Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

Great interest is now being shown in computational and mathematical neuroscience, fuelled in part by the rise in computing power, the ability to record large amounts of neurophysiological data, and advances in stochastic analysis. These techniques are leading to biophysically more realistic models. It has also become clear that both neuroscientists and mathematicians profit from collaborations in this exciting research area.
Graduates and researchers in computational neuroscience and stochastic systems, and neuroscientists seeking to learn more about recent advances in the modelling and analysis of noisy neural systems, will benefit from this comprehensive overview. The series of self-contained chapters, each written by experts in their field, covers key topics such as: Markov chain models for ion channel release; stochastically forced single neurons and populations of neurons; statistical methods for parameter estimation; and the numerical approximation of these stochastic models.
Each chapter gives an overview of a particular topic, including its history, important results in the area, and future challenges, and the text comes complete with a jargon-busting index of acronyms to allow readers to familiarize themselves with the language used.

A Quick Guide to Cancer Epidemiology is an ideal addition to Springer Briefs in Cancer Research. The Brief provides core concepts in cancer epidemiology and also gives a snapshot of the epidemiology of seventeen human cancers. The Brief aims to provide-with quantitative focus-estimates of the global burden of neoplasms, of recent and likely future trends, distribution, causes and strategies for prevention for major groups of cancers. Finally, the Brief will give an overview of severals factors that cause cancer including dietary factors, tobacco smoking, obesity and alcohol consumption.