The senses can be powerful triggers for memories of our past, eliciting a range of both positive and negative emotions. The smell or taste of a long forgotten sweet can stimulate a rich emotional response connected to our childhood, or a piece of music transport us back to our adolescence. Sense memories can be linked to all the senses - sound, vision, and even touch can also trigger intense and emotional memories of our past.
In The Proust Effect, we learn about why sense memories are special, how they work in the brain, how they can enrich our daily life, and even how they can help those suffering from problems involving memory. A sense memory can be evoked by a smell, a taste, a flavor, a touch, a sound, a melody, a color or a picture, or by some other involuntary sensory stimulus. Any of these can triggers a vivid, emotional reliving of a forgotten event in the past.
Exploring the senses in thought-provoking scientific experiments and artistic projects, this fascinating book offers new insights into memory - drawn from neuroscience, the arts, and professions such as education, elderly care, health care therapy and the culinary profession.

Advances in genomics and biotechnology are enabling quantum leaps in the understanding of soybean molecular biology. The problems that face the soybean industry also are diversifying and escalating on a global scale. Designing Soybeans for 21st Century outlines current and emerging barriers in the global soybean market, principally: 1) long-term ability to sustain production to meet continued growth in demand for soybean and soybean products; 2) governmental and legislative policies; 3) global access to advances in soybean technology; and 4) customer and consumer trends in the use of soybean products. The book also addresses state-of-art steps that should help move soybeans past these market barriers as advances in genomics and genetic engineering are deployed to design soybeans and soybean products that meet the challenges of 21st century markets.

For over thirty years Susan Wolf has been writing about moral and nonmoral values and the relation between them. This volume collects Wolf's most important essays on the topics of morality, love, and meaning, ranging from her classic essay "Moral Saints" to her most recent "The Importance of Love." Wolf's essays warn us against the common tendency to classify values in terms of a dichotomy that contrasts the personal, self-interested, or egoistic with the impersonal, altruistic or moral. On Wolf's view, this tendency ignores or distorts the significance of such values as love, beauty, and truth, and neglects the importance of meaningfulness as a dimension of the good life. These essays show us how a self-conscious recognition of the variety of values leads to new understandings of the point, the content, and the limits of morality and to new ways of thinking about happiness and well-being.

Despite the massive scale of global inequalities, until recently few political philosophers or bioethicists addressed their ethical implications. Questions of justice were thought to be primarily internal to the nation state. Over the last decade or so, there has been an explosion of interest in the philosophical issues surrounding global justice. These issues are of direct relevance to bioethics. The links between poverty and health imply that we cannot separate questions of global health from questions about fair distribution of global resources and the institutions governing the world order. Similarly, as increasing numbers of medical trials are conducted in the developing world, researchers and their sponsors have to confront the special problems of doing research in an unjust world, with corresponding obligations to correct injustice and avoid exploitation. This book presents a collection of original essays by leading thinkers in political theory, philosophy, and bioethics. They address the key issues concerning global justice and bioethics from two perspectives. The first is ideal theory, which is concerned with the social institutions that would regulate a just world. What is the relationship between human rights and the provision of health care? How, if at all, should a global order distinguish between obligations to compatriots and others? The second perspective is from non-ideal theory, which governs how people should behave in the unjust world in which we actually find ourselves. What sort of medical care should actual researchers working in impoverished countries offer their subjects? What should NGOs do in the face of cultural practices with which they deem unethical? If coordinated international action will not happen, what ought individual states to do? These questions have more than theoretical interest; their answers are of direct practical import for policymakers, researchers, advocates, NGOs, scholars, and others. This book is the first collection to comprehensively address the intersection of global justice and bioethical dilemmas.

While scholars typically view Plato's engagement with medicine as uniform and largely positive, Susan B. Levin argues that from the Gorgias through the Laws, his handling of medicine unfolds in several key phases. Further, she shows that Plato views medicine as an important rival for authority on phusis (nature) and eudaimonia (flourishing). Levin's arguments rest on careful attention both to Plato and to the Hippocratic Corpus. Levin shows that an evident but unexpressed tension involving medicine's status emerges in the Gorgias and is explored in Plato's critiques of medicine in the Symposium and Republic. In the Laws, however, this rivalry and tension dissolve. Levin addresses the question of why Plato's rivalry with medicine is put to rest while those with rhetoric and poetry continue. On her account, developments in his views of human nature, with their resulting impact on his political thought, drive Plato's striking adjustments involving medicine in the Laws. Levin's investigation of Plato is timely: for the first time in the history of bioethics, the value of ancient philosophy is receiving notable attention. Most discussions focus on Aristotle's concept of phronesis (practical wisdom); here, Levin argues that Plato has much to offer bioethics as it works to address pressing concerns about the doctor-patient tie, medical professionalism, and medicine's relationship to society.

Now published by "Academic Press" and revised from the author's previous "Five Kingdoms, Third Edition", this extraordinary, all inclusive catalogue of the world's living organisms describes the diversity of the major groups, or phyla, of nature's most inclusive taxa. Developed after consultation with specialists, this modern classification scheme is consistent both with the fossil record and with recent molecular, morphological and metabolic data. Generously illustrated, now in full color, "Kingdoms and Domains" is remarkably easy to read. It accesses the full range of life forms that still inhabit our planet and logically and explicitly classifies them according to their evolutionary relationships. Definitive characteristics of each phylum are professionally described in ways that, unlike most scientific literature, profoundly respect the needs of educators, students and nature lovers. This work is meant to be of interest to all evolutionists as well as to conservationists, ecologists, genomicists, geographers, microbiologists, museum curators, oceanographers, paleontologists and, especially nature lovers whether artists, gardeners or environmental activists. "Kingdoms and Domains" is a unique and indispensable reference for anyone intrigued by a planetary phenomenon: the spectacular diversity of life, both microscopic and macroscopic, as we know it only on Earth today. This work also carries: new foreword by Edward O. Wilson; the latest concepts of molecular systematics, symbiogenesis, and the evolutionary importance of microbes; newly expanded chapter openings that define each kingdom and place its members in context in geological time and ecological space; definitions of terms in the glossary and throughout the book; ecostrips, illustrations that place organisms in their most likely environments such as deep sea vents, tropical forests, deserts or hot sulfur springs; and, a new table that compares features of the most inclusive taxa. This book shows an application of a logical, authoritative, inclusive and coherent overall classification scheme based on evolutionary principles.

The book is based on data collected during the past 10 years by Zackenberg Ecological Research Operations (ZERO) at Zackenberg Research Station in northeast Greenland. This volume covers the function of Arctic ecosystems based on the most comprehensive long-term data set in the world from a well-defined Arctic ecosystem. Editors offer a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of how climate variability is influencing an Arctic ecosystem and how the Arctic ecosystems have inherent feedback mechanisms interacting with climate variability or change.
* The latest research on the functioning of Arctic ecosystems
* Supplements current books on Arctic climate impact assessment as a case study for ecological specialists
* Discusses the complex perpetuating effects on Earth
* Vital information on modeling ecosystem responses to understand future climates

Levels of mycotoxin contamination in agricultural commodities are regulated in more than 100 countries, and exposure to these naturally occurring toxins presents serious risks to the health of humans and animals with negative impacts to commodity values. This symposium series book presents significant scientific developments in the multifaceted approach to reducing exposure to these naturally occurring toxins. A broad-spectrum of subject matter of the multidisciplinary field of mycotoxin research is conveniently compiled in this single volume, and general themes include prevention, control, exposure, molecular biology, biosynthesis, analytical methodology, and emerging techniques. The book opens with an overview of prevention of mycotoxin production by means of biological control and human exposure to contaminated foods, including tofu, apples, figs, and a broad range of fruits.
The second section focuses on molecular biological approaches to control mycotoxin exposure. Topics covered include genomic approaches, detoxification, structure-activity studies of biosynthetic precursors, and mycotoxin biosynthesis. The success of these strategies is supported by the reduction of mycotoxin occurrence and incidence in foods. Accurate estimates of mycotoxin concentration in foods are important for food safety and wholesomeness.
The final section covers analytical approaches, including sampling plans for foods and dietary supplements, extraction efficiency of mycotoxins from naturally contaminated grains, traditional detection methods such as chromatography/mass spectrometry, and emerging techniques such as the use of molecularly imprinted polymers for purification and isolation and cyclodextrins for fluorescent enhancement of several mycotoxins.

In the last fifteen years, there has been significant interest in studying the brain structures involved in moral judgments using novel techniques from neuroscience such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Many people, including a number of philosophers, believe that results from neuroscience have the potential to settle seemingly intractable debates concerning the nature, practice, and reliability of moral judgments. This has led to a flurry of scientific and philosophical activities, resulting in the rapid growth of the new field of moral neuroscience. There is now a vast array of ongoing scientific research devoted towards understanding the neural correlates of moral judgments, accompanied by a large philosophical literature aimed at interpreting and examining the methodology and the results of this research. This is the first volume to take stock of fifteen years of research of this fast-growing field of moral neuroscience and to recommend future directions for research. It features the most up-to-date research in this area, and it presents a wide variety of perspectives on this topic.

Although we no longer live in the relative simplicity of the Jurassic age, and even though we are not aware of them, primitive mammalian brain that developed in that era still live on inside our skulls and remain crucial to our daily functions. The challenges we face today in the information age--how to process the vastly greater, more varied and quickly changing inputs we receive--are very different from those that our ancestors faced during the Jurassic age. As we struggle to process overwhelming amounts of information, we may sometimes ask whether our brains can change to help us adapt. In fact, our brains have always changed gradually, so the questions we should ask are really how our brains will change, and whether we will be able to take full advantage of the changes, perhaps even enhance them, to help us keep up with the accelerating evolution of machines. To understand how our brains will change, we need to understand how they evolved in the first place, as well as how the interactions of the resulting brain structures, including the relics of primitive mammalian and even reptilian processes, influence how we think and act.
In Mind from Body, Don Tucker, one of the most original thinkers about organic information processing, provides a fascinating analysis of how our brains have become what they are today and speculates intriguingly about what they could be tomorrow. He presents important research that explains how personal experience creates the emotional and motivational bases of each of our thoughts, even though we are usually not aware that it is happening. Tucker shows that in exploring how these bodily thought processes still determine how we react to the world andmake decisions, we can become more rational in our actions, free ourselves from fruitless or even self-destructive patterns of behavior, become more efficient, and perhaps even wiser. By combining the most up-to-date scientific thought and hands-on experimental results, expressed clearly and compellingly, along with a story of hypothetical decision-making, Tucker explicates what is happening behind our thought processes as our minds struggle to maintain the pace of the information age.

The book is based on data collected during the past ten years by Zackenberg Ecological Research Operations (ZERO) at Zackenberg Research Station in Northeast Greenland. This volume covers the function of Arctic ecosystems based on the most comprehensive long-term data set in the world from a well-defined Arctic ecosystem. Editors offer a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of how climate variability is influencing an Arctic ecosystem and how the Arctic ecosystems have inherent feedback mechanisms interacting with climate variability or change.
* The latest research on the functioning of Arctic ecosystems
* Supplement current books on arctic climate impact assessment as a case study for ecological specialists
* Discusses the complex perpetuating effects on Earth
* Vital information on modelling ecosystem responses to understand future climates

This textbook provides a thorough and comprehensive overview of the human brain and spinal cord for medical and graduate students as well as residents in the clinical neurosciences. Standing on the shoulders of training from outstanding scientist-teacher mentors and based on more than 30 years of experience teaching about the brain and spinal cord to medical and graduate students, this single authored text presents everything the reader would need as they begin their study of the nervous system. At the same time the experienced neuroscientist will find much useful and valuable information in these pages that is based almost exclusively on studies in experimental primates and observations in humans. Every effort has been made to present the complexities of the nervous system as simply and clearly as possible. The careful reader will discover a clarity and depth of coverage that makes the reading both instructional and enjoyable. Topics are presented logically and the text in an easy-to-read style. The accompanying line drawings emphasize important concepts in a clear and uncluttered manner.
Topics presented:
- Neurons, glial cells, degeneration, regeneration, axonal transport
- Review of the development of the human nervous system
- Overview of the anatomy of the spinal cord, brain stem and forebrain
- General sensory paths (pain, temperature, touch, pressure, proprioception)
- Special sensory systems (auditory, vestibular, visual, olfactory and gustatory)
- Eye movements and visual reflexes
- Comprehensive presentation of the regions involved in motor activity including the clinical manifestation of injuries to these motor areas
- Limbic system, hypothalamusand the autonomic nervous system
- Lobes of the brain, clinically important cortical areas and the results of lesions in these areas
- Blood supply to the spinal cord, brain stem, and brain including classical brain stem syndromes
- The meninges and the ventricular system
- Numerous helpful clinical correlations that emphasize the practical application of basic anatomical information.
* Presents the complexities of the nervous system as simply and clearly as possible
* Written with a clarity and depth of coverage that makes the reading both instructional and enjoyable
* Includes numerous illustrations emphasizing important concepts

Cognitive psychology has matured and flourished in the last half-century, as new theories, research tools, and theoretical frameworks have allowed cognitive psychologists and researchers to explore a broad array of topics. In the same vein, the depth of understanding and the methodological and theoretical sophistication have also grown in wonderful ways. Given the expanse of the field, an up-to-date and inclusive resource such as this handbook is needed for aspiring generalists who wish to read the book cover to cover, and for the many readers who are simply curious to know the current happenings in other cognition laboratories. Guided by this need, this volume's 64 chapters cover all aspects of cognition, spanning perceptual issues, attention, memory, knowledge representation, language, emotional influences, judgment, problem solving, and the study of individual differences in cognition. Additional chapters turn to the control of complex actions and the social, cultural, and developmental context of cognition. The authors include a mix of well-established influential figures and younger colleagues in order to gain an understanding of the field's forward trajectory. The volume also includes a mix of "tutorial" chapters and chapters that powerfully represent a particular research team's point of view.

Many people believe that pleasure and desire are obstacles to reasonable and intelligent behavior. In The Pleasure Center, Morten Kringelbach reveals that what we desire, what pleases us--in fact, our most base, animalistic tendencies--are actually very important sources of information. They motivate us for a good reason. And understanding that reason, taking that reason into account, and harnessing and directing that reason, can make us much more rational and effective people. In exploring the many facets of pleasure, desire and emotion, Kringelbach takes us through the whole spectrum of human experience, such as how emotion fuels our interest in things, allowing us to pay attention and learn. He investigates the reward systems of the brain and sheds light on some of the most interesting new discoveries about pleasure and desire. Kringelbach concludes that if we understand and accept how pleasure and desire arise in the complex interaction between the brain's activity and our own experiences, we can discover what helps us enjoy life, enabling us to make better decisions and, ultimately, lead happier lives.

Galvani's Spark chronicles the gradual understanding of the nerve impulse which is the basis of all thoughts, sensations and actions. The story begins with Luigi Galvani's chance observation of a spark from a friction machine causing a frog's leg to twitch from across the room. The accurate recording and the understanding of the properties of the nerve fiber membrane that makes the impulse possible became the objectives of neuroscientists for over 200 years.
The author, Alan J. McComas finely interweaves the stories, the challenges, and the controversies of the most prominent figures in neuroscience, from the histological descriptions of nerve cells by Cajal to the discovery of a three-dimensional structure of ion channels in cell membranes by MacKinnon. Along the way he details the first recordings of the impulse with a cathode ray oscilloscope by Gasser and Erlanger, Adrian's discovery that stimulus intensity is coded by the frequency of nerve impulses, and Hodgkin and Huxley's brilliant voltage clamp experiments, amongst many others.
The recognition by Galvani that muscles and nerves have an electrical component triggered the field of neurophysiology and in turn has produced some of the greatest discoveries in neuroscience. 16 investigators of the nerve impulse went on to win or share Nobel prizes and this book not only emphasizes their work but also traces their brilliant careers. For anyone interested in the nervous system and the history of neuroscience, Galvani's Spark: The Story of the Nerve Impulse is essential reading.

This book should be of value to anyone interested in bird evolution and taxonomy, biogeography, distributional history, dispersal and migration patterns. It provides an up-to-date synthesis of current knowledge on species formation, and the factors influencing current distribution patterns. It draws heavily on new information on Earth history, including past glacial and other climatic changes, on new developments in molecular biology and palaeontology, and on recent studies of bird distribution and migration patterns, to produce a coherent account of the factors that have influenced bird species diversity and distribution patterns worldwide.
Received the Best Bird Book of the Year award for 2004 from British Birds magazine.
* Winner of the British Birds/British Trust for Ornithology, Bird Book of the Year 2004
* The first book to deal comprehensively with bird speciation and biogeography
* Up-to-date synthesis of new information
* Clearly written
* No previous book covers the same ground
* Many maps and diagrams
* Makes difficult and widely scattered information accessible and easily understood
* A sound base for future research
* Takes full account of recent developments in molecular biology

Recent years have seen the rise of a remarkable partnership between the social and computational sciences on the phenomena of emotions. Rallying around the term Affective Computing, this research can be seen as revival of the cognitive science revolution, albeit garbed in the cloak of affect, rather than cognition. Traditional cognitive science research, to the extent it considered emotion at all, cases it as at best a heuristic but more commonly a harmful bias to cognition. More recent scholarship in the social sciences has upended this view.
Increasingly, emotions are viewed as a form of information processing that serves a functional role in human cognition and social interactions. Emotions shape social motives and communicate important information to social partners. When communicating face-to-face, people can rapidly detect nonverbal affective cues, make inferences about the other party's mental state, and respond in ways that co-construct an emotional trajectory between participants. Recent advances in biometrics and artificial intelligence are allowing computer systems to engage in this nonverbal dance, on the one hand opening a wealth of possibilities for human-machine systems, and on the other, creating powerful new tools for behavioral science research.
Social Emotions in Nature and Artifact reports on the state-of-the-art in both social science theory and computational methods, and illustrates how these two fields, together, can both facilitate practical computer/robotic applications and illuminate human social processes.

Our ability to map and intervene in the structure of the human brain is proceeding at a very quick rate. Advances in psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery have given us fresh insights into the neurobiological basis of human thought and behavior. Technologies like MRI and PET scans can detect early signs of psychiatric disorders before they manifest symptoms. Electrical and magnetic stimulation of the brain can non-invasively relieve symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and other conditions resistant to treatment, while implanting neuro-electrodes can help patients with Parkinsons and other motor control-related diseases. New drugs can help regenerate neuronal connections otherwise disrupted by schizophrenia and similar diseases.
All these procedures and drugs alter the neural correlates of our mind and raise fascinating and important ethical questions about their benefits and harms. They are, in a sense, among the most profound bioethical questions we face, since these techniques can touch on the deepest aspects of the human mind: free will; personal identity; the self; and the soul. This is the first single-author book on what has come to be known as neuroethics. Walter Glannon uses a philosophical framework that is fully informed by cutting edge neuroscience as well as contemporary legal cases such as Terri Schiavo, to offer readers an introduction to this fascinating topic. He starts by describing the state of the art in neuroscientific research and treatment, and gives the reader an up-to-date picture of the brain. Glannon then looks at the ethical implications of various kinds of treatments, such as: whether or not brain imaging will end up changing our viewson free will and moral responsibility; whether patients should always be told that they are at future risk for neurological diseases; if erasing unconscious emotional memories implicated in depression can go too far; if forcing behavior-modifying drugs or surgery on violent offenders can ever be justified; the implications of drugs that enhance cognitive abilities; and how to define brain death and the criteria for the withdrawal of life-support. While not exhaustive, Glannons work addresses a wide range of fascinating issues and his pathbreaking work should appeal to philosophers, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, radiologists, psychologists, and bioethicists.

In The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System, Michael Graziano offers a fundamentally new theory of motor cortex organization: the rendering of the movement repertoire onto the cortex. The action repertoire of an animal is highly dimensional, whereas the cortical sheet is two-dimensional. Rendering the action space onto the cortex therefore results in a complex pattern, explaining the otherwise inexplicable details of the motor cortex organization. This clearly written book book includes a complete history of motor cortex research from its discovery to the present, a discussion of the major issues in motor cortex research, and an account of recent experiments that led to Graziano's "action map" view. Though focused on the motor cortex, the book includes a range of topics from an explanation of how primates put food in their mouths, to the origins of social beahvior such as smiling and laughing, to the mysterious link between movement disorders and autism. This book is written for a general audience, and should be of interest to experts, students, and the scientific lay.

DNA sequence specificity is a sub-specialty in the general area of molecular recognition. This area includes macromolecular-molecular interactions (e.g., protein-DNA), oligomer-DNA interacitons (e.g., triple strands), and ligand-DNA interactions (e.g., drug-DNA). It is this latter group of DNA sequence specificity interactions that is the subject of Volumes 1 and 2 of "Advances in DNA Sequence Specific Agents." As was the case for Volume 1, Part A also covers methodology, but in Volume 2 we include calorimetric titrations, molecular modeling, X-ray crystallographic and NMR structural studies, and transcriptional assays. Part B also follows the same format as Volume 1 and describes the sequence specificities and covalent and noncovalent interactions of small ligands with DNA.
This volume is aimed in general at scientists who have an interest in deciphering the molecular mechanisms for sequence recognition of DNA. The methods have general applicability to small molecules as well as oligomers and proteins, while the examples provide general principles involved in sequence recognition.

This practical book provides the detailed methodology and expert guidance required for measuring and manipulating cytosolic ion concentrations. In addition, the strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls of various techniques are presented. It is an invaluable source for those needing an objective evaluation of current methodologies and for those contemplating setting up such procedures.
Key Features
* A one-source reference for measuring and manipulating intracellular ions and for comparing and evaluating current methodologies
* Includes overviews of
* Optical probes and reagents
* Fabrication and use of ion-selective microelectrodes
* Use of NMR spectroscopy
* Ionophores

Gene probes, whether RNA or DNA, have played a central role in the rapid development of molecular biology. The wide variety of applications is matched by a considerable diversity in the methods used for generating probes, a complete account of which would be very difficult to make. Instead, this second volume in the series combines a selection of newer gene probe procedures with a review of the most important established methods, together with some examples of the ways in which gene probes can be applied. In doing so, the book aims to act not only as an introductory manual for newcomers to the field, but also as a means of broadening the horizons of existing researchers.