This book offers an in-depth analysis of the Brazilian sugarcane complex with a special focus on technological advances that promote sustainable development. It first examines the question why sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil is considered a superior alternative to fossil fuel compared to other biofuels produced on an industrial scale and subsequently analyzes the most dynamic areas within t…
This book seeks to answer the questions: how do the rules of international treaties on trade and investment apply to the new laws and policies relating to energy-related trade, and do the rules of the multilateral system contribute to or detract from sustainable development? An emerging set of new problems in the law of international trade is how to reconcile the rules of the multilateral trad…
The original point that differentiates this text from otherwise similar texts is that it looks at the building of smart cities from the viewpoint of an interchange of knowledge among companies in different industries, or “Ba” as shared context in motion, and emphasizes that the resulting value becomes a source of new corporate competitive advantage. In recent years numerous publications hav…
Composed of two extensive sections, this book surveys important work in climate change science, mainly in the United States, and introduces contributions to the body of science that have arrived on the scene between January 2013 and February 2014. The opening section offers a broad examination of contemporary climate change science, with subsections on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate …
This book introduces some emerging functional foods that are natural resources with tremendous promise as nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals. The author considers biodiversity and bioprospecting as a response to food security issues, drug-resistance, nutrition-poor diets and other problems, exploring the prospects of several under-utilized nutrients and bioactive repositories. Readers will d…
Presented here is the story of the mining and sale of uranium and radium ore through biographical vignettes, chemistry, physics, geology, geography, occupational health, medical utilization, environmental safety and industrial history. Included are the people and places involved over the course of over 90 years of interconnected mining and sale of radium and uranium, finally ending in 1991 with…
This monograph presents a unified approach to model-based processing for underwater acoustic arrays. The use of physical models in passive array processing is not a new idea, but it has been used on a case-by-case basis, and as such, lacks any unifying structure. This work views all such processing methods as estimation procedures, which then can be unified by treating them all as a form of joi…
This volume provides a comprehensive overview of environmental aspects of the Sava River, which is the greatest tributary to the Danube River and the major drainage river system of South Eastern Europe. Hydroelectric power plants, river traffic, intensive agricultural activities, heavy industry and floods have considerable influence on the environment and biota in the basin. Summarizing the res…
This book presents current research into the catalytic combustion of methane using perovskite-type oxides (ABO3). Catalytic combustion has been developed as a method of promoting efficient combustion with minimum pollutant formation as compared to conventional catalytic combustion. Recent theoretical and experimental studies have recommended that noble metals supported on (ABO3) with well-order…
Natural and constructed wetlands play a very important role on the landscape and their ecological services are highly valuable. In fact, some wetland types are regarded as one of the most valuable ecosystems on the Earth. Water management, including flood water retention, biomass production, carbon sequestration, wastewater treatment and biodiversity sources, are among the most important ecolog…