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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues
The Wonder of Life takes you from Earth's beginning and describes
the events that preceded man and carries you along the path of
man's education. This came through wars, then religion, and always
through the silent killers of man as disease became one of the
major carriers of education as well as death. You will journey
through the battles with the silent killers and understand how man
went from a defensive mode to one of the aggressor with the
invention of the microscope. Follow the progress of the wins over
the Staff infections, to the use of penicillin during the war and
then the defeat of Polio; always in the search of what made man
tick. This carries him through the discovery of DNA, the genetic
code, AIDS, the human genome and to today's great hope of the use
of stem cells to correct for the body's malfunction of its organs.
It's an exciting story told in a novel manner for the layman to
understand.
The philosophically most challenging science today, arguably, is no
longer physics but biology. It is hardly an exaggeration to state
that Charles Darwin has shaped modern evolutionary biology more
significantly than anyone else. Moreover, since Darwin's day,
philosophers and scientists have realized the enormous
philosophical potential of Darwinism and have tried to expand his
insights well beyond the limits of biology. However, no consensus
has been achieved. The aim of this collection of essays is to
revive a comprehensive discussion of the meaning and the
philosophical implications of "Darwinism." The contributors to
Darwinism and Philosophy are international scholars from the fields
of philosophy, science, and history of ideas. A strength of this
collection is that it brings together sustained reflection from
American and Continental philosophical traditions. The conclusions
of the contributors vary, but taken together their essays
successfully map the problems of interpreting "Darwinism."
The threat of climate displacement looms large over a growing
number of countries. Based on the more than six years of work by
Displacement Solutions in ten climate-affected countries, academic
work on displacement and climate adaptation, and the country-level
efforts of civil society groups in several frontline countries,
this report explores the key contention that land will be at the
core of any major strategy aimed at preventing and resolving
climate displacement. This innovative and timely volume coordinated
and edited by the Founder of Displacement Solutions, Scott Leckie,
examines a range of legal, policy and practical issues relating to
the role of land in actively addressing the displacement
consequences of climate change. It reveals the inevitable truth
that climate displacement is already underway and being tackled in
countries such as Bangladesh, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands, Tuvalu and the United States, and proposes a series of
possible land solution tools that can be employed to protect the
rights of people and communities everywhere should they be forced
to flee the places they call home.
A concise, clear writing style and a detailed and rich coverage of
topics are the reasons that students found the first edition of the
book so engaging and useful.Riding on this wave, all chapters
within the second edition of this popular book have been thoroughly
updated and expanded, especially the human and animal materials. A
wider range of animals is covered, including dogs and cats as well
as farm animals. The use of cord blood for therapy,
pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and animal cloning are also
explored and dealt with.
The untold story of a stunning discovery: not only can birds smell,
but their scents may be the secret to understanding their world.
The puzzling lack of evidence for the peculiar but widespread
belief that birds have no sense of smell irked evolutionary
biologist Danielle Whittaker. Exploring the science behind the myth
led her on an unexpected quest investigating mysteries from how
juncos win a fight to why cowbirds smell like cookies. In The
Secret Perfume of Birds-part science, part intellectual history,
and part memoir-Whittaker blends humor, clear writing, and a
compelling narrative to describe how scent is important not just
for birds but for all animals, including humans. Whittaker
engagingly describes how emerging research has uncovered birds'
ability to produce complex chemical signals that influence their
behavior, including where they build nests, when they pick a fight,
and why they fly away. Mate choice, or sexual selection-a still
enigmatic aspect of many animals' lives-appears to be particularly
influenced by smell. Whittaker's pioneering studies suggest that
birds' sexy (and scary) signals are produced by symbiotic bacteria
that manufacture scents in the oil that birds stroke on their
feathers when preening. From tangerine-scented auklets to her
beloved juncos, redolent of moss, birds from across the world
feature in Whittaker's stories, but she also examines the smelly
chemicals of all kinds of creatures, from iguanas and bees to
monkeys and humans. Readers will enjoy a rare opportunity to
witness the twisting roads scientific research can take, especially
the challenging, hilarious, and occasionally dangerous realities of
ornithology in the wild. The Secret Perfume of Birds will interest
anyone looking to learn more about birds, about how animals and
humans use our senses, and about why it can sometimes take a rebel
scientist to change what we think we know for sure about the
world-and ourselves.
This highly acclaimed book brings the cumulative results of a
century and a half of kinship studies in anthropology into the
focus of current debates on the origin of modern humans in Africa
and on an entangled bit of human evolutionary history commonly
subsumed under the heading of the "peopling of the Americas." This
erudite study is based on a database of some 2,500 kinship
vocabularies representing roughly 600 African languages, 140
Australian languages, 500 Austronesian languages, 200 Papuan
languages, 350 languages of Eurasia (excluding Indo-Europeans), 440
North and Middle American Indian languages, and 200 South American
languages. This valuable reference will take the reader to the dawn
of kinship studies in the 19th century Western science in order to
elicit the wider context of anthropological interest in kinship
systems and the interdisciplinary salience of the phenomenon of
kinship. The book also examines the founder of kinship studies in
anthropology, American lawyer and Iroquois ethnographer, Lewis
Henry Morgan, and the circumstances of his life that generated his
interest in human kinship. The study ventures into the intricacies
of scientific and quasi-scientific debates in the 19th century, and
treats 19th century science as embedded in a myth featuring
divinity, humanity and animality as principal characters. This
account is divided into four sections, each of which is structured
as a triad (philosophy, psychology and physiology; logic, semiotics
and reproduction; religion, hermeneutics and evolution; law,
grammar and speech). This far-reaching historical journey aims at
formulating an idea of what human kinship might be all about,
especially in the light of the widespread uncertainties about this
question caused by the constructivist turn in anthropology.
Eventually our ideas regarding human origins, ancient population
dispersals and the homeland of modern humans are inextricably
linked to our ideas about kinship. As a book that brings together
evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology, The Genius of Kinship
will be a critical addition for all Anthropology collections.
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.
The cryosphere stands for environments where water appears in a
frozen form. It includes permafrost, glaciers, ice sheets, and sea
ice and is currently more affected by Global Change than most other
regions of the Earth. In the cryosphere, limited water availability
and subzero temperatures cause extreme conditions for all kind of
life which microorganisms can cope with extremely well. The
cryosphere's microbiota displays an unexpectedly large genetic
potential, and taxonomic as well as functional diversity which,
however, we still only begin to map. Also, microbial communities
influence reaction patterns of the cryosphere towards Global
Change. Altered patterns of seasonal temperature fluctuations and
precipitation are expected in the Arctic and will affect the
microbial turnover of soil organic matter (SOM). Activation of
nutrients by thawing and increased active layer thickness as well
as erosion renders nutrient stocks accessible to microbial
activities. Also, glacier melt and retreat stimulate microbial life
in turn influencing albedo and surface temperatures. In this
context, the functional resilience of microbial communities in the
cryosphere is of major interest. Particularly important is the
ability of microorganisms and microbial communities to respond to
changes in their surroundings by intracellular regulation and
population shifts within functional niches, respectively. Research
on microbial life exposed to permanent freeze or seasonal
freeze-thaw cycles has led to astonishing findings about microbial
versatility, adaptation, and diversity. Microorganisms thrive in
cold habitats and new sequencing techniques have produced large
amounts of genomic, metagenomic, and metatranscriptomic data that
allow insights into the fascinating microbial ecology and
physiology at low and subzero temperatures. Moreover, some of the
frozen ecosystems such as permafrost constitute major global carbon
and nitrogen storages, but can also act as sources of the
greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. In this book we
summarize state of the art knowledge on whether environmental
changes are met by a flexible microbial community retaining its
function, or if the altered conditions also render the community in
a state of altered properties that affect the Earth's element
cycles and climate. This book brings together research on the
cryosphere's microbiota including permafrost, glaciers, and sea ice
in Arctic and Antarctic regions. Different spatial scales and
levels of complexity are considered, spanning from ecosystem level
to pure culture studies of model microbes in the laboratory. It
aims to attract a wide range of parties with interest in the effect
of climate change and/or low temperatures on microbial nutrient
cycling and physiology.
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DeeNA
(Hardcover)
A. R. Sutton
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R868
Discovery Miles 8 680
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Recent advances in protein structural biology, coupled with new
developments in human genetics, have opened the door to
understanding the molecular basis of many metabolic, physiological,
and developmental processes in human biology. Medical pathologies,
and their chemical therapies, are increasingly being described at
the molecular level. For single-gene diseases, and some multi-gene
conditions, identification of highly correlated genes immediately
leads to identification of covalent structures of the actual
chemical agents of the disease, namely the protein gene products.
Once the primary sequence of a protein is ascertained, structural
biologists work to determine its three-dimensional, biologically
active structure, or to predict its probable fold and/or function
by comparison to the data base of known protein structures.
Similarly, three-dimensional structures of proteins produced by
microbiological pathogens are the subject of intense study, for
example, the proteins necessary for maturation of the human HIV
virus. Once the three-dimensional structure of a protein is known
or predicted, its function, as well as potential binding sites for
drugs that inhibit its function, become tractable questions. The
medical ramifications of the burgeoning results of protein
structural biology, from gene replacement therapy to "rational"
drug design, are well recognized by researchers in biomedical
areas, and by a significant proportion of the general population.
The purpose of this book is to introduce biomedical scientists to
important areas of protein structural biology, and to provide an
insightful orientation to the primary literature that shapes the
field in each subject.
The chapters in this volume cover aspects of protein structural
biology which have led to the recognition of fundamental
relationships between protein structure and function.
The world within reach is characterised to a large extent by our
ability to sense objects through touch. Research into the sensation
of touch has a long history. However, it is only relatively
recently that significant advances have been made in understanding
how information about objects we touch is represented in both the
peripheral and central divisions of the nervous systems. This
volume draws together the increasing body of knowledge regarding
the mechanisms underlying tactile sensation and how they relate to
tactile perception.
Individual chapters address; the response of mechanoreceptors to
stimuli (including movement and shape), the role of the
somatosensory cortex in processing tactile information, the
psychophysics and neurophysiology of the detection and
categorisation of somesthetic stimuli, perceptual constancy, recent
findings in regard to short term and long term plasticity in the
somatosensory cortex and the psychophysical correlates of this
plasticity, and parallel versus serial information processing in
the cortex.
The authors look at past and current research, and comment on the
direction of future investigation, relating findings from
psychophysical studies of tactile behavior to our growing
understanding of the underlying neural mechanisms.
Our visual system can process information at both conscious and
unconscious levels. Understanding the factors that control whether
a stimulus reaches our awareness, and the fate of those stimuli
that remain at an unconscious level, are the major challenges of
brain science in the new millennium. Since its publication in 1984,
Visual Masking has established itself as a classic text in the
field of cognitive psychology. In the years since, there have been
considerable advances in the cognitive neurosciences, and a growth
of interest in the topic of consciousness, and the time is ripe for
a new edition of this text. Where most current approaches to the
study of visual consciousness adopt a 'steady-state' view, the
approach presented in this book explores its dynamic properties.
This new edition uses the technique of visual masking to explore
temporal aspects of conscious and unconscious processes down to a
resolution in the millisecond range. The 'time slices' through
conscious and unconscious vision revealed by the visual masking
technique can shed light on both normal and abnormal operations in
the brain. The main focus of this book is on the microgenesis of
visual form and pattern perception - microgenesis referring to the
processes occurring in the visual system from the time of stimulus
presentation on the retinae to the time, a few hundred milliseconds
later, of its registration at conscious or unconscious perceptual
and behavioural levels. The book takes a highly integrative
approach by presenting microgenesis within a broad context
encompassing visuo-temporal phenomena, attention, and
consciousness.
Microbial population genetics is a rapidly advancing field of
investigation with relevance to many areas of science. The subject
encompasses theoretical issues, such as the origins and evolution
of species, sex, and recombination. Population genetics lays the
foundations for tracking the origin and evolution of antibiotic
resistance and deadly infectious pathogens and is also an essential
tool in the utilization of beneficial microbes. This invaluable
book, written by leading researchers in the field, details the
current major advances in microbial population genetics and
genomics. Distinguished international scientists introduce
fundamental concepts, describe genetic tools, and comprehensively
review recent data from SNP surveys, whole-genome DNA sequences,
and microarray hybridizations. The chapters cover broad groups of
microorganisms including viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi,
protozoa, and algae. A major focus is the application of molecular
tools in the study of genetic variation. Topics covered include
microbial systematics, comparative microbial genomics, horizontal
gene transfer, pathogenic bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria,
cyanobacteria, microalgae, fungi, malaria parasites, viral
pathogens, and metagenomics. Microbial Population Genetics is an
essential volume for everyone interested in population genetics,
and it is highly recommended reading for all microbiologists.
Vents and seeps are the epitome of life in extreme environments,
but there is much more to these systems than just black smokers or
hydrocarbon seeps. Many other ecosystems are characterized by
moving fluids and this book provides an overview of the different
habitats, their specific conditions as well as the technical
challenges that have to be met when studying them. The book
provides the current state of the art and will be a valuable
resource for everybody that has an interest in such environments.
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