Present-day society asks more from agriculture than just the production of food. Agriculture is now required to be concerned with the quality of food, ecosystem services, inclusion of marginalized populations, revitalization of rural territories, energy production, etc. This opening up of the future of agriculture encourages rural actors to experiment with new farming systems, using imagination, creativity and determination to replace dominant models. At the same time, low-cost mass-produc...

Viruses are the smallest living things known to science, yet they hold the entire planet in their sway. Rabbits with Horns and Other Astounding Viruses explores the bizarre places viruses dwell, and considers the often unexpected ways they influence our world. From agricultural production and crystal caves to rabbits with horns and cervical cancer, viruses are behind many of the wonders—some fascinating, some frightening—of the natural world, as well as some of our greatest medica...

“We’re born in blood. Our family histories are contained in it, our bodies nourished by it daily. Five quarts run through each of us, along some sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, and capillaries.”–fromFive QuartsIn the national bestseller Sleep Demons, Bill Hayes took us on a trailblazing trip through the night country of insomnia. Now he is our guide on a whirlwind journey through history, literature, mythology, and science by means of the great red river that runs f...

Epigenetic Mechanisms in Cancer provides a comprehensive analysis of epigenetic signatures that govern disease development, progression and metastasis. Epigenetic signatures dictating tumor etiologies present an opportunity for biomarker identification which has broad potential for improving diagnosis, prognosis, prediction, and risk assessment. This volumes offers a unique evaluation of signature differences in childhood, sex-specific and race-specific cancers, and in doing so broadly ill...

Animals in Irish Literature and Culture spans the early modern period to the present, exploring colonial, post-colonial, and globalized manifestations of Ireland as country and state as well as the human animal and non-human animal migrations that challenge a variety of literal and cultural borders.

This is a collection of multiple choice questions on five subtopics: Subspecialties of human anatomy and physiology, Structural organization of the human body, Body systems, Homeostasis and Feedback systems. Question answers are provided in a separate section after each bank of subtopic questions.

This book is based on a one semester course that the authors have been teaching for several years, and includes two sets of case studies. The first includes chemostat models, predator-prey interaction, competition among species, the spread of infectious diseases, and oscillations arising from bifurcations. In developing these topics, readers will also be introduced to the basic theory of ordinary differential equations, and how to work with MATLAB without having any prior programming exper...

The first edition of Geometric Morphometrics for Biologists has been the primary resource for teaching modern geometric methods of shape analysis to biologists who have a stronger background in biology than in multivariate statistics and matrix algebra. These geometric methods are appealing to biologists who approach the study of shape from a variety of perspectives, from clinical to evolutionary, because they incorporate the geometry of organisms throughout the data analysis. The second e...

This proceedings presents recent practical applications of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. It contains the proceedings of the 9th International Conference onPractical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics held at University of Salamanca, Spain, at June 3rd-5th, 2015. The International Conference on Practical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics (PACBB) is an annual international meeting dedicated to emerging and challenging applied resear...

A Very Short Introduction on Evolution.And then came Homo Erectus―the upright monkey―and the Ducati Girl. The original theory on the evolution of man is still uncertain; evolutionists couldn't agree on the real face of all these homos, and after all this fuss, life seems to have started all of the sudden, out of nowhere; fossils are the testimonies, right? The Ducati Girl is skeptical and she wants answers. Can the truth be revealed?

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology, CMSB 2015, held in Nantes, France, in September 2015. The 20 full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 full and 4 short paper submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the analysis of biological systems, networks and data such as model checking, stochastic analysis, hybrid systems, circadian clock, time se...

This book highlights recent advances in natural computing, including biology and its theory, bio-inspired computing, computational aesthetics, computational models and theories, computing with natural media, philosophy of natural computing, and educational technology. It presents extended versions of the best papers selected from the “8th International Workshop on Natural Computing” (IWNC8), a symposium held in Hiroshima, Japan, in 2014. The target audience is not limited to researchers wo...