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This book explores microbial intervention in wastewater treatment for resource recovery, bioenergy production, and environmental sustainability. It discusses the fate of pollutants, challenges in existing treatment strategies, and the need for innovation. Case studies illustrate wastewater-specific treatment strategies for bioenergy and resource recovery at different scales. The book emphasizes the use of wastewater for resource recovery through sequestration or biotransformation and highlights tailormade consortium development for sludge-free treatment. It also covers sustainable approaches like microbial biofilm reactors, microbial fuel cells and membrane technology for wastewater treatment. It also deals with nanotechnology in combination with microbial technology for handling refractory components in wastewater that could not be handled by microbes alone. This book provides insights into microbial technology for a clean environment and bioenergy production through a reduce, recover, and reuse approach. This valuable resource offers practical information that can be applied by engineers, researchers, and undergraduate and graduate students, as well as business professionals in the bioenergy field, aiding them in the implementation of renewable energy projects.

Arsenic contamination in drinking water and crops is a major health issue in many countries worldwide, threatening the health of millions of people due to arsenic's toxicity and carcinogenicity. This edited volume brings together a diverse group of environmental science, sustainability and health researchers to address the challenges posed by arsenic contamination. The book sheds light on this global environmental issue and proposes solutions to aquatic contamination through multi-disciplinary sustainable approaches and case studies from different parts of the world. The chapters contained here present the status quo in different parts of the world and provide essential information on arsenic exposure risks for humans as well as possible measures for tackling arsenic poisoning. The mechanisms of arsenic uptake, translocation and distribution in plants and grains are also explained. In closing, the book reviews a variety of prospective sustainable solutions to the problem of arsenic accumulation in soil and water. The book is comprised of three sections. The first section describes the routes of exposure to environmental arsenic and its transport in soil and aquatic ecosystems. The second section explains the health risks linked to arsenic exposure in food and the environment. The third section addresses sustainable arsenic contamination mitigation strategies using the potential applications of recent biological technology such as biotechnology, bioremediation, phytoremediation, biochar, absorbent, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology approaches. The book is intended for a broad audience including researchers, scientists, and readers with diverse backgrounds.

This book focuses primarily on evolutionary processes (rather than evolutionary history). Topics covered are abiotic framework conditions, morphology and physiology of living organisms, fossil and molecular evidence of evolutionary developments. The basic processes of biological evolution are already established in unicellular organisms. Evolutionary options for multicellular organisms arise in a simplified way from the usable energetic transformation potentials and the dynamics of abiotic and biotic interactions. Evolutionary processes of multicellular organisms are therefore predominantly determined by the conditions of the surrounding systems. This is most clearly shown by comparisons of the evolutionary development of vertebrates under marine and terrestrial conditions. For reasons of efficiency alone, no single species can have the equipment to capture and sustainably shape the surrounding systems in the long term. Depending on the available energetic transformation potentials, a single species is very well able to change the surrounding systems - but without being able to capture the resulting long-term consequences. This gives rise to fundamentally new questions for the design and limits of social action that makes sense in the long term. This book is a translation of an updated and revised version of the original German work: Relativität der Evolution, ISBN 978-3-662-63936-8. Translated by Robert D. Martin.

This volume discusses the adsorptive profiles of microplastic (MP) pollutants, covering their structural identity, sorption ability and degradation due to photolytic, hydrolytic, mechanical, and other environmental factors. In addition to the quantitation of (MPs) in the environment, the book unveils the deleterious effects on aquatic species and humans due to adsorbed inorganic/organic contaminants on the surface of MPs. The present book finds its uniqueness by presenting in-depth discussions on the interactions and mechanisms of microplastics with organic pollutants, microalgae, and human systems. The interactions and mechanisms between microplastics and microalgae are explored to understand the possible remediation pathways in microplastic contaminated water resources. Students and researchers in the fields of environmental science and engineering, biotechnology, aquaculture, marine technology, and water chemistry can benefit from this book. Furthermore, industries, NGOs and stakeholders dealing with wastewater, solid waste/environmental pollution will find this book useful.

This book introduces a variety of well-proven and newly developed nature-inspired optimization algorithms solving a wide range of real-life biomedical and healthcare problems. Few solo and hybrid approaches are demonstrated in a lucid manner for the effective integration and finding solution for a large-scale complex healthcare problem. In the present bigdata-based computing scenario, nature-inspired optimization techniques present adaptive mechanisms that permit the understanding of complex data and altering environments. This book is a voluminous collection for the confront faced by the healthcare institutions and hospitals for practical analysis, storage, and data analysis. It explores the distinct nature-inspired optimization-based approaches that are able to handle more accurate outcomes for the current biomedical and healthcare problems. In addition to providing a state-of-the-art and advanced intelligent methods, it also enlightens an insight for solving diversified healthcare problems such as cancer and diabetes.

This book provides a review of the most recent data on osteoporosis and bone health, presenting a vision of diagnosis and management for the year 2021 and beyond. It covers all pertinent aspects of bone health including diagnosis, fracture prevention, optimized practice, impaired orthostasis, and falls. The book examines recent developments in therapeutics, including goal-directed therapy, individualizing therapy, sequential and combined therapies, pharmaceuticals, and anabolic vs. antiresorptive therapy. In addition, it provides an in-depth overview of osteoporosis and bone health in complex patients, covering Duchene dystrophy, renal failure, periodontal diseases, and steroid-induced osteoporosis as well as considerations for pediatric populations and men. New Horizons in Osteoporosis Management is an essential resource for physicians and related professionals, residents, fellows, graduate students and nurses in rheumatology, endocrinology, radiology, pediatrics, primary care, and internal medicine.

The rapid demise of coral reefs worldwide has spurred efforts to develop innovative conservation and restoration methods. Many of these rely on omics approaches to produce genetic, genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic or metabolomic data to inform conservation and restoration interventions. This book provides the state of play of this field. It discusses topics ranging from how genomic and environmental DNA (eDNA) data can be used to inform marine protected area design and cryopreservation strategies, the use of knowledge on adaptive genetic and epigenetic variation to maximise environmental stress tolerance of coral stock, harnessing transcriptome data to develop early warning markers, the use of microbial symbiont omics data in guiding restoration strategies, to applications of metabolomics and genetic engineering. How best to translate omics data to resource managers is also discussed.

Dieses Werk fokussiert vor allem auf evolutionäre Prozesse (und weniger auf evolutionäre Geschichte). Themen sind abiotische Rahmenbedingungen, Morphologie und Physiologie lebender Organismen, fossile und molekulare Hinweise auf evolutionäre Entwicklungen. Die grundlegenden Prozesse biologischer Evolution sind bereits in einzelligen Organismen festgelegt. Entwicklungsoptionen für vielzellige Organismen ergeben sich vereinfacht durch die nutzbaren energetischen Umwandlungspotenziale und die Dynamik der abiotischen und biotischen Wechselwirkungen. Evolutionsprozesse vielzelliger Organismen sind deshalb überwiegend durch die Bedingungen der umgebenden Systeme bedingt. Am deutlichsten zeigen dies Vergleiche der evolutionären Entwicklung von Wirbeltieren unter marinen und terrestrischen Bedingungen.Allein aus Effizienzgründen kann keine einzige Art die Ausstattung für die Erfassung und langfristig nachhaltige Gestaltung der umgebenden Systeme besitzen. Abhängig von den verfügbaren energetischen Umwandlungspotenzialen ist eine einzelne Art sehr wohl in der Lage die umgebenden Systeme zu verändern – allerdings ohne die daraus resultierenden langfristigen Folgewirkungen erfassen zu können. Daraus ergeben sich grundsätzlich neue Fragestellungen für die Gestaltung und Grenzen eines langfristig sinnvollen gesellschaftlichen Handelns.

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the morphodynamic process of the Changjiang River from upstream to estuary in the Anthropocene. As the longest river in China, the Changjiang River has nurtured Chinese civilization with ample natural resources for thousands of years. Evidence highlights that the Changjiang River has experienced intensive human interference and indicated dramatic changes in the Anthropocene, including “no flood in flood season, no dry in dry season” in discharge; “less flood in flood season, more dry in dry season” in sediment; riverbed shifts from accretion to erosion; lakes in the middle-lower reach turn from sediment sink to source; estuarine tidal flat exhibits self-organization characteristics and maintains the current accretion state; estuarine branches that connect to the sea show district morphodynamic patterns; and depocenters of the submerged delta indicate periodic shifts. The book stresses that dam construction upstream, practically the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydraulic engineering project, has significant influences on the hydrology and geomorphology of the middle-lower reach but has a slight effect on estuarine delta development. The geomorphological structure of the estuarine channel is dominated by local land reclamation, navigation, and dredging. This book clarifies the river-estuary morphodynamics of the Changjiang River and indicates the general features of global mega rivers under human interference as well as their own response mechanisms. This book also exhibits the potential risk of river-estuary deltas in the future, as both material and dynamics are experiencing acceleration adjustment.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, COMSNETS 2018, held in Banaglore, India, in January 2018.The 12 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. They cover various topics in networking and communications systems.

This book answers key questions asked by emergency clinicians faced with complex gastrointestinal and abdominal pain presentations. Instead of a traditional format that includes epidemiology, pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment options, this book takes an approach that mirrors the way clinicians interact with patients – by asking and answering specific clinical care questions. The book is organized into sections by presentation – gastrointestinal bleeding, for example – each of which contains chapters on specific questions, such as “What is the best clinical risk score for low risk GIB patients?” Each clinical question comes with a detailed, evidence-based response and a summary that gives best practices, recommendations, and references. Additionally, at the end of each section is a chapter titled “Expert Corner,” which asks the same clinical questions to a surgical or gastrointestinal specialist and includes key pearls these experts have for emergency medicine practitioners. Gastrointestinal Emergencies: Evidence-Based Answers to Key Clinical Questions is an essential guide for emergency medicine physicians, residents, and medical students who want to review and improve their care of acute gastrointestinal emergencies.

This book summarizes the recent progress in the physics and astrophysics of neutron stars and, most importantly, it identifies and develops effective strategies to explore, both theoretically and observationally, the many remaining open questions in the field. Because of its significance in the solution of many fundamental questions in nuclear physics, astrophysics and gravitational physics, the study of neutron stars has seen enormous progress over the last years and has been very successful in improving our understanding in these fascinating compact objects. The book addresses a wide spectrum of readers, from students to senior researchers. Thirteen chapters written by internationally renowned experts offer a thorough overview of the various facets of this interdisciplinary science, from neutron star formation in supernovae, pulsars, equations of state super dense matter, gravitational wave emission, to alternative theories of gravity. The book was initiated by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action MP1304 “Exploring fundamental physics with compact stars” (NewCompStar).

Due to recent advances in laparoscopic gastrectomy for gastric cancer, a high-resolution atlas in this field was felt necessary. This book describes the laparoscopic surgical procedure and precautions of lymph node (LN) dissection, comprehensively. The details of preoperative preparation, regional LN dissection, and digestive tract reconstruction are introduced based on a large numbers of clinical cases. Modified intracorporeal anastomosis procedure and clinical application of indo cyanine green (ICG) in LN dissection are included. This atlas will be of benefit to gastrointestinal surgeons, surgical oncologists, and minimally invasive surgeons.

This book presents principles and applications to expand the storage space from 2-D to 3-D and even multi-D, including gray scale, color (light with different wavelength), polarization and coherence of light. These actualize the improvements of density, capacity and data transfer rate for optical data storage. Moreover, the applied implementation technologies to make mass data storage devices are described systematically. Some new mediums, which have linear absorption characteristics for different wavelength and intensity to light with high sensitivity, are introduced for multi-wavelength and multi-level optical storage. This book can serve as a useful reference for researchers, engineers, graduate and undergraduate students in material science, information science and optics.

As we began to plan this book about 10 years ago, we wanted to write a practical book for medical students, doctors in training, internists, gas­ and surgeons faced with everyday clinical problems in troenterologists, the care of patients with acute and chronic pancreatitis. Now, 10 years lat­ er, our book has become much more than what we had originally intend­ ed, with so many new findings that have expanded our knowledge of pancreatic diseases, not to mention new imaging procedures and con­ trolled studies on the effectiveness of various therapies. Consequently, we decided to include: • The state-of-the-art on diagnosis and therapy in inflammatory pan­ creatic diseases • Recommendations for diagnosis and therapy based on the published results from experienced clinicians. In the many areas still untested we have relied on the decades of experience of the two authors on both sides of the Atlantic • A discussion of unanswered questions for future research by physi­ cians interested in pancreatitis who can draw upon our bibliography of almost 1900 references complete through 1996. We also wanted to demonstrate with this work that two authors from two continents can come to common conclusions that can help physicians and students in their everyday clinical work and their clinical research. It is with deep gratitude that we acknowledge the assistance of Mrs. Gisela Ropte for years of patient cooperation, great precision, and initia­ tive, as well as that of Dr. Dr.

In recent years, robots have been built based on cognitive architecture which has been developed to model human cognitive ability. The cognitive architecture can be a basis for intelligence technology to generate robot intelligence. In this edited book the robot intelligence is classified into six categories: cognitive intelligence, social intelligence, behavioral intelligence, ambient intelligence, collective intelligence and genetic intelligence. This classification categorizes the intelligence of robots based on the different aspects of awareness and the ability to act deliberately as a result of such awareness. This book aims at serving researchers and practitioners with a timely dissemination of the recent progress on robot intelligence technology and its applications, based on a collection of papers presented at the 1st International Conference on Robot Intelligence Technology and Applications (RiTA), held in Gwangju, Korea, December 16-18, 2012. For a better readability, this edition has the total 101 papers grouped into 3 chapters: Chapter I: Cognitive Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Behavioral Intelligence, Chapter II: Ambient Intelligence, Collective Intelligence and Genetic Intelligence, Chapter III: Intelligent Robot Technologies and Applications.

To survive and thrive in the competition, firms have strived to achieve greater supply chain collaboration to leverage the resources and knowledge of suppliers and customers. Internet based technologies, particularly interorganizational systems, further extend the firms'opportunities to strengthen their supply chain partnerships and share real-time information to optimize their operations. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture explores the nature and characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of supply chain collaboration from multiple theoretical perspectives. Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture conceptualizes supply chain collaboration as seven interconnecting elements including information sharing, incentive alignment, goal congruence, decision synchronization, resource sharing, as well as communication and joint knowledge creation. These seven components define the occurrence of collaborative efforts and allow us to explain supply chain collaboration more precisely. Collaborative advantages are also divided into five components to capture the joint competitive advantages and benefits among supply chain partners. The definitions and measures developed here examine some central issue surrounding supply chain development but this is also followed up with real-life managerial practicalities. This balance of theory and practical application makes Supply Chain Collaboration: Roles of Interorganizational Systems, Trust, and Collaborative Culture a strong resource for industry practitioners and researchers alike.

Despite medical technological advances, the major killers with which we must currently contend have remained essentially the same for the past few decades. Stroke, cancer, and heart disease together account for the vast majority of deaths in the United States. In addition, due to improved medical care, many Americans who would previously have died now survive these disorders, necessitating that they receive appropriate rehabilitation efforts. One result of our own medical advances is that we must now accept the high costs associated with providing quality care to individuals who develop one of these problems, and we must avail ourselves to assist of afflicted individuals. families Despite the relative stability of causes of death and disability, the health-care field is currently experiencing tremendous pressures, both from professionals with­ in the field, who desire more and better technology than is currently available, and from the public and other payers of health care (e.g., insurance companies), who seek an end to increasing health-care costs. These pressures, along with an increased emphasis on providing evidence of cost-effectiveness and quality assurance, are substantially changing the way that health-care professionals perform their jobs.

Das Buch ist unentbehrlich für Chirurgen aller Fachrichtungen, die über den aktuellen Stand der klinischen und experimentellen Forschung sowie der modernen chirurgischen Behandlung unterrichtet sein wollen; gleichzeitig zeigt es die Grenzen chirurgischen Handelns auf.

Die 9. Auflage dieses internistischen Standardwerkes liegt nun in aktualisierter und erweiterter Form vor. In übersichtlicher und an der Praxis orientierter Darstellung werden Therapieempfehlungen gegeben, die dem gegenwärtigen Stand wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis und der eigenen Erfahrung der Autoren entsprechen. Dabei wird umfassend auf die Wahl der Medikamente, auf Dosierungen, Nebenwirkungen und Kontraindikationen eingegangen. Mit besonderer Sorgfalt wurden Notfallpläne für die Erstversorgung bei akuten Krankheitszuständen aufgearbeitet.

When the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) launched its collabora­ tive research centre or SFB (Sonderforschungsbereich) 438'Mathematical Modelling, Simulation, and Verification in Material-Oriented Processes and Intelligent Systems'in July 1997 at the Technische Vniversitat Munchen and at the Vniversitat Augsburg, southern Bavaria got its second nucleus of the still young discipline scientific computing. Whereas the first and older one, FORTWIHR, the Bavarian Consortium for High Performance Scientific Com­ puting, had put its main emphasis on the supercomputing aspect, this new initiative was now expected to focus on the mathematical part. Consequently, throughout all of the five main research topics (A) adaptive materials and thin layers, (B) adaptive materials in medicine, (C) robotics, aeronautics, and automobile technology, (D) microstructured devices and systems, and (E) transport processes in flows, mathematical aspects play a predominant role. The formation of the SFB 438 and its scientific program are inextricably linked with the name of Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. As full professor for applied mathematics in Augsburg (1981-1991) and in Munchen (since 1992) and as dean of the faculty of mathematics at the TV Munchen, he was the driv­ ing force of this fascinating, but not always easy-to-realize idea of bringing together scientists from mathematics, physics, engineering, informatics, and medicine for joint efforts in modern applied mathematics. However, scarcely work had begun when the successful captain was called to take command on a bigger boat.

Hysteresis is an exciting and mathematically challenging phenomenon that oc­ curs in rather different situations: jt, can be a byproduct offundamental physical mechanisms (such as phase transitions) or the consequence of a degradation or imperfection (like the play in a mechanical system), or it is built deliberately into a system in order to monitor its behaviour, as in the case of the heat control via thermostats. The delicate interplay between memory effects and the occurrence of hys­ teresis loops has the effect that hysteresis is a genuinely nonlinear phenomenon which is usually non-smooth and thus not easy to treat mathematically. Hence it was only in the early seventies that the group of Russian scientists around M. A. Krasnoselskii initiated a systematic mathematical investigation of the phenomenon of hysteresis which culminated in the fundamental monograph Krasnoselskii-Pokrovskii (1983). In the meantime, many mathematicians have contributed to the mathematical theory, and the important monographs of 1. Mayergoyz (1991) and A. Visintin (1994a) have appeared. We came into contact with the notion of hysteresis around the year 1980.

Human and organizational factors have a substantial impact on the performance of planning and scheduling processes. Despite widespread and advanced decision support systems, human decision makers are still crucial to improve the operational performance in manufacturing industries. In this text, the state of the art in this area is discussed by experts from a wide variety of engineering and social science disciplines. Moreover, recent results from collaborative studies and a number of field cases are presented. The text is targeted at researchers and graduate students, but is also particularly useful for managers, consultants, and system developers to better understand how human performance can be advanced.

It covers all aspects of DC generation, function, survival and antitumor activity in the tumor environment both in vivo and in experimental in vitro systems. The goal in focusing on a spectrum of issues related to DC in cancer is to provide an extensive and expansive review rather than a collection of independent analyses from different authors. Specific topics to be covered include analysis of DC behavior in the tumor microenvironment, including endogenous and exogenous DC, multiple DC populations, molecular pathways responsible for DC dysfunction, tumor-derived factors altering DC polarization and activation, mechanisms of DC alterations, and the role of DC in tumor escape from immune recognition and elimination. Furthermore, additional chapters provide extensive analysis of the consequences of cancer therapy on the DC system and how aging impacts DC function in the tumor microenvironment. Finally, chapters are included examining strengths and pitfalls of current methodologies for generating DC from cancer patients for therapeutic purposes and on the role of tumor-mediated modulation of the DC system in cancer immunotherapy.

Perspektiven des Supply Management gibt einen Einblick in innovative Ansätze zum Beschaffungs-, Einkaufs- und Logistikmanagement. Das Buch kombiniert Best Practice-Unternehmensbeispiele (BASF AG, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Morgan Stanley Bank AG, MTU AeroEngines GmbH, Siemens AG, Thiel Logistik AG, etc.) mit internationalen Wissenschaftskonzepten und liefert somit Anregungen für Forschung, Lehre und Praxis gleichermaßen. Unter der Klammer eines integrierten Supply Management-Ansatzes ('House of Sourcing and Supply Management') vereinigen sich zahlreiche namhafte Fachautoren mit ihren Überlegungen für eine zukunftsgerichtete Versorgungsfunktion. Die Bandbreite der Themen reicht von Fragen der Beschaffungsstrategie und des Lieferantenmanagement bis zur Optimierung von Supply Chain-Strukturen, Finanzierungs- und Kapitalbeschaffungskonzepten sowie Beschaffungs- und Supply Chain-Controlling.