Tag: Biological

Free Download Ernest V. Burkheisser, "Biological Barriers to Cellulosic Ethanol "
English | ISBN: 1606922033 | 2009 | 251 pages | PDF | 17 MB
The purpose of this book is to define barriers and challenges to a rapid expansion of cellulosic-ethanol production and determine ways to speed solutions through concerted application of modern biology tools as part of a joint research agenda. Although the focus was ethanol, the science applies to additional fuels that include biodiesel and other bioproducts or coproducts having critical roles in any deployment scheme. The core barrier is cellulosic-biomass recalcitrance to processing to ethanol. Biomass is composed of nature’s most ready energy source, sugars, but they are locked in a complex polymer composite exquisitely created to resist biological and chemical degradation. Key to energising a new biofuel industry based on conversion of cellulose (and hemicelluloses) to ethanol is to understand plant cell-wall chemical and physical structures – how they are synthesised and can be deconstructed. With this knowledge, innovative energy crops – plants specifically designed for industrial processing to biofuel – can be developed concurrently with new biology-based treatment and conversion methods. Recent advances in science and technological capabilities, especially those from the nascent discipline of systems biology, promise to accelerate and enhance this development. Resulting technologies will create a fundamentally new process and biorefinery paradigm that will enable an efficient and economic industry for converting plant biomass to liquid fuels. These key barriers and suggested research strategies to address them are described in this book. The core barrier is cellulosic-biomass recalcitrance to processing to ethanol. Biomass is composed of nature’s most ready energy source, sugars, but they are locked in a complex polymer composite exquisitely created to resist biological and chemical degradation. Key to energising a new biofuel industry based on conversion of cellulose (and hemicelluloses) to ethanol is to understand plant cell-wall chemical and physical structures – how they are synthesised and can be deconstructed. With this knowledge, innovative energy crops – plants specifically designed for industrial processing to biofuel – can be developed concurrently with new biology-based treatment and conversion methods. Recent advances in science and technological capabilities, especially those from the nascent discipline of systems biology, promise to accelerate and enhance this development. Resulting technologies will create a fundamentally new process and biorefinery paradigm that will enable an efficient and economic industry for converting plant biomass to liquid fuels. These key barriers and suggested research strategies to address them are described in this book.

Free Download Liliane Campos, "Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance"
English | ISBN: 1800647506 | 2022 | 420 pages | PDF | 54 MB
This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political issues raised by the twenty-first century’s shifting views of life. The collection thus examines literature and performance as spaces that shape our contemporary biological imagination.

Free Download Gillian Bentley, "Substitute Parents: Biological and Social Perspectives on Alloparenting in Human Societies "
English | ISBN: 0857456415 | 2012 | 372 pages | PDF | 2 MB
From a comparative perspective, human life histories are unique and raising offspring is unusually costly: humans have relatively short birth intervals compared to other apes, childhood is long, mothers care simultaneously for many dependent children (other apes raise one offspring at a time), infant mortality is high in natural fertility/mortality populations, and human females have a long post-reproductive lifespan. These features conspire to make child raising very burdensome. Mothers frequently defray these costs with paternal help (not usual in other ape species), although this contribution is not always enough. Grandmothers, elder siblings, paid allocarers, or society as a whole, help to defray the costs of childcare, both in our evolutionary past and now. Studying offspring care in a various human societies, and other mammalian species, a wide range of specialists such as anthropologists, psychologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary ecologists, economists and sociologists, have contributed to this volume, offering new insights into and a better understanding of one of the key areas of human society.

Free Download Musa Khan Jalalzai, "Prospect of Biological and Nuclear Terrorism in Central Asia and Russia: Foreign Fighters, the ISIS, Chechens Extremists, Katibat-i-Imam Bukhari … Movement of Uzbekistan and the Al Nusra Front"
English | 2020 | ISBN: 9389620651, 938962066X | EPUB | pages: 344 | 0.5 mb
This book discusses the danger of nuclear and biological terrorism and the strategies of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia based extremist and jihadist groups to purchase fissile material in the black market or steal it from a military or civilian facility and then use that material to construct an improvised nuclear device.

Free Download Physical and Biological Bases of Life Stability: Man, Biota, Environment By Professor Dr. Victor G. Gorshkov (auth.)
1995 | 340 Pages | ISBN: 3642850030 | PDF | 23 MB
It is well known that the biochemical processes of life on Earth are maintained by the external solar radiation and can be reduced to the synthesis and decomposition of organic matter. Man has added the synthesis and decomposition of various in dustrial products to these natural processes. On one hand, biological synthesis may only be conducted within the rather narrow margins of parameters of the environ ment, including temperature, humidity, concentrations of the inorganic substances used by life (such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, etc.) On the other hand, the physical and chemical composition of the environment suffers significant changes during those processes of synthesis and decomposition. The maximum possible rate of such change due to the activity of living beings can exceed the average geophysical rates of change of the environment due to activity ofterrestrial depths and cosmic processes by a factor often thousand. In the absence of a rigid correlation between the biological synthesis and decomposition, the environment would be greatly disturbed within a decade and driven into a state unfit for life. A lifeless Earth, however would suffer similar changes only after about a hundred thousand years. Preservation of the existing state of the environment is only possible with strict equality between the rates of biological synthesis and decomposition, that is, when the biochemical cycles of matter are virtually closed.

Free Download Modelling the Dynamics of Biological Systems: Nonlinear Phenomena and Pattern Formation By Erik Mosekilde, Ole G. Mouritsen (auth.), Professor Dr. Erik Mosekilde, Professor Dr. Ole G. Mouritsen (eds.)
1995 | 294 Pages | ISBN: 3642792928 | PDF | 7 MB
The development of a proper theoretical description of the living world today poses one of the most significant challenges to science. In this interdisciplinary work, leading scientists in biology, physics, computer science and mathematics have joinded forces to present and tackle some of the open problems. They demonstrate that the concepts and methods of the newly developed fields of nonlinear dynamics and complex systems theory, combined with irreversible thermodynamics and far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics, enable us to make progress with many of these problems. The book will interest all researchers and students involved in seeking an integrative approach to the frontiers of biological science.

Free Download Dynamics and the Problem of Recognition in Biological Macromolecules By Yawen Bai, S. Walter Englander (auth.), Oleg Jardetzky, Jean-François Lefèvre (eds.)
1996 | 311 Pages | ISBN: 1461376777 | PDF | 22 MB
From within complex structures of organisms and cells down to the molecular level, biological processes all involve movement. Muscular fibers slide on each other to activate the muscle, as polymerases do along nucleic acids for replicating and transcribing the genetic material. Cells move and organize themselves into organs by recognizing each other through macromolecular surface-specific interactions. These recognition processes involve the mu tual adaptation of structures that rely on their flexibility. All sorts of conformational changes occur in proteins involved in through-membrane signal transmission, showing another aspect of the flexibility of these macromolecules. The movement and flexibility are inscribed in the polymeric nature of essential biological macromolecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. For instance, the well-defined structures formed by the long protein chain are held together by weak noncovalent interac tions that design a complex potential well in which the protein floats, permanently fluctuating between several micro- or macroconformations in a wide range of frequencies and ampli tudes. The inherent mobility of biomolecular edifices may be crucial to the adaptation of their structures to particular functions. Progress in methods for investigating macromolecular structures and dynamics make this hypothesis not only attractive but more and more testable.

Free Download Biological Organization
English | 2024 | ISBN: 100953940X | 82 Pages | PDF (True) | 2.3 MB
Living systems are complex systems made of components that tend to degrade, but nonetheless they maintain themselves far from equilibrium. This requires living systems to extract energy and materials from the environment and use them to build and repair their parts by regulating their activities based on their internal and external conditions in ways that allow them to keep living. The philosophical and theoretical approach discussed in this Element aims to explain these features of biological systems by appealing to their organization. It addresses classical and more recent issues in philosophy of biology, fromorigins and definitions of life to biological teleology and functions, from an original perspective mainly focused on the living system, its physiology and behavior, rather than evolution. It discusses and revises the conceptual foundations of this approach and presents an updated version of it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Free Download Nicholas L. Clesceri, "Waste Sites as Biological Reactors: Characterization and Modeling"
English | 2002 | pages: 403 | ISBN: 1566705509 | PDF | 2,2 mb
Where and how wastes disappear, and how the environment is affected by the process, are issues that affect cities and towns around the world. Recent investigations have convincingly shown that waste poses water, air, and public health dangers that necessitate highly efficient engineered controls. An inexpensive, effective, method for assessing impacts and risks of a system and devising management plans is to develop mathematical and quantitative models that are sufficiently representative to allow examination of physical systems as units subject to environmental factors.

Free Download Richard Horobin, John Kiernan, "Conn’s Biological Stains: A Handbook of Dyes, Stains and Fluorochromes for Use in Biology and Medicine"
English | 2002 | pages: 572 | ISBN: 1859960995 | PDF | 98,9 mb
Published on behalf of the Biological Stain Commission