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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Human biology & related topics
Bilateral Communication Between the Endocrine and Immune Systems,
"Volume 7" in the Springer-Verlag "Endocrinology and " "Metabolism"
Series, offers the most current information and recent advances in
the area of communication and regulation between the Immune and
Endocrine Systems. Immune-Endocrine Interactions are reported to
play pivotal roles in both activation and down-regulation of immune
responses and this volume provides the most up-to-date research and
findings on the immune-endocrine relationship. The contributing
authors are internationally recognized experts in this area and
have written chapters on such diverse topics as Interactions
between the Pituitary and Immune Systems, Effects of Estrogens and
Androgens on Immune Response, The Role of Sex Steroids in Immune
System Regulation, and Neuroendocrine and Thymus Interactions
During Development and Aging. This volume is a must for all
endocrinologists and endocrinology residents.
In this volume a distinguished group of internationally renowned
clinicians and basic researchers discuss the present state of
knowledge of the etiologyand pathogenesis of Dupuytren's
contracture, a disease responsible for a considerable portion of
disabilities within the working population allover the world.
Although the riddle of how the contracture of the palmar fascia
develops is still unsolved, the data on the pathobiochemistry and
clinic of Dupuytren's Disease achieved in recent years has led to a
better understanding of the biochemical and morphological processes
underlying the deformation and malfunction of the afflicted
tissues. Research in Dupuytren's Disease now enters the era of
molecular medicine, which opens up new experimental means of
studying the pathological changes which occur during the formation
of the contracture on a molecular level. In particular, data are
presented as to the role of specific biological macromolecules
influencing the phenotype expression of the palmar fascia cells
which are involved in autoimmune reactions and present both at the
cell surface as well as in the extracellular matrix to regulate
cell-to-cell and cell-to-matrix interactions. In vitro cell culture
models to investigate fibro-cytic modulations are available and
havebeen applied to study the effects of specific biological
molecules on isolated cells from healthy palmar fascia and
Dupuytren's contracture. Complementary evaluations of
morphological, epidemiological, and clinical data contribute
essentially to the present understanding of the etiology and
pathogenesis of Dupuytren's Disease. This comprehensive and
informative summary of the state of the art is completed by
numerous references affixed to the individual contributions.
"Fractals in Biology and Medicine" explores the potential of
fractal geometry for describing and understanding biological
organisms, their development and growth as well as their structural
design and functional properties. It extends these notions to
assess changes associated with disease in the hope to contribute to
the understanding of pathogenetic processes in medicine. The book
is the first comprehensive presentation of the importance of the
new concept of fractal geometry for biological and medical
sciences. It collates in a logical sequence extended papers based
on invited lectures and free communications presented at a
symposium in Ascona, Switzerland, attended by leading scientists in
this field, among them the originator of fractal geometry, Benoit
Mandelbrot. "Fractals in Biology and Medicine" begins by asking how
the theoretical construct of fractal geometry can be applied to
biomedical sciences and then addresses the role of fractals in the
design and morphogenesis of biological organisms as well as in
molecular and cell biology. The consideration of fractal structure
in understanding metabolic functions and pathological changes is a
particularly promising avenue for future research.
This volume is based on the Field Museum of Natural History Spring
System atics Symposium held in Chicago on May 11, 1991. The
financial support of Ray and Jean Auel and of the Field Museum is
gratefully acknowledged. When we teach or write, we present only
those elements that support our arguments. We avoid all weak points
of our debate and all the uncer tainties of our models. Thus, we
offer hypotheses as facts. Multiauthored books like ours, which
simultaneously advocate and question diverse views, avoid the
pitfalls and lessen the impact of indoctrination. In this volume we
analyze the anthropological and biological disagreements and the
positions taken on the origins of modern humans, point out
difficultieswith the inter pretations, and suggest that the concept
of the human origin can be explained only when we first attempt to
define Homo sapiens sapiens. One of the major controversies in
physical anthropology concerns the geographic origin of
anatomically modern humans. It is undisputed, due to the extensive
research of the Leakeys and their colleagues, that the family
Hominidae originated in Africa, but the geographic origin of Homo
sapiens sapiens is less concretely accepted. Two schools of thought
existon this topic."
The idea of editing this book was born in the winter of 1988/1989.
Christian Endler was organizing the workshop 'Wasser und
Information' (water and information) in Austria [1], and Jurgen
Schulte was working on a publication of his results on atomic
cluster stabilities and long-range electromagnetic interaction in
atomic clusters. It was Franz Moser from the Technical University
of Graz who brought these two together. After a talk that Moser had
given in Bremen, Schulte explained to hirn his ideas about clusters
and long range interaction, and his concern about reliable theories
and experiments in research on ultra high dilutions (UHD) and
homoeopathy. He was suggested to be a speaker at the Austrian
workshop. Reviewing the contributions of this workshop and the
current literature on UHD and homoeopathy, especially the PhD
thesis by Giesela King [2] and the excellent survey by Marco
Righetti [3], we decided to work on a book in order to critically
encou rage more scientists to work and publish in this field with a
high scientific standard. What we had in mind was a useful
contribution to the goal to lift research on UHD and homoeo pathy
to an internationally acceptable scientific standard, to encourage
international scien tists to work in this area and to establish UHD
and homoeopathy in academic science. Delayed by our individual
academic careers in our specific fields, and delayed by lack of
funds it took us about four years to finish this book.
All over Europe, asylum-seekers, immigrants and minorities are
increasingly finding themselves under violent attack. Who are the
perpetrators? What are their motives? To what extent are right-wing
or neo-Nazi organizations involved? How do the authorities and the
police respond? What are the roles of the media, the public opinion
and anti-racist movements? What can be done to stop the violence?
These are questions addressed in this volume by some of Europe's
leading experts on racism and racist violence.
A savory account of how the pursuit of delicious foods shaped human
evolution Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite
and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some
so pleasing while others are not? Delicious is a supremely
entertaining foray into the heart of such questions. With generous
helpings of warmth and wit, Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez offer bold
new perspectives on why food is enjoyable and how the pursuit of
delicious flavors has guided the course of human history. They
consider the role that flavor may have played in the invention of
the first tools, the extinction of giant mammals, the evolution of
the world's most delicious and fatty fruits, the creation of beer,
and our own sociality. Along the way, you will learn about the
taste receptors you didn't even know you had, the best way to
ferment a mastodon, the relationship between Paleolithic art and
cheese, and much more. Blending irresistible storytelling with the
latest science, Delicious is a deep history of flavor that will
transform the way you think about human evolution and the gustatory
pleasures of the foods we eat.
The Trouble with Human Nature brings together biological and
cross-cultural evidence to critically examine common preconceptions
and challenge popular assumptions about human nature. It sets out
to counter genetic and evolutionary myths about human variation and
behavior, drawing on both biological and cultural anthropology, as
well as from other disciplines including psychology, economics, and
sociology. The chapters address the interrelated topics of health
and disease, gender and other differences, and violence and
conflict. The analysis calls into question the presumed natural
foundation for social inequalities and sheds light on both the
constraints and possibilities inherent in the human condition. This
book provides students of human diversity and evolution with an
excellent resource to better approach questions relating to human
nature. It will also be of interest to those taking courses in
social, cultural, and biological anthropology, as well as public
health, medical anthropology, sociology, gender studies,
psychology, and kinship studies.
In the beginning there was not only life but the ability to
communicate and eventually to cooperate among the most basic,
primeval creatures. In The Naked Neuron Dr. Joseph - an
internationally respected neuroscientist and author of the highly
praised The Right Brain and the Unconscious: Discovering the
Stranger Within - takes us on an intriguing journey through time as
he traces the evolution of communication and language from the most
primitive single-celled animals to our earliest ancestors to humans
today. As he so clearly demonstrates, we are linked to all levels
of animals in a common bond of sensing, feeling, and communication.
Be it singing wolves, dancing bees, or writhing rock and roll
dancers, all communicate a treasure chest of meaning in the absence
of the spoken word. Approximately 700 million years ago, a unique
type of cell came into being - the neuron. This "naked" neuron, or
nerve cell, lacked a protective fatty sheath. Still, it marked a
monumental and world altering development, since it would become
the building block of the brain. The naked neuron generated a
revolutionary change resulting in a greater complexity and subtlety
of thought. Dr. Joseph vividly depicts how neurons conferred on
early humans advanced powers of mental and sensory acuity,
including the gift of remembering one's past and contemplating the
future. Although humans possess much of the same ancient brain
tissue as our fellow primates, Dr. Joseph reveals to us the
singular features of the human brain that have enabled humans
uniquely to develop complex, spoken language. He holds us
spellbound, revealing that although the new and old brain tissue
are couched within the same brain, each often has difficulty
understanding the impulses and language of the other. This
ground-breaking book draws on Dr. Joseph's brilliant and original
research and theories, fusing the latest discoveries made in
neuroscience, sociobiology, and anthropology. He illuminates how
the languages of th
The etiology of the Wimbum people in the Western Grassfields of
Cameroon is described through an examination of the way in which
the meanings of key concepts, used to interpret and explain illness
and other forms of misfortune, are continually being produced and
reproduced in the praxis of everyday communication. During the
course of numerous dialogues, witchcraft, a highly ambivalent
force, gradually emerges as the prime mover. As destructive
cannibals or respectable elders the witches are the ultimate cause
of all significant illness, misfortune and death, and as diviners
they are also the ultimate judges who apportion moral
responsibility. Even the ancestors and the traditional gods turn
out to be fronts behind which the witches hide their activities.The
study is on three levels: a medical anthropological exploration of
explanations of illness and misfortune; a detailed ethnography of
traditional African cosmology and witchcraft; and an examination of
recent theoretical issues in anthropology such as the nature of
ethnographic fieldwork and the possibility of dialogical or
postmodern ethnography.
This volume, a study of a transhumant cattle-raising community in
Spain, is based on the extensive fieldwork at La Nava de San
Miguel, a village in the province of Avila in central Spain. It
shows the social and economic factors upon which the continued
vitality of this mountain village is based: the use of communal
summer pastures; the transhumant groups which walk the cattle to
the winter pastures over the mountains; and the system of taking
turns for many tasks within the village. The book analyzes the
dichotomy between the more rigid organization of life within the
village and the organization of life outside the village, in the
transhumant group which goes to the winter pastures in Extramadura.
Exploring the contemporary sources, scope and intensity of
nationality conflicts in the context of a disintegrating Soviet
Empire, the authors address themselves to the resurgence of
ethnicity and nationalism within the former Soviet imperium,
Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and China, and the consquences of
perestroika and glasnost. Kumar Rupesinghe has also written
"Conflict Resolution in Uganda" and "Ethnic Conflicts and Human
Rights". Olga Vorkunova is also the author of "Konflikti v 'Tretem
Mire' i Zapad" (conflict in the "Third World" and the West) and
"Skandinavia i Mezhdunarodnie Konflikti" (Scandinavia and
international conflict).
Health and Other Unassailable Values sets out to examine health as
a core cultural value. Taking 'health', 'evidence' and 'ethics' as
her primary themes, Bell explores the edifice that underpins
contemporary conceptions of health and the transformations in how
we understand it, assess it and enact it. Although health, evidence
and ethics have always been important values, she demonstrates that
the grounds upon which they are grasped today are radically
different from how they were formulated in the past. Divided into
three parts, Part I focuses on the rise of epidemiology, Part II
examines the emergence of evidence-based medicine, and Part III
explores the broader ethical turn in health and medicine. Through
an examination of core concepts including health behaviour, the
randomised controlled trial, informed consent and human rights,
Bell illustrates the ways in which certain entrenched ideas and
assumptions about how human beings think and act recur across a
variety of settings. An array of topical case studies, including
cigarette packaging legislation, the incorporation of male
circumcision as an HIV prevention tool, cancer screening
technologies and e-cigarettes, ground the arguments presented.
Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume will be of
interest to a wide range of scholars and students, especially those
in medical anthropology, medical sociology and public health. Clear
chapter delineations make the work easy to engage with at the
individual chapter level as well as a whole.
Traditionally, Non-Indian societies in Brazilian Amazonia -
'caboclo' - are treated by anthropologists as relics of the
haphazard development of Amazonia - leftovers of the colonial
enterprise and have therefore received little serious attention.
This volume attempts to redress this imbalance by looking closely
at the encompassing nature of peasant society in Brazilian
Amazonia. The first part of the book is concerned with the concept
of caboclo as it emerges in anthropological and Amazonianist
disclosure. The second examines a historical 'caboclo' society (in
Santarem, Para) from a broadly ethnographic viewpoint. Three
different modes of peasant livelihood and their relation to the
impact of the Transamazon Highway are then fully discussed,
followed by a detailed examination of the 'sustainable-
development' thesis using research from another part of Amazonia -
the Guama River. Overall, this volume aims to examine the reasons
for the relative 'invisibility' of caboclo society and to place it
in a historical perspective.
A cultural history of the face in Western art, ranging from
portraiture in painting and photography to film, theater, and mass
media This fascinating book presents the first cultural history and
anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media.
Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work
of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik,
renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that while the face
plays a critical role in human communication, it defies attempts at
visual representation. Belting divides his book into three parts:
faces as masks of the self, portraiture as a constantly evolving
mask in Western culture, and the fate of the face in the age of
mass media. Referencing a vast array of sources, Belting's insights
draw on art history, philosophy, theories of visual culture, and
cognitive science. He demonstrates that Western efforts to portray
the face have repeatedly failed, even with the developments of new
media such as photography and film, which promise ever-greater
degrees of verisimilitude. In spite of sitting at the heart of
human expression, the face resists possession, and creative
endeavors to capture it inevitably result in masks--hollow
signifiers of the humanity they're meant to embody. From creations
by Van Eyck and August Sander to works by Francis Bacon, Ingmar
Bergman, and Chuck Close, Face and Mask takes a remarkable look at
how, through the centuries, the physical visage has inspired and
evaded artistic interpretation.
Itisonlyrecently thatthe naturaloccurrenceoffree radicalsin
biological tissue has become widely accepted, and that the suspi-
cion with which biologists previously viewed the free radicals of
radiationchemistryhas beenplacedin a broaderperspective. Now,
oxygen-derived free radicals are considered respectable biochemi-
cal intermediates, given always the caveat that unwanted tissue
damage may arise if these active species are produced in such
abundance that they overwhelm the natural antioxidant and free-
radical defense mechanisms, or if these systems have become
hypoeffective. Many factors, including several dietary manipula-
tions, can lead toelevatedproductionofsuperoxide and may result in
free radical overload, whereas a deficiency of those micronutri-
ents associated with the antioxidant defense mec.hanisms may re-
sult in substantially diminished antioxidant capacity. By now,
antioxidants have become a household word and al- most everyone is
aware of their imponance in protecting the body against attack by
active oxygen species. Indeed, it is a paradox of nature that
oxygen, which is so essential to sustain aerobic life, ul- timately
contributes to its destruction. Not surprisingly, recogni- tion
ofthis dilemma has generated a spate ofantioxidant strategies
intended to reduce the risk of tissue damage by rampant oxygen
radicals, some sadly based less on science than on speculation.
The stated aims of the Lecture Notes in Biomathematics allow for
work that is "unfinished or tentative." This volume is offered in
that spirit. The problem addressed is one of the classics of
statistical ecology, the estimation of mortality rates from
stage-frequency data, but in tackling it we found ourselves making
use of ideas and techniques very different from those we expected
to use, and in which we had no previous experience. Specifically we
drifted towards consideration of some rather specific curve and
surface fitting and smoothing techniques. We think we have made
some progress (otherwise why publish?), but are acutely aware of
the conceptual and statistical clumsiness of parts of the work.
Readers with sufficient expertise to be offended should regard the
monograph as a challenge to do better. The central theme in this
book is a somewhat complex algorithm for mortality estimation
(detailed at the end of Chapter 4). Because of its complexity, the
job of implementing the method is intimidating. Any reader
interested in using the methods may obtain copies of our code as
follows: Intelligible Structured Code 1. Hutchinson and deHoog's
algorithm for fitting smoothing splines by cross validation 2.
Cubic covariant area-approximating splines 3. Cubic interpolating
splines 4. Cubic area matching splines 5. Hyman's algorithm for
monotonic interpolation based on cubic splines. Prototype
User-Hostile Code 6. Positive constrained interpolation 7. Positive
constrained area matching 8. The "full method" from chapter 4 9.
The "simpler" method from chapter 4.
I am pleased to respond to the wish of the Editors, Drs A. Czeizel,
H. G. Benk mann and H. W. Goedde and write the Foreword to this
book "Genetics ofthe Hun garian population." This book represents
the result of a fruitful international scientif ic cooperation, an
endeavour that has been forged and sustained in the midst of a
number of difficulties. It bears ample testimony to the fact that
the pursuit of science transcends national boundaries and barriers
and to what can be achieved through international cooperation. It
has now become possible, among other things, to present a more
meaningful characterization of the different ethnic groups than had
been hitherto possible, thanks to the major advances in the study
of human biology through the application of a wide variety of
concepts and techniques. Several new disciplines, in particular,
ecogenetics, pharmacogenetics and molecular biology have come into
being and are flourishing. At the risk of stating the obvious, it
is perhaps worth mentioning that the trends and place of migration
and urbanization that we are witnessing today are such, that,
before long, differences between different human gene pools may be
substantially diminished, if not entirely obliterated. This book,
therefore, is timely: it provides valuable information on who the
Hungarians are, where they come from and where they are heading, in
short, their past, present and future, in addition to presenting a
broad perspective of some aspects of current research in biomedical
sciences in Hungary."
Evolutionary ecology has grown into an exciting and dynamic area of
research in the biological sciences. Only recently, however, has
there been noteworthy progress in adapting theory, concepts, and
models from this fi eld for analysis of human behavior and
evolution.
Following recent events in Eastern Europe, questions surrounding
European identity seem more pressing than ever. This volume
explores, through a series of ethnographic case studies, the
construction and experience of identities in Western Europe. All of
the case studies are based on fieldwork, and in geographical scope
range from Wales to the Basque country; from Corsica to the Lake
District. The peoples they look at are similarly diverse:
nationalists and members of the Communist party; rural and urban
populations. The essays illustrate the ways in which detailed
ethnographic case studies can illuminate how identities are lived
by ordinary people.
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