Capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels is heating our planet at a pace and scale never before experienced. Extreme weather patterns, rising sea levels and accelerating feedback loops are a commonplace feature of our lives. The number of environmental refugees is increasing and several island states and low-lying countries are becoming vulnerable. Corporate-induced climate change has set us on…
This paper describes a new initiative to provide information services in support of professionals, including legislators, that work in health, pharmacovigilance, the herbal and pharmaceutical industries or that undertake pharmaceutical research. The services are being designed to help these audiences to use plant names appropriately and navigate safely the rich information sources that already …
This book explores nanotechnology, a rapidly evolving and growing field with applications in a large number of areas. The concepts and physics are highlighted through topics such as nanoscience, quantum effects, nanostructures, and new forms of carbon. Applications and potential health and safety implications of nanomaterials are discussed for healthcare, food production, electronics, defence a…
With applications in quantum field theory, general relativity and elementary particle physics, this three-volume work studies the invariance of differential operators under Lie algebras, quantum groups and superalgebras. This second volume covers quantum groups in their two main manifestations: quantum algebras and matrix quantum groups. The exposition covers both the general aspects of these a…
New technologies have revealed previously unknown and invisible parts of the human body and made it visible at the molecular level, revealing in turn more detailed structures and arrangements than those which were previously available. In doing so, in many ways they refine, expand, and even completely overturn forms of contemporary knowledge. This book maps the shifts and blurring of boundaries…
What Works in Conservation has been created to provide practitioners with answers to these and many other questions about practical conservation. This book provides an assessment of the effectiveness of 763 conservation interventions based on summarized scientific evidence. Chapters cover the practical global conservation of amphibians, bats, birds and forests, conservation of European farmland…
The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikuláš Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting the…
In this bold and original study, Jeff Kochan constructively combines the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) with Martin Heidegger’s early existential conception of science. Kochan shows convincingly that these apparently quite different approaches to science are, in fact, largely compatible, even mutually reinforcing.
Scientists have identified southern China as a likely epicenter for viral pandemics, a place where new viruses emerge out of intensively farmed landscapes and human--animal interactions. In Virulent Zones, Lyle Fearnley documents the global plans to stop the next influenza pandemic at its source, accompanying virologists and veterinarians as they track lethal viruses to China's largest freshwat…
A sociological and historical study of the development of reproductive technologies, this book focuses on key technological developments through a biomedicalization lens with special attention to gender. Using in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a hub, it critically examines the main areas of related socio-technical developments: reproductive science, birth control, animal husbandry, genetics and r…