Reviews key challenges and advances in maize breeding methods;Discusses the development of varieties with enhanced nutritional and other properties such as improved protein content and abiotic stress resistance;Summarises key steps being taken to support smallholders growing maize in developing countries

Digital technology is fundamentally altering the world we live in, but can only be truly understood in relation to the physical world we all inhabit. The most successful future products and policies will be those that take this rich digital/physical ecology seriously. The physical world is increasingly filled with digital products to the extent that the boundaries of digital and physical reality become blurred. From mundane devices such as mobile phones and washing machines, to esoteric re...

Designing User Experience presents a comprehensive introduction to the practical issue of creating interactive systems, services and products from a human-centred perspective. It develops the principles and methods of human–computer interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design (ID) to deal with the design of twenty-first-century computing and the demands for improved user experience (UX). It brings together the key theoretical foundations of human experiences when people interact with...

A transgenic organism is a plant, animal, bacterium, or other living organism that has had a foreign gene added to it by means of genetic engineering. Transgenic plants can arise by natural movement of genes between species, by cross-pollination based hybridization between different plant species (which is a common event in flowering plant evolution), or by laboratory manipulations by artificial insertion of genes from another species. Methods used in traditional breeding that generate tra...

The world of smart shoes, appliances, and phones is already here, but the practice of user experience (UX) design for ubiquitous computing is still relatively new. Design companies like IDEO and frogdesign are regularly asked to design products that unify software interaction, device design and service design -- which are all the key components of ubiquitous computing UX -- and practicing designers need a way to tackle practical challenges of design. Theory is not enough for them -- luckil...

Integrated Pest Management: Current Concepts and Ecological Perspective presents an overview of alternative measures to traditional pest management practices using biological control and biotechnology. The removal of some highly effective broad-spectrum chemicals, caused by concerns over environmental health and public safety, has resulted in the development of alternative, reduced risk crop protection products. These products, less toxic to the environment and easily integrated into biolo...

From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg, the person who is both flesh and metal, brain and electronics. But philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark sees it differently. Cyborgs, he writes, are not something to be feared--we already are cyborgs. In Natural-Born Cyborgs, Clark argues that what makes humans so different from other species is our capacity to fully incorporate tools and supporting cultu...

Awarded with the US National Indie Excellence Award 2014 in Social Media. This book is about digital media. Even more, the book is about us. It explains how the ever-growing flood of digital media affects our perceptions of the world, change our behaviors and eventually transform our very existence. In the era of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Apple, being online is the standard. We spend many hours a day gazing at our screens, traversing the virtual realm, and posting our tweets, tags, an...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption. Being the only vegetatively propagated species among the world’s main five staple c...

Understanding Virtual Reality arrives at a time when the technologies behind virtual reality have advanced to the point that it is possible to develop and deploy meaningful, productive virtual reality applications. The aim of this thorough, accessible exploration is to help you take advantage of this moment, equipping you with the understanding needed to identify and prepare for ways VR can be used in your field, whatever your field may be. By approaching VR as a communications medium, the...

A whole host of motivations are driving the development of the “renewables” industry— ranging from the desire to develop sustainable energy resources to the reduction of dangerous greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. All energy utilized on the earth is ultimately derived from the sun through photosynthesis—the only truly renewable commodity.As concerns regarding increasing energy prices, global warming and renewable resources continue to grow, so has scientific disco...

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? What can it do and how is it created? In this highly accessible guide to the subject, Richard Urwin bases his assessment of AI on the definition of AI as a tool that is 'constructed to aid or substitute for human thought'. He explains how AI came about, the importance of the development of the computer and then examines how AI has developed over the years through the construction of computer programs and how the language used to construct these program...