Wood as an engineering material can be technically defined as a hygroscopic, orthotropic, biological, and permeable material having extreme chemical diversity and physical complexity with structures, that vary extensively in their shape, size, properties and function. Therefore, using wood to its best advantage and most efficiency in engineering applications, specific characteristics or chemical, physical and mechanical properties must be considered.
Recently, several applications, primarily driven by microtechnology, have emerged where the use of materials with tailored electromagnetic (dielectric) properties are necessary for a successful overall design. The “tailored” aggregate properties are achieved by combining an easily moldable base matrix with particles having dielectric properties that are chosen to deliver (desired) effective properties. In many cases, the analysis of such materials requires the simulation of the macroscopic and microscopic electromagnetic response, as well as its resulting coupled thermal response, which can be important to determine possible failures in “hot spots.” This necessitates a stress analysis. Furthermore, because, oftentimes, such processes initiate degratory chemical processes, it can be necessary to also include models for these processes as well. A central objective of this work is to provide basic models and numerical solution strategies to analyze the coupled response of such materials by direct simulation using standard laptop/desktop equipment. Accordingly, this monograph covers: (1) The foundations of Maxwell’s equations, (2) Basic homogenization theory,(3) Coupled systems (electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical and chemical),(4) Numerical methods and(5) An introduction to select biological problems.The text can be viewed as a research monograph suitable for use in an upper-division undergraduate or first year graduate course geared towards students in the applied sciences, mechanics and mathematics that have an interest in the analysis of particulate materials.
Easily the most thorough treatment of terrorisM&Apos;s complexities on the market today is how one reviewer described the set from which this single volume is drawn: the 4-volume Psychology of Terrorism. Here, Editor Chris E. Stout presents seven classic chapters from across that multivolume set, which brought together experts from around the world in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Stout includes a new introduction with this condensed version, along with appendices that will enable lay readers and professionals to recognize and treat symptoms of biological attack, take basic steps to prepare for terrorist incidents, and find resources for more information.
DNA Structure and Function, a timely and comprehensive resource, is intended for any student or scientist interested in DNA structure and its biological implications. The book provides a simple yet comprehensive introduction to nearly all aspects of DNA structure. It also explains current ideas on the biological significance of classic and alternative DNA conformations. Suitable for graduate courses on DNA structure and nucleic acids, the text is also excellent supplemental reading for courses in general biochemistry, molecular biology, and genetics.
Tomatoes are one of the most important horticultural crops in both temperate and tropical regions of the world. This book provides a concise review of our knowledge of the scientific principles underlying the biology and production of the tomato crop. Our understanding of these aspects has increased rapidly in recent years and new areas such as genetic modification and biological pest control have been developed. Topics covered include genetics and breeding, developmental processes, crop growth and yield, fruit ripening and fruit quality, irrigation and fertilization, crop protection, production in the open field, greenhouse tomato production, postharvest biology and handling. This book will be of significant interest to students and professionals in horticulture.
Advances in Marine Biology has been providing in-depth and up-to-date reviews on all aspects of Marine Biology since 1963 — over 40 years of outstanding coverage! The series is well-known for both its excellence of reviews and editing. The serial publishes in-depth and up-to-date content on a wide range of topics which will appeal to postgraduates and researchers in marine biology, fisheries science, ecology, zoology, and biological oceanography.
This General, Organic and Biochemistry text has been written for students preparing for careers in health-related fields such as nursing, dental hygiene, nutrition, medical technology and occupational therapy. It is also suited for students majoring in other fields where it is important to have an understanding of the basics of chemistry. Students need have no previous background in chemistry, but should possess basic math skills. Raymond was crafted to take advantage of recent trends in the GOB market. It is a shorter, lighter book with a new, integrated table of contents that develops general, organic, and biochemistry topics together, rather than in isolation. In introducing GOB material, this text uses an integrated approach in which related general chemistry, organic chemistry, and biochemistry topics are presented in adjacent chapters. This approach helps students see the strong connections that exist between these three branches of chemistry, and allows instructors to discuss these, interrelationships while the material is still fresh in students’ minds. Having a shorter time interval between when a topic is first presented and when it is reintroduced can help students assimilate the material more readily.
Probabilistic Modelling in Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics has been written for researchers and students in statistics, machine learning, and the biological sciences. The first part of this book provides a self-contained introduction to the methodology of Bayesian networks. The following parts demonstrate how these methods are applied in bioinformatics and medical informatics. All three fields – the methodology of probabilistic modeling, bioinformatics, and medical informatics – are evolving very quickly. The text should therefore be seen as an introduction, offering both elementary tutorials as well as more advanced applications and case studies.
This book presents concise descriptions and analysis of the classical and modern models used in mathematical biophysics. The authors ask the question ‘what new information can be provided by the models that cannot be obtained directly from experimental data?’ Actively developing fields such as regulatory mechanisms in cells and subcellular systems and electron transport and energy transport in membranes are addressed together with more classical topics such as metabolic processes, nerve conduction and heart activity, chemical kinetics, population dynamics, and photosynthesis. The main approach is to describe biological processes using different mathematical approaches necessary to reveal characteristic features and properties of simulated systems. With the emergence of powerful mathematics software packages such as MAPLE, Mathematica, Mathcad, and MatLab, these methodologies are now accessible to a wide audience.
This book covers the fundamental aspects of fiber lasers and fiber amplifiers, and includes a wide range of material from laser physics fundamentals to state-of-the-art topics, as well as industrial applications in the rapidly growing field of quantum electronics. Emphasis is placed on the nonlinear processes taking place in fiber lasers and amplifiers, their similarities, differences to, and their advantages over other solid-state lasers. The reader will learn basic principles of solid-state physics and optical spectroscopy of laser active centers in fibers, main operational laser regimes, and practical recommendations and suggestions on fiber laser research, laser applications, and laser product development. The book will be useful for students, researchers, and professionals who work with lasers, in the optical communications, chemical and biological industries.
The practice of modern medicine and biomedical research requires sophisticated information technologies with which to manage patient information, plan diagnostic procedures, interpret laboratory results, and carry out investigations. Biomedical Informatics provides both a conceptual framework and a practical inspiration for this swiftly emerging scientific discipline at the intersection of computer science, decision science, information science, cognitive science, and biomedicine. Now revised and in its third edition, this text meets the growing demand by practitioners, researchers, and students for a comprehensive introduction to key topics in the field. Authored by leaders in medical informatics and extensively tested in their courses, the chapters in this volume constitute an effective textbook for students of medical informatics and its areas of application. The book is also a useful reference work for individual readers needing to understand the role that computers can play in the provision of clinical services and the pursuit of biological questions. The volume is organized so as first to explain basic concepts and then to illustrate them with specific systems and technologies.
The hydrogen bond represents an important interaction between molecules, and the dynamics of hydrogen bonds in water create an ever-present question associated with the process of chemical and biological reactions. In spite of numerous studies, the process remains poorly understood at the microscopic level because hydrogen-bond dynamics, such as bond rearrangements and hydrogen/proton transfer reactions, are extremely difficult to probe. Those studies have been carried out by means of spectroscopic methods where the signal stems from the ensemble of a system and the hydrogen-bond dynamics were inferred indirectly. This book addresses the direct imaging of hydrogen-bond dynamics within water-based model systems assembled on a metal surface, using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The dynamics of individual hydrogen bonds in water clusters, hydroxyl clusters, and water-hydroxyl complexes are investigated in conjunction with density functional theory. In these model systems, quantum dynamics of hydrogen bonds, such as tunneling and zero-point nuclear motion, are observed in real space. Most notably, hydrogen atom relay reactions, which are frequently invoked across many fields of chemistry, are visualized and controlled by STM. This work presents a means of studying hydrogen-bond dynamics at the single-molecule level, providing an important contribution to wide fields beyond surface chemistry.
Many objects of physical, biological, and industrial interest include randomly distributed nanoscale nonuniformities, e.g., nanoparticles. Their characterization online in dynamic industrial processes and in situ in biological systems faces serious practical challenges when the rapid formation and distribution of nanoparticles takes place. This book discusses optical methods the best tools for nanoparticle monitoring, as they are fast, noninvasive, and provide a broad range of information in real time and their application in molecular biology and nanotechnology.
This eleventh volume in the Poincar Seminar Series presents an interdisciplinary perspective on the concept of Time, which poses some of the most challenging questions in science. Five articles, written by the Fields medalist C. Villani, the two outstanding theoretical physicists T. Damour and C. Jarzynski, the leading experimentalist C. Salomon, and the famous philosopher of science H. Price, describe recent developments related to the mathematical, physical, experimental, and philosophical facets of this fascinating concept. These articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in lectures to a broad scientific audience. Highlights include a description of the manifold fundamental physical issues in play with time, in particular with the changes of perspective implied by Special and General Relativity; a mathematically precise discussion of irreversibility and entropy in the context of Boltzmann’s and Vlasov’s equations; a thorough survey of the recently developed thermodynamics at the nanoscale, the scale most relevant to biological physics; a description of the new cold atom space clock PHARAO to be installed in 2015 onboard the International Space Station, which will allow a test of Einstein’s gravitational shift with a record precision of 2 10-6, and enable a test of the stability over time of the fundamental constants of physics, an issue first raised by Dirac in 1937; and last, but not least, a logical and clarifying philosophical discussion of Time’s arrow, a phrase first coined by Eddington in 1928 in a challenge to physics to resolve the puzzle of the time-asymmetry of our universe, and echoed here in a short pome en prose by C. de Mitry. This book should be of broad general interest to physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers.
The neurotransmitter dopamine has just celebrated its 50th birthday. The discovery of dopamine as a neuronal entity in the late 1950s and the notion that it serves in neurotransmission has been a milestone in the field of neuroscience research. This milestone marked the beginning of an era that explored the brain as an integrated collection of neuronal systems that one could distinguish on basis of neurotransmitter identities, and importantly, in which one started to be able to pinpoint the seat of brain disease. The mesodiencephalic dopaminergic (mdDA) system, previously designated as midbrain dopaminergic system, has received much attention since its discovery. The initial identification of dopamine as a neurotransmitter in the central nervous system (CNS) and its relevance to psychiatric and neurological disorders have stimulated a plethora of neurochemical, pharmacological and genetic studies into the function of dopamine neurons and their projections. In the last decade, studies on gene expression and development have further increased the knowledge of this neuronal population and have unmasked a new level of complexity. The start of the molecular dissection of the mdDA system has been marked by the cloning and characterization of Nurr1 and Pitx3. These transcription factors were shown to have a critical function during mdDA development. These initial studies have been followed by the identification of many other proteins that have a crucial function in the creation of a dopamine neuron permissive region, induction of precursors, induction of terminal differentiation and finally maintenance of the mdDA neuronal pool. In addition, work showing that the historically distinguished regions of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) and ventral tegmental area (VTA ) harbor molecularly distinct sets of neuronal groups with specific connectivity patterns has added a new layer ofcomplexity to how mdDA neurons are generated and function in the adult CNS. The current challenge in the field of dopamine research is to characterize the full extent of molecular processes that underlie mdDA neuron programming and to translate these findings into viable approaches for embryonic stem (ES)-cell engineering as an ultimate treatment of degenerative diseases as Parkinsons disease. The chapters presented in this book provide an overview of the different stages that are distinguished during mdDA neuronal development. Chapter 1 discusses the dopamine systems of the zebrafish, being a powerful model organism for genetic intervention on the developmental programming of neuronal systems. In Chapter 2 an overview is presented of dopamine systems that are present in the vertebrate CNS. Chapters 3-6 discuss the early specification of dopamine precursors and the programs that lead to terminal differentiation. In Chapters 7 and 8 the maintenance of dopamine neurons is discussed with a special emphasis on neurotrophic support. The specific connectivity of the dopamine system and the axon guidance rules that apply to developing dopamine neurons are described in Chapter 9. An overview of ES-cell engineering of dopamine neurons is presented in Chapters 10 and 11. The research directed towards unraveling the molecular programming of mdDA neurons continues to be highly exciting. One may expect that novel biological principles will continue to emerge from this population of neurons. In the near future the field as a whole will mature towards a more comprehensive understanding of mdDA neuronal development and network integration, and will continue to apply knowledge of dopamine neuron development and function to the treatment of human disease.
The period of adolescence involves growth, adaptation, and dramatic reorganization in almost every aspect of social and psychological development. The Encyclopedia of Adolescence offers an exhaustive and comprehensive review of current theory and research findings pertaining to this critical decade of life. Leading scientists offer accessible and easily readable reviews of biological, social, educational, occupational, and cultural factors that shape adolescent development. Issues in normative development, individual differences, and psychopathology/maladjustment are reviewed. Over 130 chapters are included, each covering a specific aspect or issue of adolescence. The chapters trace differences in the course of adolescence in different nations and among youth with different backgrounds.
Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms — both biological and social — Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on ‘The Rhythmanaly.
Introduction to Probability, Second Edition, is written for students in statistics, mathematics, engineering, computer science, operations research, actuarial science, biological sciences, economics, physics, and some of the social sciences with a background in a year-long elementary calculus, taking upper level or graduate level introduction to probability courses. Roussas utilizes his trademark clarity and economy of expression to elucidate important concepts of probability, while providing a plethora of useful examples and exercises of real world applications for students to consider.
Dynamic Systems Biology Modeling and Simuation consolidates and unifies classical and contemporary multiscale methodologies for mathematical modeling and computer simulation of dynamic biological systems from molecular/cellular, organ-system, on up to population levels. The book pedagogy is developed as a well-annotated, systematic tutorial with clearly spelled-out and unified nomenclature derived from the authors own modeling efforts, publications and teaching over half a century. Ambiguities in some concepts and tools are clarified and others are rendered more accessible and practical. The latter include novel qualitative theory and methodologies for recognizing dynamical signatures in data using structural (multicompartmental and network) models and graph theory; and analyzing structural and measurement (data) models for quantification feasibility. The level is basic-to-intermediate, with much emphasis on biomodeling from real biodata, for use in real applications.
The phrase Life, stress and death connects three terms, but is there a biological basis for that? Are there molecules that are essential to/or mediate these phenomena? This contributory volume Mortalin Biology: Life, Stress and Death is a remarkable compilation of the research outcomes on the stress protein mortalin, a member of heat shock 70 family of proteins. The book is unique as it describes mortalin playing essential role in life, stress response and death either from cancer, when it becomes hyperactive or from neuro-degeneration, when it becomes hypoactive. The book provides up-to-date knowledge on mortalin with respect to its discovery, structure, evolutionary conservation, function and signal transduction in different organisms in a simple, but most comprehensive way, that besides offering an enjoyable and in-depth reading, prompts the reader to ask further questions to explore this protein with new ideas, approaches and experiments. Twenty-one chapters by the world leaders on the specific areas of mortalin research throw light on its multi-functionality, potentials for biotechnology, diagnostics and therapeutic values. Avenues of mortalin biology, yet unexplored, hold immense promises for future, and reading this volume provides an easy, enthusiastic and energetic head-on start.
