The book illustrates theories of sustainable development from physical, chemical and biological aspects, and then introduces technologies to prevent pollution of water, air, solid waste and noise, finally concludes with ecological environmental protection and restoration techniques. With interdisciplinary features and abundant case studies, it is an essential reference for researchers and industrial engineers.

In this book experts in the environment, theology and science argue that the challenge posed to society by biotechnology lies not only in terms of risk/benefit analysis of individual genetic technologies and interventions, but also has implications for the way we think about human identity and our relationship to the natural world. Such a profound--they would suggest religious--challenge requires a response that is genuinely interdisciplinary in nature, a conversation that draws as much on expertise in theology and philosophy as on the natural sciences and risk assessment techniques. They argue that an adequate response must also be sociologically informed in at least two ways. First it must draw on contemporary sociological insights about contemporary cultural change, the complex role of expert knowledge in modern complex society and the specific social dynamics of contemporary technological risks. Secondly, it must endeavour to pay sensitive attention to the voice of the lay public in the current controversy over the new genetics. This book attempts to realise such an aim, as a contribution not just to academic scholarship, but also to the public debate about biotechnology and its regulation. Thus the collection includes contributions from scholars in a range of intellectual domains (indeed, many of the chapters themselves draw on more than one discipline in new and challenging ways). The book invites the reader to enter into this conversation in a creative way and come to appreciate more fully the many-sided nature of the debate.

The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) 2017 is an international, multidisciplinary conference for the presentation and discussion of current research in the theory and application of computational methods in problems of biological significance. Presentations are rigorously peer reviewed and are published in an archival proceedings volume. PSB 2017 will be held on January 4 - 8, 2017 in Kohala Coast, Hawaii. Tutorials and workshops will be offered prior to the start of the conference.PSB 2017 will bring together top researchers from the US, the Asian Pacific nations, and around the world to exchange research results and address open issues in all aspects of computational biology. It is a forum for the presentation of work in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modeling, and other computational methods, as applied to biological problems, with emphasis on applications in data-rich areas of molecular biology.The PSB has been designed to be responsive to the need for critical mass in sub-disciplines within biocomputing. For that reason, it is the only meeting whose sessions are defined dynamically each year in response to specific proposals. PSB sessions are organized by leaders of research in biocomputing's 'hot topics.' In this way, the meeting provides an early forum for serious examination of emerging methods and approaches in this rapidly changing field.

This book introduces new methods to analyze vertex-varying graph signals. In many real-world scenarios, the data sensing domain is not a regular grid, but a more complex network that consists of sensing points (vertices) and edges (relating the sensing points). Furthermore, sensing geometry or signal properties define the relation among sensed signal points. Even for the data sensed in the well-defined time or space domain, the introduction of new relationships among the sensing points may produce new insights in the analysis and result in more advanced data processing techniques. The data domain, in these cases and discussed in this book, is defined by a graph. Graphs exploit the fundamental relations among the data points. Processing of signals whose sensing domains are defined by graphs resulted in graph data processing as an emerging field in signal processing. Although signal processing techniques for the analysis of time-varying signals are well established, the corresponding graph signal processing equivalent approaches are still in their infancy. This book presents novel approaches to analyze vertex-varying graph signals. The vertex-frequency analysis methods use the Laplacian or adjacency matrix to establish connections between vertex and spectral (frequency) domain in order to analyze local signal behavior where edge connections are used for graph signal localization. The book applies combined concepts from time-frequency and wavelet analyses of classical signal processing to the analysis of graph signals. Covering analytical tools for vertex-varying applications, this book is of interest to researchers and practitioners in engineering, science, neuroscience, genome processing, just to name a few. It is also a valuable resource for postgraduate students and researchers looking to expand their knowledge of the vertex-frequency analysis theory and its applications. The book consists of 15 chapters contributed by 41 leading researches in the field.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was one of the most significant and influential environmental philosophers of the twentieth century. The founder of the social ecology movement, Bookchin was presenting and publishing foundational ideas about issues like air and water pollution, nuclear radiation, and the dangers of fossil fuels. He was a genuinely original and prescient thinker who was grappling with problems that we still face today-and proposing solutions for them-before most people realized those problems existed. In addition to his work in ecology, Bookchin was also a noted leftist, and he worked to create an authentic, indigenous American Left. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin is the first-ever biography of Murray Bookchin, written by his personal collaborator and copyeditor, Janet Biehl. From 1987-2006, Biehl edited every word that Bookchin wrote, and worked with him on numerous articles and books. She tells the story of Bookchin's life from a perspective that no one else could, providing a comprehensive biography that examines this pioneer environmentalist's life on both personal and professional levels. She uses her access to Bookchin's papers as well as extensive archival research, and draws upon nearly two decades' worth of a personal relationship with Bookchin. The book discusses the variety of philosophies and movements that Bookchin helped lead, including social ecology, assembly democracy, and even, in certain instances, anarchism. Ecology or Catastrophe is the definitive biography of Murray Bookchin, written by the person who knew him best.

The finding that working memory training can increase fluid intelligence triggered a great number of cognitive training studies, the results of which have been fiercely debated among experts. The finding also prompted a surge of commercial versions of these working memory training programs. Increasing Intelligence overviews contemporary approaches and techniques designed to increase general cognitive ability in healthy individuals. The book covers behavioral training and different electrical stimulation methods such as TMS, tDCS, tACS, and tRNS, along with alternative approaches ranging from neurofeedback to cognitive-enhancing drugs. It describes crucial brain features that underlie intelligent behavior and discusses theoretical and technical shortcomings of the reported studies, then goes on to suggest avenues for future research and inquiry.

This invaluable resource discusses clinical applications with effects and side-effects of applications of stem cells in liver, lung and heart regeneration. All chapters are contributed by pre-eminent scientists in the field and covers such topics as cell therapy in the treatment of cirrhosis and other liver, heart and lung diseases, characteristics of hepatic progenitor cells, future directions of the discussed therapies and much more. Liver, Lung and Heart Regeneration and the other books in the Stem Cells in Clinical Applications series will be invaluable to scientists, researchers, advanced students and clinicians working in stem cells, regenerative medicine or tissue engineering.

Thanks to the enormous progress of neuroscience over the past few decades, we can now monitor the passage of initial stimulations to certain points in the brain. In spite of these findings, however, subjective consciousness still remains an unsolved mystery. This volume exposes neuroscience and cognitive science to philosophical analysis and proposes that we think of our conscious states of mind as a composite phenomenon consisting of three layers: neuronal events, somatic markers, and explicit consciousness. While physics and chemistry can and have been successfully employed to describe the causal relation between the first two layers, the further step to articulate consciousness is purely interpretative and points to the preponderant importance of language.

Language is essential for the transformation of inchoate, not very informative somatic markers and mere moods into full consciousness and appraised emotion. Munz uses literary examples to shift our understanding of the mind away from computational models and to show how eloquence about our states of mind is manufactured rather than caused. He firmly rejects the efforts of both Freud and non-Freudian psychologists to find a scientific explanation for such manufacture and to make a science out of the eloquence of folk psychology. Instead he argues that the many ways eloquence is being manufactured to transform somatic markers into conscious states of mind are best accounted for in terms of Wittgenstein's conception of language games. This volume challenges most current thinking about consciousness and mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and linguists.

This books provides up-to-date reviews on current advances of the role of HSP in veterinary medicine and research. Key basic and clinical research laboratories from major universities, veterinary hospitals and pharmaceutical companies around the world have contributed chapters that review present research activity and importantly project this field into the future. For easy readability, the book is sub divided into sections on HSP in the following aspects of Veterinary Medicine, including, I - Domestic Animals, II - Poultry, III - Aquatic and IV - Parasites. The book is a must read for heat shock protein researchers in general and specifically those involved in clinical and research in veterinary medicine.

Public health is an important and fast-developing area of ethical discussion. In this volume a range of issues in public health ethics are explored using the resources of moral theory, political philosophy, philosophy of science, applied ethics, law, and economics. The twelve original papers presented consider numerous ethical issues arise within public health ethics. To what extent can the public good or the public interest justify state interventions that impose limits upon the freedom of individuals? What role should the law play in regulating risks? Should governments actively aim to change our preferences about such things as food, smoking or physical exercise? What are public goods, and what role (if any) do they play in public health? To what extent do individuals have moral obligations to contribute to protecting the community or the public good? Where is it appropriate to concentrate upon prevention rather than cure? Given the fact that we cannot be protected from all harm, what sorts of harm provide a justification for public health action? What limits do we wish to place upon public health activities? How do we ensure that the interests of individuals are not set aside or forgotten in the pursuit of population benefits? An excellent line-up of authors from North America, Europe, and the UK tackle these questions.

This book presents an interpretation of pharmaceutical, surgical and psychotherapeutic interventions based on a univalent metalanguage: biosemiotics. It proposes that a metalanguage for the physical, mental, social, and cultural aspects of health and medicine could bring all parts and aspects of human life together and thus shape a picture of the human being as a whole, made up from the heterogeneous images of the vast variety of sciences and technologies in medicine discourse. The book adopts a biosemiotics clinical model of thinking because, similar to the ancient principle of alchemy, tam ethice quam physice, everything in this model is physical as much as it is mental. Signs in the forms of vibrations, molecules, cells, words, images, reflections and rites conform cultural, mental, physical, and social phenomena. The book decodes healing, dealing with health, illness and therapy by emphasizing the first-person experience as well as objective events. It allows readers to follow the energy-information flows through and between embodied minds and to see how they form physiological functions such as our emotions and narratives.

This book summarizes current advances in our understanding of how infectious disease represents an ecological interaction between a pathogenic microorganism and the host species in which that microbe causes illness. The contributing authors explain that pathogenic microorganisms often also have broader ecological connections, which can include a natural environmental presence; possible transmission by vehicles such as air, water, and food; and interactions with other host species, including vectors for which the microbe either may or may not be pathogenic. This field of science has been dubbed disease ecology, and the chapters that examine it have been grouped into three sections. The first section introduces both the role of biological community interactions and the impact of biodiversity on infectious disease. In turn, the second section considers those diseases directly affecting humans, with a focus on waterborne and foodborne illnesses, while also examining the critical aspect of microbial biofilms. Lastly, the third section presents the ecology of infectious diseases from the perspective of their impact on mammalian livestock and wildlife as well as on humans. Given its breadth of coverage, the volume offers a valuable resource for microbial ecologists and biomedical scientists alike.

Epilepsy is a devastating group of neurological disorders characterized by periodic and unpredictable seizure activity in the brain. There is a critical need for new drugs and approaches given than at least one-third of all epilepsy patients are not made free of seizures by existing medications and become "medically refractory". Much of epilepsy research has focused on neuronal therapeutic targets, but current antiepileptic drugs often cause severe cognitive, developmental, and behavioral side effects. Recent findings indicate a critical contribution of astrocytes, star-shaped glial cells in the brain, to neuronal and network excitability and seizure activity. Furthermore, many important cellular and molecular changes occur in astrocytes in epileptic tissue in both humans and animal models of epilepsy. The goal of Astrocytes and Epilepsy is to comprehensively review exciting findings linking changes in astrocytes to functional changes responsible for epilepsy for the first time in book format. These insights into astrocyte contribution to seizure susceptibility indicate that astrocytes may represent an important new therapeutic target in the control of epilepsy. Astrocytes and Epilepsy includes background explanatory text on astrocyte morphology and physiology, epilepsy models and syndromes, and evidence from both human tissue studies and animal models linking functional changes in astrocytes to epilepsy. Beautifully labelled diagrams are presented and relevant figures from the literature are reproduced to elucidate key findings and concepts in this rapidly emerging field. Astrocytes and Epilepsy is written for neuroscientists, epilepsy researchers, astrocyte investigators as well as neurologists and other specialists caring for patients with epilepsy.

Fully updated and revised according to student feedback, the sixth edition of Mayo Clinic Medical Neurosciences: Organized by Neurologic System and Level provides a systematic approach to anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system inspired by the neurologist's approach to solving clinical problems. This volume has 4 sections: 1) an overview of the neurosciences necessary for understanding anatomical localization and pathophysiologic characterization of neurologic disorders; 2) an approach to localizing lesions in the 7 longitudinal systems of the nervous system; 3) an approach to localizing lesions in the 4 horizontal levels of the nervous system; and 4) a collection of clinical problems. This book provides the neuroscience framework to support the neurologist in a clinical setting and is also a great resource for neurology and psychiatry board certifications. This is the perfect guide for all medical students and neurology, psychiatry, and physical medicine residents at early stages of training. New to This Edition - A chapter devoted to multiple-choice questions for self-assessment - Discussion of emerging concepts in molecular, cellular, and system neurosciences - New chapters on emotion and consciousness systems - Incorporation of new discoveries in neuroimaging and an appendix for tables of medications commonly used to treat neurologic disorders

The last decades of the 20th century witnessed strongly growing interest in evolutionary approaches to the human past. Even now, however, there is little real agreement on what "evolutionary archaeology" is all about. A major obstacle is the lack of consensus on how to define the basic principles of Darwinian thought in ways that are genuinely relevant to the archaeological sciences. Each chapter in this new collection of specially invited essays focuses on a single major concept and its associated key words, summarizes its historic and current uses, and then reviews case studies illustrating that concept's present and probable future role in research. What these authors say shows the richness and current diversity of thought among those today who insist that Darwinism has a key role to play in archaeology. Each chapter includes definitions of related key words. Because the same key words may have the same or different meanings in different conceptual contexts, many of these key words are addressed in more than one chapter. In addition to exploring key concepts, collectively the book's chapters show the broad range of ideas and opinions in this intellectual arena today. This volume reflects--and clarifies--debate today on the role of Darwinism in modern archaeology, and by doing so, may help shape the directions that future work in archaeology will take.

This book presents the theoretical foundations of Systems Biology, as well as its application in studies on human hosts, pathogens and associated diseases. This book presents several chapters written by renowned experts in the field. Some topics discussed in depth in this book include: computational modeling of multiresistant bacteria, systems biology of cancer, systems immunology, networks in systems biology.

Evolution gave rise to a prominent insect diversity at every level of ecological niche. Since then, hordes of insects have threatened human and cattle health as well as most of all green lands and agricultural crops. Now, the insect problem expands from many mutant forms of yellow dengue fever mosquitoes to highly-resistant larvae of most all various phytophageous species. The tremendous expansion of insects is due not only to an increasing resistance capacity to insecticides, but also to a strong capacity for adapting to different climate and environmental changes, including global warming. Obviously insects display a number of rudimentary systems to build an extremely efficient organism to survive in a changing world. In many species, one pheromone molecule is enough to trigger mating behavior. Therefore, insects have become crucial models not only for evolutionary studies, but also for understanding specific mechanisms underlying sensory-based behaviors. Most of insect species such as ants, beetles, cockroaches, locusts, moths and mosquitoes largely rely on olfactory cues to explore the environment and find con-specifics or food sources. A conglomerate of renowned international scientific experts is gathered to expose the insect problem on the various continents of the planet and propose an alternative to the use of toxic insecticides. Sex pheromones, specific chemical signals necessary for reproduction, and pheromone detection in insects are described with full details of the olfactory mechanisms in the antennae and higher centers in the brain. Thus, new synthetic pheromones and/or plant odors with specific molecular target sites in the insect olfactory system are proposed for sustainable development in agricultural and entomological industries. Disrupting insect pheromone channels and plant odor detection mechanisms is solemnly envisioned as a unique way to control invasive insect pest species while preserving human and environment safety.

This book contains some selected papers from the International Conference on Extreme Learning Machine 2015, which was held in Hangzhou, China, December 15-17, 2015. This conference brought together researchers and engineers to share and exchange R&D experience on both theoretical studies and practical applications of the Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) technique and brain learning. This book covers theories, algorithms ad applications of ELM. It gives readers a glance of the most recent advances of ELM.

Technology maturity: What is it, and why is it important? For more than ten years, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has criticized federal agencies for a history of cost and schedule overruns on a significant portion of their procurement programs. GAO has repeatedly reported that the use of immature technologies in programs is a primary cause for these overruns. In spite of these repeated reports, the problems in government procurement have not improved. In fact, recent reports indicate that the problems are getting worse. One cause of this worsening situation might be that, while GAO identified lack of technology maturity as a problem, they did not tell how to measure technology maturity, or conversely, its lack. This groundbreaking work attempts to fill this gap by examining the current state of technology maturity measurement, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of available measures, and proposing a complete technology maturity assessment as a potential solution. The book also includes a discussion of risk during technology development.