New Books purchased by Campbell Library

by Daniel Kipnis on 2018-05-01T10:43:00-04:00 | 0 Comments

ISBN: 1250094593

Publication Date: 2016-07-12

I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. InBeyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn,Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.

A Guide to Bioethics by Emmanuel A. Kornyo

ISBN: 9781138631984

Publication Date: 2017-09-07

Solving intractable biotechnological questions of evolution, medicine, and genetics is now easier due to methods permitting the rapid analysis of molecular sequence data. These advances have exposed ethical and policy concerns. How would genomic information be used and by whom? Should individuals be able to make decisions regarding their own genomic data? How accurate are these genetic tests and how should they be regulated? These and other ethical conundrums are the subject of this book. Bioethicists, biomedical policy experts and lawyers, physicians, nursing and allied health students as well as science educators will find this book helpful and engaging in exploring the complexities of modern evolutionary, genetic and biomedical data.

Zebrafish by Koichi Kawakami (Editor); Michael Orger (Editor); Elizabeth Patton (Editor)

ISBN: 9781493937691

Publication Date: 2016-07-27

Thissecond edition details new emerging areas of zebrafish research focusing on geneticsand genomics, techniques for developing and analyzing zebrafish disease models,and methods for neuroscience. Zebrafish:Methods and Protocols, Second Edition guides readers through methods for mutagenesisand genome editing in zebrafish, applicationsof GFP-expressing transgenic fish, techniques for cancer models, imaging of infectionand host-pathogen interactions, metabolism and transport of lipids, and the structure and function of neural circuitsand their role in generating behavior. Written in the highlysuccessful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, chapters includeintroductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials andreagents, step-by-step, readily reproducible laboratory protocols, and tips ontroubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and practical Zebrafish: Methods and Protocols, Second Edition is a usefulcomplement to the first book for new and experienced zebrafish researcheralike.

Advanced Biometrics by David Zhang; Guangming Lu; Lei Zhang

ISBN: 9783319615448

Publication Date: 2017-08-16

This book describes a range of new biometric technologies, such as high-resolution fingerprint, finger-knuckle-print, multi-spectral backhand, 3D fingerprint, tongueprint, 3D ear, and multi-spectral iris technologies. Further, it introduces readers to efficient feature extraction, matching and fusion algorithms, in addition to developing potential systems of its own. These advanced biometric technologies and methods are divided as follows: 1. High-Resolution Fingerprint Recognition; 2. Finger-Knuckle-Print Verification; 3. Other Hand-Based Biometrics; and 4. New Head-Based Biometrics. Traditional biometric technologies, such as fingerprint, face, iris, and palmprint, have been extensively studied and addressed in many research books. However, all of these technologies have their own advantages and disadvantages, and there is no single type of biometric technology that can be used for all applications. Many new biometric technologies have been developed in recent years, especia lly in response to new applications. The contributions gathered here focus on how to develop a new biometric technology based on the requirements of essential applications, and how to design efficient algorithms that yield better performance.

Snake Venoms and Envenomation by Yuri N. Utkin; Arcadius V. Krivoshein (Editor)

ISBN: 9781634847438

Publication Date: 2016-01-01

Snake bites are a major health concern, especially in tropical countries. Understanding the pathology of envenomation and chemical composition of snake venoms is important in the development of medical countermeasures (including, but not limited to, antivenoms). Furthermore, snake venoms can be considered natural "combinatorial libraries" of proteins and peptides. Thus, it is not surprising that components of snake venom have been found extensively useful in biomedical research as well as clinical use for treating diseases as diverse as cancer and muscle pain. In this book, well-known scientists from the Americas, Asia, and Europe discuss recent trends and outlooks in regards to snake venom research. A distinctively broader coverage of the subject is given, with topics ranging from protein biochemistry to pathology. Several chapters highlight protein biochemistry and enzymology of snake venoms, immune response to envenomation and antivenoms, production and use of snake venom components as antigens for antivenom preparation, and the therapeutic value of snake venom components in the treatment of various diseases. A comprehensive and authoritative monograph, this book will be equally interesting to both established researchers and graduate students interested in toxinology and pathology of envenomation.

Statistical Thermodynamics by Arieh Ben-Naim

ISBN: 9789814578202

Publication Date: 2014-05-01

The book presents a clear and unique approach to statistical thermodynamics based on Shannon's measure of information, and provides applications to problems of interest in the life sciences.There is no other book which presents the fundamentals of statistical thermodynamics on Information theory, yet also includes many applications which usually do not feature in such textbooks.

Sacred Bovines by Douglas Allchin

ISBN: 9780190490362

Publication Date: 2017-07-17

This book is a collection of short essays, each challenging a commonplace assumption about biology - playfully dubbed "Sacred Bovines." The essays aim to be both provocative and entertaining. They highlight amusing ironies and fascinating details, such as organisms that blur the distinction ofmale and female, tool use and language among non-humans, errors made by Charles Darwin or Nobel Prize winners, and how research on cells was enriched by a Marxist perspective. As an ensemble, the essays aim to deepen an understanding of how science works, including its cultural contexts. The 28pieces are arranged in 7 thematic sections, focusing on such topics as error in science, "myth-conceptions" of scientists, cultural bias in scientific concepts, the challenge of expertise and "what counts as science" in society, and science and values.While all the essays focus on cases in biology, most of the lessons are more general, and valuable for any citizen who reflects on science in society. A final Epilogue profiles the value of the style of thinking exemplified throughout the book - namely, the light-hearted challenging of assumptionsas a source of creative insight. An additional "Afterword for Teachers" highlights how the essays can foster learning about the nature of science and describes some practical classroom strategies.

Smell Detectives by Melanie A. Kiechle; Paul S. Sutter (Foreword by, Series edited by)

ISBN: 9780295741932

Publication Date: 2017-07-01

What did nineteenth-century cities smell like? And how did odors matter in the formation of a modern environmental consciousness? Smell Detectives follows the nineteenth-century Americans who used their noses to make sense of the sanitary challenges caused by rapid urban and industrial growth. Melanie Kiechle examines nuisance complaints, medical writings, domestic advice, and myriad discussions of what constituted fresh air, and argues that nineteenth-century city dwellers, anxious about the air they breathed, attempted to create healthier cities by detecting and then mitigating the most menacing odors. Medical theories in the nineteenth century assumed that foul odors caused disease and that overcrowded cities--filled with new and stronger stinks--were synonymous with disease and danger. But the sources of offending odors proved difficult to pinpoint. The creation of city health boards introduced new conflicts between complaining citizens and the officials in charge of the air. Smell Detectives looks at the relationship between the construction of scientific expertise, on the one hand, and "common sense"--the olfactory experiences of common people--on the other. Although the rise of germ theory revolutionized medical knowledge and ultimately undid this form of sensory knowing, Smell Detectives recovers how city residents used their sense of smell and their health concerns about foul odors to understand, adjust to, and fight against urban environmental changes.

The Eye of the Sandpiper by Brandon Keim

ISBN: 9781501707728

Publication Date: 2017-06-20

In The Eye of the Sandpiper, Brandon Keim pairs cutting-edge science with a deep love of nature, conveying his insights in prose that is both accessible and beautiful. In an elegant, thoughtful tour of nature in the twenty-first century, Keim continues in the tradition of Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and David Quammen, reporting from the frontiers of science while celebrating the natural world?s wonders and posing new questions about our relationship to the rest of life on Earth. The stories in The Eye of the Sandpiper are arranged in four thematic sections. Each addresses nature through a different lens. The first is evolutionary and ecological dynamics, from how patterns form on butterfly wings to the ecological importance of oft-reviled lampreys. The second section explores the inner lives of animals, which science has only recently embraced: empathy in rats, emotions in honeybees, spirituality in chimpanzees. The third section contains stories of people acting on insights both ecological and ethological: nourishing blighted rivers, but also caring for injured pigeons at a hospital for wild birds and demanding legal rights for primates. The fourth section unites ecology and ethology in discussions of ethics: how we should think about and behave toward nature, and the place of wildness in a world in which space for wilderness is shrinking. By appreciating the nonhuman world more fully, Keim writes, "I hope people will also act in ways that nourish rather than impoverish its life?which is, ultimately, the problem that needs to be solved at this Anthropocene moment, with a sixth mass extinction looming, once-common animals becoming rare, and Earth straining to support 7.5 billion people. The solution will come from a love of nature rather than chastisement or lamentation."

Photosynthesis: Structures, Mechanisms, and Applications by Harvey J. M. Hou (Editor); Mohammad Mahdi Najafpour (Editor); Gary F. Moore (Editor); Suleyman I. Allakhverdiev (Editor)

ISBN: 9783319488714

Publication Date: 2017-05-26

To address the environmental, socioeconomic, and geopolitical issues associated with increasing global human energy consumption, technologies for utilizing renewable carbon-free or carbon-neutral energy sources must be identified and developed. Among renewable sources, solar energy is quite promising as it alone is sufficient to meet global human demands well into the foreseeable future. However, it is diffuse and diurnal. Thus effective strategies must be developed for its capture, conversion and storage. In this context, photosynthesis provides a paradigm for large-scale deployment. Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria and has evolved over 3 billion years. The process of photosynthesis currently produces more than 100 billion tons of dry biomass annually, which equates to a global energy storage rate of ~100 TW. Recently, detailed structural information on the natural photosynthetic systems has been acquired at the molecular level, providing a foundation for comprehensive functional studies of the photosynthetic process. Likewise, sophisticated spectroscopic techniques have revealed important mechanistic details. Such accomplishments have made it possible for scientists and engineers to construct artificial systems for solar energy transduction that are inspired by their biological counterparts. The book contains articles written by experts and world leaders in their respective fields and summarizes the exciting breakthroughs toward understanding the structures and mechanisms of the photosynthetic apparatus as well as efforts toward developing revolutionary new energy conversion technologies. The topics/chapters will be organized in terms of the natural sequence of events occurring in the process of photosynthesis, while keeping a higher-order organization of structure and mechanism as well as the notion that biology can inspire human technologies. For example, the topic of light harvesting, will be followed by charge separation at reaction centers, followed by charge stabilization, followed by chemical reactions, followed by protection mechanisms, followed by other more specialized topics and finally ending with artificial systems and looking forward. As shown in the table of contents (TOC), the book includes and integrates topics on the structures and mechanisms of photosynthesis, and provides relevant information on applications to bioenergy and solar energy transduction.

Biological Individuality by Scott Lidgard; Lynn Nyhart

ISBN: 9780226446455

Publication Date: 2017-05-24

Individuals are things that everybody knows--or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences often cannot agree on what an individual is and why. One reason for this disagreement is that the many important biological individuality concepts serve very different purposes--defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Indeed, as the contributors to Biological Individuality reveal, nature is too messy for simple definitions of this concept, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning. Bringing together biologists, historians, and philosophers, this book provides a multifaceted exploration of biological individuality that identifies leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality both past and present, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Biological practice and theory recognize individuals at myriad levels of organization, from genes to organisms to symbiotic systems. We depend on these notions of individuality to address theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and Darwinian fitness; to illuminate empirical questions about development, function, and ecology; to ground philosophical questions about the nature of organisms and causation; and to probe historical and cultural circumstances that resonate with parallel questions about the nature of society. Charting an interdisciplinary research agenda that broadens the frameworks in which biological individuality is discussed, this book makes clear that in the realm of the individual, there is not and should not be a direct path from biological paradigms based on model organisms through to philosophical generalization and historical reification.

Evolutionary Theory by Niles Eldredge; Telmo Pievani; Emanuele Serrelli; Ilya Temkin (Editor)

ISBN: 9780226426228

Publication Date: 2016-09-23

The natural world is infinitely complex and hierarchically structured, with smaller units forming the components of progressively larger systems: molecules make up cells, cells comprise tissues and organs that are, in turn, parts of individual organisms, which are united into populations and integrated into yet more encompassing ecosystems. In the face of such awe-inspiring complexity, there is a need for a comprehensive, non-reductionist evolutionary theory. Having emerged at the crossroads of paleobiology, genetics, and developmental biology, the hierarchical approach to evolution provides a unifying perspective on the natural world and offers an operational framework for scientists seeking to understand the way complex biological systems work and evolve. Coedited by one of the founders of hierarchy theory and featuring a diverse and renowned group of contributors, this volume provides an integrated, comprehensive, cutting-edge introduction to the hierarchy theory of evolution. From sweeping historical reviews to philosophical pieces, theoretical essays, and strictly empirical chapters, it reveals hierarchy theory as a vibrant field of scientific enterprise that holds promise for unification across the life sciences and offers new venues of empirical and theoretical research. Stretching from molecules to the biosphere, hierarchy theory aims to provide an all-encompassing understanding of evolution and--with this first collection devoted entirely to the concept--will help make transparent the fundamental patterns that propel living systems.

Kin by John L. Ingraham

ISBN: 9780674660403

Publication Date: 2017-05-08

Since Darwin, people have speculated about the evolutionary relationships among dissimilar species, including our connections to the diverse life forms known as microbes. In the 1970s biologists discovered a way to establish these kinships. This new era of exploration began with Linus Pauling's finding that every protein in every cell contains a huge reservoir of evolutionary history. His discovery opened a research path that has changed the way biologists and others think about the living world. In Kin John L. Ingraham tells the story of these remarkable breakthroughs. His original, accessible history explains how we came to understand our microbe inheritance and the relatedness of all organisms on Earth. Among the most revolutionary scientific achievements was Carl Woese's discovery that a large group of organisms previously lumped together with bacteria were in fact a totally distinct form of life, now called the archaea. But the crowning accomplishment has been to construct the Tree of Life--an evolutionary project Darwin dreamed about over a century ago. Today, we know that the Tree's three main stems are dominated by microbes. The nonmicrobes--plants and animals, including humans--constitute only a small upper branch in one stem. Knowing the Tree's structure has given biologists the ability to characterize the complex array of microbial populations that live in us and on us, and investigate how they contribute to health and disease. This knowledge also moves us closer to answering the tantalizing question of how the Tree of Life began, over 3.5 billion years ago.

The Politics of Scale by Nathan F. Sayre

ISBN: 9780226083254

Publication Date: 2017-03-23

Rangelands are vast, making up one quarter of the United States and forty percent of the Earth's ice-free land. And while contemporary science has revealed a great deal about the environmental impacts associated with intensive livestock production--from greenhouse gas emissions to land and water degradation--far less is known about the historic role science has played in rangeland management and politics. Steeped in US soil, this first history of rangeland science looks to the origins of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American West, exploring the larger political and economic forces that--together with scientific study--produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well being. During the late 1880s and early 1890s, a variety of forces--from the Homestead Act of 1862 to the extermination of bison, foreign investment, and lack of government regulation--promoted free-for-all access to and development of the western range, with disastrous environmental consequences. To address the crisis, government agencies turned to scientists, but as Nathan F. Sayre shows, range science grew in a politically fraught landscape. Neither the scientists nor the public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy--from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities--contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates about rangelands to this day. Looking at the global history of rangeland science through the Cold War and beyond, The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of past conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists.

Evolution`s Bite - A Story of Teeth, Diet, and Human Origins by Peter S. Ungar

ISBN: 9780691160535

Publication Date: 2017-05-09

What teeth can teach us about the evolution of the human species Whether we realize it or not, we carry in our mouths the legacy of our evolution. Our teeth are like living fossils that can be studied and compared to those of our ancestors to teach us how we became human. In Evolution's Bite, noted paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar brings together for the first time cutting-edge advances in understanding human evolution and climate change with new approaches to uncovering dietary clues from fossil teeth to present a remarkable investigation into the ways that teeth--their shape, chemistry, and wear--reveal how we came to be. Ungar describes how a tooth's "foodprints"--distinctive patterns of microscopic wear and tear--provide telltale details about what an animal actually ate in the past. These clues, combined with groundbreaking research in paleoclimatology, demonstrate how a changing climate altered the food options available to our ancestors, what Ungar calls the biospheric buffet. When diets change, species change, and Ungar traces how diet and an unpredictable climate determined who among our ancestors was winnowed out and who survived, as well as why we transitioned from the role of forager to farmer. By sifting through the evidence--and the scars on our teeth--Ungar makes the important case for what might or might not be the most natural diet for humans. Traveling the four corners of the globe and combining scientific breakthroughs with vivid narrative, Evolution's Bite presents a unique dental perspective on our astonishing human development.

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