Page 15
Page 15
Essential oils as antibacterial agents
An alarm increase in the rate of emerging of resistant bacteria have been causing a great public concern worldwide. This problem of increasing resistance has necessitated the search for safe and effective factors that may be used to treat persistent bacterial infections or modify the currently available antibiotics. An experimental approach, using agar diffusion method was used to estimate the antibacterial properties of 5 essential oils (cinnamon, clove, peppermint, rosemary and thyme) each one individually, in pure and commercial form, against 3 of the bacterial strains that cause common skin infections which are gram negative bacteria (Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and gram positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus), obtained from clinical sources. Only two of the commercial oils had an antibacterial effect on both gram negative bacteria (E. coli) and gram positive bacteria (S. aureus) and in lesser extent on gram negative bacteria (P. aeruginosa).synergy.
Essential dental therapeutics
A practical guide to drugs and their effects on dental care. Covering both medical and dental prescribing, all major categories of prescription drugs, their possible side effects, and potential drug interactions are discussed. The medical section is succinct and easily understandable, providing busy dentists with the information they need about medical conditions and the drugs used to treat them. The dental section offers practical, straightforward information that is relevant to everyday dental prescribing.
Error-Correction Coding and Decoding : Bounds, Codes, Decoders, Analysis and Applications
This book discusses both the theory and practical applications of self-correcting data, commonly known as error-correcting codes. The applications included demonstrate the importance of these codes in a wide range of everyday technologies, from smartphones to secure communications and transactions. Written in a readily understandable style,This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in error-correcting codes and their applications, ranging from non-experts to professionals at the forefront of research in their field.
Error-Correcting Linear Codes : Classification by Isometry and Applications
This text offers a thorough introduction to the mathematical concepts behind the theory of error-correcting linear codes. Care is taken to introduce the necessary algebraic concepts, for instance the theory of finite fields, the polynomial rings over such fields and the ubiquitous concept of group actions that allows the classification of codes by isometry. The book provides in-depth coverage of important topics like cyclic codes and the coding theory used in compact disc players. The final four chapters cover advanced and algorithmic topics like the classification of linear codes by isometry, the enumeration of isometry classes, random generation of codes, the use of lattice basis reduction to compute minimum distances, the explicit construction of codes with given parameters, as well as the systematic evaluation of representatives of all isometry classes of codes.
Enzymes and drugs
Enzyme dysfunction, an essential catalyst for the smooth running of biochemical reactions and the maintenance of vital processes, is at the root of many pathologies that have paved the way for the development of numerous drugs. Aimed at pharmacists, biologists, biochemists, doctors, veterinarians, medicinal chemists and students from a wide range of disciplines, Enzymes and Drugs brings together, for the first time, extensive documentation highlighting the relationships between a large number of drugs and enzymes. The book also highlights new prospects for therapeutic discoveries offered by enzyme targeting. Numerous applications have been developed thanks to strategies for studying enzyme inhibition or activation, as well as the development of allosteric effectors, presented with their advantages and disadvantages. Various rare diseases, known as "orphan" diseases, have resulted from enzyme deficiency or absence. For their treatment, the introduction of substitute enzymes has led to major therapeutic advances.
Enzyme-Catalyzed Synthesis of Polymers
New polymers have been developed and "old" polymers have been generated using novel synthetic strategies. This book contains seven chapters that cover in great deatail the use of enzymes to synthesize a range of polymers. It also makes use of a large number of examples to summarize the salient features of the enzymatic reactions and resulting polymeric properties.
Enzyme Biocatalysis : Principles and Applications
This book was written with the purpose of providing a sound basis for the design of enzymatic reactions based on kinetic principles, but also to give an updated vision of the potentials and limitations of biocatalysis, especially with respect to recent app- cations in processes of organic synthesis. The ?rst ?ve chapters are structured in the form of a textbook, going from the basic principles of enzyme structure and fu- tion to reactor design for homogeneous systems with soluble enzymes and hete- geneous systems with immobilized enzymes. The last chapter of the book is divided into six sections that represent illustrative case studies of biocatalytic processes of industrial relevance or potential, written by experts in the respective ?elds.
Environments for Multi-Agent Systems ; 1st International Workshop, E4MAS, 2004, New York, NY, July 19, 2004, Revised Selected Papers
The modern ?eld of multiagent systems has developed from two main lines of earlier research. Its practitioners generally regard it as a form of arti?cial intelligence (AI). Some of its earliest work was reported in a series of workshops in the US dating from1980,revealinglyentitled,“DistributedArti?cialIntelligence,”andpioneers often quoted a statement attributed to Nils Nilsson that “all AI is distributed. ” The locus of classical AI was what happens in the head of a single agent, and much MAS research re?ects this heritage with its emphasis on detailed modeling of the mental state and processes of individual agents. From this perspective, intelligenceisultimatelythepurviewofasinglemind,thoughitcanbeampli?ed by appropriate interactions with other minds. These interactions are typically mediated by structured protocols of various sorts, modeled on human conver- tional behavior. But the modern ?eld of MAS was not born of a single parent. A few - searchershavepersistentlyadvocatedideasfromthe?eldofarti?ciallife(ALife). These scientists were impressed by the complex adaptive behaviors of commu- ties of animals (often extremely simple animals, such as insects or even micro- ganisms). The computational models on which they drew were often created by biologists who used them not to solve practical engineering problems but to test their hypotheses about the mechanisms used by natural systems. In the ar- ?cial life model, intelligence need not reside in a single agent, but emerges at the level of the community from the nonlinear interactions among agents. - cause the individual agents are often subcognitive, their interactions cannot be modeled by protocols that presume linguistic competence.
Environmental Security in Harbors and Coastal Areas : Management Using Comparative Risk Assessment and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
This book explores the challenges facing coastal areas during the next few decades and the difficult decisions needed to prevent a repeat of the past. Establishing, maintaining or enhancing a sense of environmental security in different coastal regions and improving the management of critical infrastructure will require (i) matching human demands with available environmental resources; (ii) recognition of environmental security threats and infrastructure vulnerabilities; and, (iii) identification of the range of available options for preventing and/or minimizing natural disasters, technological failures, and/or terror actions. This book emphasizes beliefs that the convergence of seemingly disparate viewpoints and often uncertain and limited information is possible only by using one or more available risk assessment methodologies and decision-making tools such as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).
Environmental Risk Assessment : Quantitative Measures, Anthropogenic Influences, Human Impact
The world is a dirty place and getting dirtier all the time. The reasons for this ever-increasing lack of cleanliness are not hard to find, being basically caused by the actions of the six billion people who inhabit the planet. The needs of the people for air, water, food, housing, clothing, heating, materials, oil, gas, minerals, metals, chemicals, and so forth have, over the centuries, given rise to a variety of environmental problems that have been exacerbated or been newly created by the industrialization of the world, the increase in population, and the increase in longevity of the population. The costs of cleaning even fractions of the known environmental problems are truly enormous, as detailed in the volume Environmental Risk Analysis (I. Lerche and E. Paleologos, 2001, McGraw-Hill). The chances of causing new environmental problems, and their associated costs of clean up, are equally challenging in terms of anthropogenic influences and also of the natural environmental problems that can be triggered by humanity.
Environmental Photochemistry ; Part II
Photochemical reactions play a major role in the environment including a wide range of reactions in the atmosphere, natural waters, soil and living organisms. This new volume on Environmental Photochemistry up-dates the previous edition with chapters on basic aspects including concepts of photochemical transformations and mechanistic photochemical processes in the atmosphere and water. In addition a range of applications are also detailed such as advanced photochemical oxidation processes for water and air treatment as well as applications of photocatalysis for surface treatment and nuclear fuel reprocessing. The new edition provides a critical up to date overview of the most important research in the field of environmental photochemistry.
Environmental Governance in Latin America
The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.
Environmental Chemistry : Green Chemistry and Pollutants in Ecosystems
Environmental chemistry is a new, fast developing science aimed at deciphering fundamental mechanisms ruling the behaviour of pollutants in ecosystems. Applying this knowledge to current environmental issues leads to the remediation of environmental media, and to new, low energy, low emission, sustainable processes. This book describes the state-of-the-art advances regarding the pollution of water, soils, atmosphere, food and living organisms by toxic metals, fossil fuels, pesticides and other organic pollutants. Furthermore, the eco-toxicology section presents novel bio-assays to assess the toxicity of various pollutants such as dioxins and endocrine disrupters within complex media. The green chemistry section highlights novel chemical reactions based upon environmentally friendly conditions. The analytical chemistry section describes very sensitive methods which trace the fate of pollutants in complex ecosystems.
Environmental and Microbial Relationships
After the publication of Volume IV in 1997, the introduction of molecular methods into ecology led to significant new findings. Emphasizing these advances, the chapters for the second edition have been completely updated and revised. This volume provides insight into current research on fungal populations and communities. It focuses on fungal responses to the physical environment, interactions with other fungi, microorganisms and invertebrates, the role of fungi in ecosystem processes such as decomposition and nutrient cycling, and aspects of biogeography and conservation. Several chapters deal with various applications in, e.g. biological pest control, natural products discovery, and the degradation of toxic organic compounds. This is an invaluable source of information both for scientists who wish to update their knowledge of current progress and for graduate students interested in obtaining a first overview of this field of research.
Entropy and Energy : A Universal Competition
Entropy and Energy- a Universal Competition" is a students textbook as well as a scientific monograph. The concepts of entropy and energy embody the effects of random walk in a body and of deterministic strife respectively, and are therefore often in competition. The book gives instructive examples from elementary thermodynamics and physico-chemistry and extrapolates the notion to non-standard thermodynamic subjects like shape memory, dissipation of the earth's atmosphere, and sociology
Entrepreneurial responses to chronic adversity : The bright, the dark, and the in between
Extends recent work on entrepreneurship in response to adverse events to explore entrepreneurial responses by people who face chronic adversity more deeply. Instead of focusing on the sort of responses intended to destroy the institutions that create and sustain chronic adversity, the authors are interested in how individuals use entrepreneurial action to find a way within these adverse constraints to improve their lives. They explore the positive outcomes arising from these entrepreneurial actions for the entrepreneurial actor and their family members as well as the negative consequences of these entrepreneurial responses to chronic adversity — outcomes that diminish others’ well-being.
Enterprise interoperability II : New challenges and approaches
Interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the user is a key issue in manufacturing and industrial enterprise generally. It is fundamental to the production of goods and services quickly and at low cost at the same time as maintaining levels of quality and customisation. Interoperability is achieved if internal and external collaborators can interact on at least three levels: data, applications and business enterprise (through the architecture of an enterprise model and making allowance for the semantics of both partners). Not only a problem of software and IT technologies, it implies support for communication and transactions between different organisations that must be based on shared business references. Today, a new and important consideration must be taken into account – economic business evaluation and the definition of dissemination policy.
Enterprise interoperability : New challenges and approaches
Interoperability: the ability of a system or a product to work with other systems or products without special effort from the user is a key issue in manufacturing and industrial enterprise generally. It is fundamental to the production of goods and services quickly and at low cost at the same time as maintaining levels of quality and customisation. Interoperability is achieved if internal and external collaborators can interact on at least three levels: data, applications and business enterprise (through the architecture of an enterprise model and making allowance for the semantics of both partners). Not only a problem of software and IT technologies, it implies support for communication and transactions between different organisations that must be based on shared business references. Today, a new and important consideration must be taken into account – economic business evaluation and the definition of dissemination policy.
Energy transition and energy democracy in East Asia
Provides down-to-earth information on what kind of actions are being taken by the Government, Local community, Businesses, Researchers, NGOs on the energy transition in this region. It gives an updated picture of the energy transition in the East Asian countries, where the economic growth, as well as CO2 emission growth, is significant.
Energy Metabolism and Obesity : Research and Clinical Applications
Elucidate the most important aspects of genetic background, neuropeptide secretion and action, neuronal pathways, adipokines, gut hormones, and environmental influences (physical activity, pharmacologic agents, and surgical alteration of the gastrointestinal tract), as well as the complex interactions among them.
