the Vergilian quotations, this essay argues that Servius’s commentary to the Aeneid represents one of the major sources that might have led Dante to construe pagan deities as rhetorical personifications.

Making the invisibles visible: Including animals in sustainability (and) accounting

In this essay we draw attention to a crisis that touches upon a great number of individuals: the plight of non-human animals. Billions of farmed animals are slaughtered each year to produce for instance food and clothes, while wild animals experience various degrees of human-induced harms. Yet, non-human animals are largely invisible in discussions of sustainability and associated accounting efforts. This is due to a problematic ontology that leaves domesticated animals hovering between society and nature while grouping wild animals with their habitats and inanimate things. Our purpose is to consider how to make animals visible in sustainability (and) accounting. To that end, we first illustrate how sociology and philosophy, among other disciplines, have begun to shift towards the view that non-human animals are worthy of our moral, political and legal consideration. We then develop a view of sustainability that explicitly includes animals and introduce an accounting framework with examples of indicators to track progress from no rights to fundamental rights for non-human animals.

To What Inanimate Matter Are We Most Closely Related and Does the Origin of Life Harbor Meaning?

The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we hold to be meaning in addition, requiring us to do both in a properly researched context. We unconditionally surrender to that challenge. Instead, we offer a vernacular, armchair approach to life’s origin and meaning, with some layman’s thoughts on the meaning of origins as viewed from the biologist’s standpoint. One can observe that biologists generally approach the concept of biological meaning in the context of evolution. This is the basis for the broad resonance behind Dobzhansky’s appraisal that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Biologists try to understand living things in the historical context of how they arose, without giving much thought to the definition of what life or living things are, which for a biologist is usually not an interesting question in the practical context of daily dealings with organisms. Do humans generally understand life’s meaning in the context of history? If we consider the problem of life’s origin, the question of what constitutes a living thing becomes somewhat more acute for the biologist, though not more answerable, because it is inescapable that there was a time when there were no organisms on Earth, followed by a time when there were, the latter time having persisted in continuity to the present. This raises the question of where, in that transition, chemicals on Earth became alive, requiring, in turn, a set of premises for how life arose in order to conceptualize the problem in relation to organisms we know today, including ourselves, which brings us to the point of this paper: In the same way that cultural narratives for origins always start with a setting, scientific narratives for origins also always start with a setting, a place on Earth or elsewhere where we can imagine what happened for the sake of structuring both the problem and the narrative for its solution. This raises the question of whether scientific origins settings convey meaning to humans in that they suggest to us from what kind of place and what kinds of chemicals we are descended, that is, to which inanimate things we are most closely related.