Bücher veröffentlicht von IntechOpen

Metal ions play an important role in analytical chemistry, organometallic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, and materials chemistry. This book, Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry Researches of Metal Compounds, collects research articles, review articles, and tutorial description about metal compounds. To perspective contemporary researches of inorganic chemistry widely, the kinds of metal elements (typical and transition metals including rare earth; p, d, f-blocks) and compounds (molecular coordination compounds, ionic solid materials, or natural metalloenzyme) or simple substance (bulk, clusters, or alloys) to be focused are not limited. In this way, review chapters of current researches are collected in this book.

Redox reactions are central to the major element cycling, many cell cycles, many chemisorption and physisorption processes, trace element mobility from rocks and sediments toward wells, aquifers, trace element toxicity toward life forms, and most remediation schemes including water treatments; over the last three decades, the field has attracted a lot of scientists, and a great deal of researches has been done in redox chemistry. This book provides a very broad overview of the state of the art of understanding redox processes, which starts with giving a concise introduction that describes the origin, historical background, and the development of the redox definitions. The book is organized into two sections that include ten chapters and introduces, in Section 1, generalized electron balance theory and its applications in electrolytic redox systems, redox-active molecules and its applications in device memory, fundamentals and applications of flow batteries and their integration into antidirect current, and donor acceptor titrations of displacement and electronic transference. Section 2 introduces redox in biological processes, including roles of reactive oxygen species in respiration, metabolism, and regulations, and redox in physiological processes as redox-sensitive TRP channels TRPA1 and TRPM2. All chapters are written by different authors (with the exception of Chapter 1 [Introduction]). This clearly reflects the broad range of topics that have been covered by experts in the field.

In the last few years, the society is witnessing ever-growing levels of complexity in the optimization paradigms lying at the core of different applications and processes. This augmented complexity has motivated the adoption of heuristic methods as a means to balance the Pareto trade-off between computational efficiency and the quality of the produced solutions to the problem at hand. The momentum gained by heuristics in practical applications spans further towards hyper-heuristics, which allow constructing ensembles of simple heuristics to handle efficiently several problems of a single class. In this context, this short book compiles selected applications of heuristics and hyper-heuristics for combinatorial optimization problems, including scheduling and other assorted application scenarios.

This book has been designed to give a brief information on the development and current status of radionuclide treatments. Today, despite most of them have been accepted experimentally in the clinical guidelines, the number of the radionuclide treatments has been increasing gradually. Theranostic concept is the leading cause for this increase. Behind the radioiodine treatment for benign and malignant thyroid diseases, other radionuclide treatments that consist of I-131 metaiodobenzylguanidine therapy for neuroectodermal tumors, radionuclide pain palliation for bone metastases, radiosynovectomy, and selective internal radiation therapy were included in the book. All the chapters have been written by experienced nuclear medicine physicians.

Serotonin - A Chemical Messenger Between All Types of Living Cells is a very interesting book on the most ancient neurotransmitter, hormone and trophic factor serotonin or 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT). This unique chemical is present in all living cells including plants and animals. This book will take us through a serene journey of the evolutionary history of serotonin and its role from man to mollusk. There are many interesting chapters incorporated in this book, including novel approaches for detecting minor metabolites of serotonin in human plasma, production and function of serotonin in cardiac cells, immuno-thrombotic effects of serotonin in platelets to the identification and localization of serotonin in the nervous system and gonad of bivalve mollusks.

Optoelectronics - Advanced Device Structures (Book IV) is following the Optoelectronics (Books I, II, and III) published in 2011, 2013, and 2015, as part of the InTech collection of international works on optoelectronics. Accordingly, as with the first three books of the collection, this book covers recent achievements by specialists around the world. The growing number of countries participating in this endeavor as well as joint participation of the US and Moldova scientists in edition of this book testifies to the unifying effect of science. An interested reader will find in the book the description of properties and applications employing organic and inorganic materials, as well as the methods of fabrication and analysis of operation and regions of application of modern optoelectronic devices.

It has been nearly 5 years since I edited the last version. In this version, the focus is on islet transplantation. In addition, interesting topics dealing with corneal and peripheral nerve transplantation and decellularization are covered. Unfortunately, clinical trials have not started in Japan, the USA, or Europe in the past 5 years. On the other hand, clinical trials were completed in many countries and so on (inventory of human xenotransplantation practices: IXA and HUG in collaboration with the WHO). In addition, in Japan, clinical trials related to cell transplantation have been initiated, and guidelines for xenotransplantation have been revised. In the near future, some clinical trials on xenotransplantation using genetically modified pigs or the microencapsulation of pancreatic islets will start.

The book Intensive Care is composed of ten chapters, which are the day-to-day practice diagnosis as well as rare disease and pediatric sepsis. It is written very well by the experts from the respective fields. We are sure and confident that this book will not only help the critical care physicians but also help acute care physicians, general practitioners, surgeons, and paramedical critical, intensive care, and acute care staff.

Phosphoric acid is an important industrial acid that is utilized for manufacturing phosphatic fertilizers and industrial products, for pickling and posterior treatment of steel surfaces to prevent corrosion, for ensuring appropriate paint adhesion, and for the food and beverages industry, e.g., cola-type drinks to impart taste and slight acidity and to avoid iron sedimentation. This industry is spread out in countries of four continents - Asia, Africa, America, and Europe - which operate mines and production plants and produce fertilizers. Phosacid is one of the most widely known acids. The global phosacid market and its many phosphate derivatives are expanding worldwide; this trend is expected to continue in the next years, thus producing innovative products.

Accurate prediction of turbulent flows remains a challenging task despite considerable work in this area and the acceptance of CFD as a design tool. The quality of the CFD calculations of the flows in engineering applications strongly depends on the proper prediction of turbulence phenomena. Investigations of flow instability, heat transfer, skin friction, secondary flows, flow separation, and reattachment effects demand a reliable modelling and simulation of the turbulence, reliable methods, accurate programming, and robust working practices. The current scientific status of simulation of turbulent flows as well as some advances in computational techniques and practical applications of turbulence research is reviewed and considered in the book.

The evidence of cancer in humans, animals and plant species suggests that it is as old as multicellular life on Earth. Why is it so difficult to understand and fight? Because cancer begins from the organism's own mutated single cell focused on its own survival. It would be naive to expect that cancer could be ever entirely eliminated, but there is still hope for finding effective treatments. The book is to give a view of selected aspects of cancer like its spread in nature, novel anticancer drugs based on Chinese herbs or birch bark, novel promising targets of annexins and kinases and progress in immunotherapy. It is our hope that you will find in this book interesting, inspiring and stimulating information concerning cancer research.

Gluconeogenesis, the metabolic process through which glucose or glycogen is synthesized from noncarbohydrate substrates, is critical for maintaining the plasma glucose level within a narrow range either in the fed or fasting (nutritional deprivation) state. Dysregulation of this pathway usually causes severe or even fatal outcomes. This book discusses a series of up-to-date topics about this critical process, including the fundamental biochemical reactions of glucose metabolism, the glucogenesis process in eukaryotic cells using the Dictyostelium discoideum as a model, the role of "gut-brain-liver axis" in the control of glucose homeostasis, and the new mathematic model for the monitoring and prediction of blood glucose. This book is written by international scientists with expertise in the study of gluconeogenesis. By presenting a clear and succinct review of the fundamentals of gluconeogenesis, it is expected to draw more attentions and stimulate more scientists to dedicate their researches in revealing the mechanism and its application of gluconeogenesis.

One of the most critical resources required for wireless communication is the radio spectrum. Traditionally, the administration of the spectrum rights tends to grant exclusive rights to some services in the major geographic regions. On the other hand, several studies have shown that the spectrum is actually underutilized and that new devices should use the underutilized spectrum in an opportunistic manner. Cognitive radio is a way to do that. The cognitive radio needs to collect cognition about the radio environment to operate efficiently. Such a radio needs to understand if the spectrum it intends to use is free or utilized by some primary user. By primary user we mean the licensed user of the band, and correspondingly the cognitive radios are often termed as secondary users. The goal of this book is to collect recent research about cognitive radio and provide an up-to-date review of the challenging topic.

This new book presents the growing occupational therapy knowledge and clinical practice. Occupational therapy, as a health profession, is concerned with preserving well-being through occupations, and its main goal is to help people participate in the activities of daily living. This is achieved by working with people to improve their ability to engage in the occupations they want to engage in or by changing the occupation or the environment to better support their occupational engagement. The topic of the book has been structured on occupational therapy framework and reflects new research, techniques, and occupational therapy trends. This useful book will help students, occupational therapy educators, and professionals to connect occupational therapy theories and the evidence-based clinical practice.

This book provides useful information about pyrolysis, which includes the pyrolysis of biomass and pyrolysis of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. Additionally, this book elucidates and illustrates further innovative pyrolysis processes such as catalytic pyrolysis, spray pyrolysis, and microwave-assisted pyrolysis. This book discusses the production of semiconductors and nanomaterials through the pyrolysis process.

Parallel and distributed computing has been one of the most active areas of research in recent years. The techniques involved have found significant applications in areas as diverse as engineering, management, natural sciences, and social sciences. This book reports state-of-the-art topics and advances in this emerging field. Completely up-to-date, aspects it examines include the following: 1) Social networks; 2) Smart grids; 3) Graphic processing unit computation; 4) Distributed software development tools; 5) Analytic hierarchy process and the analytic network process

Risk management is an interdisciplinary discipline that involves several aspects. It is absolutely necessary to make sure we manage risks in order to minimize their threats and maximize their potential. This book tries to investigate the complexity that characterizes risk management. It contains original research and application chapters from different perspectives and covers different areas such as human aspects, emergency management, cognitive factors, software engineering, and marketing. The idea of the book is to expand the reader's consciousness to deal with problems regarding risk management.

Nitrification and denitrification are essential processes for aquatic ecological system and vital for human health. While ammonia is applied for disinfection together with chlorine to produce chloramine, excessive ammonia may cause nitrification and bacteria growth in water transmission pipeline. Since excessive discharge may cause eutrophication and deterioration of aquatic system, nitrate is regulated for wastewater discharge in sensitive areas. Further, nitrate needs to be monitored and controlled in drinking water treatment to protect against methemoglobinemia in bottle-fed infants.

The objective of this book is to fill the gap combining several studies from qualitative and quantitative research methods. The various chapters presented here follow several approaches that researchers explore in different context. This book intends to contribute to better understanding of the application areas of qualitative research method and to show how these business practices in social sciences can stimulate in various areas.

Toxoplasma gondii was first identified more than 100 years ago in the tissues of birds and mammals. Although toxoplasmosis is important all over the world, its approaches to diagnostic strategies considerably differ among countries. Its wide distribution may be attributed to complex transmission patterns and parasite coevolution with multiple hosts. Although T. gondii infections of immunocompetent people are generally considered asymptomatic, infections in immunocompromised individuals, such as those with AIDS or organ transplant recipients, can result in severe consequences. This book, composed of a series of articles, including effective diagnosis of laboratory in toxoplasma infections, congenital toxoplasmosis, relationship between toxoplasmosis and public health genomics, prevalence, genetic diversity of toxoplasmosis, and microparticle vaccines against Toxoplasma gondii by authors from all over the world, presents a wide open point of view for toxoplasmosis.

Nanoplasmonics is a young topic of research, which is part of nanophotonics and nano-optics. Nanoplasmonics concerns to the investigation of electron oscillations in metallic nanostructures and nanoparticles. Surface plasmons have optical properties, which are very interesting. For instance, surface plasmons have the unique capacity to confine light at the nanoscale. Moreover, surface plasmons are very sensitive to the surrounding medium and the properties of the materials on which they propagate. In addition to the above, the surface plasmon resonances can be controlled by adjusting the size, shape, periodicity, and materials' nature. All these optical properties can enable a great number of applications, such as biosensors, optical modulators, photodetectors, and photovoltaic devices. This book is intended for a broad audience and provides an overview of some of the fundamental knowledges and applications of nanoplasmonics.

Sexual dysfunctions have a high prevalence in males and females, and an increase in research into its backgrounds, causes and treatment is clearly visible. Characterization of sexual dysfunctions is complex and often needs extensive clinical, psychological and psychiatric expertise to arrive at reliable diagnoses. The present volume illustrates various aspects involved in sexual (dys)functioning but also the complexity of the field. Premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, female interest/arousal disorder, hypogonadism, sexual side effects of antidepressants and circumcision are subject of the various contributions. The topics treated nicely illustrate the problems associated with sexual function and dysfunction, including lifestyle, biological, mental, sociocultural and religious aspects. The topics in this volume clearly demonstrate the importance of research on sexual functions and dysfunctions.

This book presents an overview of adrenal tumors written by a multidisciplinary team of world experts who provide comprehensive, evidence-based perspective of their topics in this field and current approaches to the management of adrenal tumors. The areas discussed in this book include an overview of adrenal incidentalomas, unusual presentations of adrenal tumors, genetic basis of pheochromocytomas and paragangliomas, pathophysiology, and medical and surgical treatment and approaches to patients with benign and malignant adrenal tumors. Each chapter written by these experts provides clinical evidence, treatment recommendations, and algorithms. Clinical Management of Adrenal Tumors will serve as a valuable resource of current information regarding adrenal tumors for medical students, residents in training, physicians, and researchers.

Sustainable development and alternative energy constituted urgent needs in the last decade. Renewable chemicals, energy and bio-resource use became challenging topics in the sustainable, renewable and green sciences. This encourages and turns primordial needs the works in certain fields as developing of new and green catalysts for chemical transformations, in the domains of energy, environmental, pharmaceutical, agro-alimentary and cosmetically applications; evaluation of bio-resources compounds largely available for many applications in energy or as additives to fuels and other applications, reduction and conversion of greenhouse gas as well as developing new synthesis routes by avoiding the use of toxic and environmentally damage materials. In this book, the recent sustainable and green process is presented in three sections: "Greenhouse Gas Conversion Efficiency in Microwave", "Biomass Green Process" and "Green Synthesis and Catalysis".

The book contains seven chapters written by noted experts and young researchers who present their recent studies of both pure mathematical problems of perturbation theories and application of perturbation methods to the study of the important topic in physics, for example, renormalization group theory and applications to basic models in theoretical physics (Y. Takashi), the quantum gravity and its detection and measurement (F. Bulnes), atom-photon interactions (E. G. Thrapsaniotis), treatment of spectra and radiation characteristics by relativistic perturbation theory (A. V. Glushkov et al), and Green's function theory and some applications (Jing Huang). The pure mathematical issues are related to the problem of generalization of the boundary layer function method for bisingularly perturbed differential equations (K. Alymkulov and D. A. Torsunov) and to the development of new homotopy asymptotic methods and some of their applications (Baojian Hong).

The insulating medium used in gas-insulated switchgear is SF6 gas, which has been widely used in substations. Energy generated by discharge will cause the composition of SF6 and generate characteristic component gases. Diagnosing the insulation defect through analyzing the decomposed gases of SF6 by chemical gas sensors is the optimal method due to its advantages. Carbon nanotubes, TiO2 nanotubes and graphene are chosen as the gas-sensing materials to build specific gas sensors for detecting each kind of SF6 decomposed gases and then enhance the gas sensitivity and selectivity by material modification. The properties and preparation methods are introduced in this book. The author studied the micro-adsorption mechanism and macro-gas sensing properties by theoretical calculation and sensing experiment.

Traveling from Zimbabwe to New Zealand and on to Ghana and the United States, the voices of higher education are presented in a way only scholars from these regions can fully articulate and understand. The changing world of higher education challenges all of those involved in very unique ways. In Global Voices in Higher Education, scholars from 10 different countries share their work, describing not only their research but also the context in which their work exists. This book allows the reader to travel with these scholars to their colleges and universities and discover areas of concern in higher education from around the globe.

Versatility, extended compositional ranges, better homogeneity, lesser energy consumption, and requirement of nonexpensive equipments have boosted the use of sol-gel process on top of the popularity in the synthesis of nanosystems. The sol-gel technique has not only revolutionized oxide ceramics industry and/or material science but has also extended widely into multidimensional applications. The book Recent Applications in Sol-Gel Synthesis comprises 14 chapters that deal mainly with the application-oriented aspects of the technique. Sol-gel prepared metal oxide (MO) nanostructures like nanospheres, nanorods, nanoflakes, nanotubes, and nanoribbons have been employed in biomedical applications involving drug deliveries, mimicking of natural bone, and antimicrobial activities. The possibility of controlling grain size in aerogel and preparation of ultrahigh-temperature ceramic (UHTC)-based materials, fluorescent glasses, ultraviolet photosensors, and photocatalysts have been discussed in detail by the experts in the field. The usefulness of sol-gel materials as active GRIN, as textile finisher, and as leather modifier with water-repellent and oil-resistive properties would be an incentive for researchers keen to pursue the field.

The book "Issues of Human Resource Management", written by well-known authors, is a result of a teamwork of specialists who have been dealing with the issue of managing human resources in different contexts. The authors from Germany, Spain, Turkey, Slovakia and Romania have submitted results of their current research and have presented important findings that are becoming a starting point for making managers decision so that their businesses can be competitive. You have put your hands on a selection of the best scientific contributions that have been reviewed and now are offering a space for an active debate on partial issues of the given topic. The authors in their work examined also the factors of psychology applied in HRM, the organisation of companies and its impact on human resource management, workers motivation and incentives and investment into human resources development; they searched the field of human resource management in family businesses, the quality of relationship in a workplace and specifics of human resource management in non-governmental organisation.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a synthetic compound for hardening and clearing polycarbonate plastics. BPA is mainly classified as an estrogen-like endocrine-disrupting chemical. In the last decade, attention has arisen in scientific communities that it is not safe to use this chemical in mainly polycarbonate plastics. Exposure to BPA starts in prenatal period, which is the critical period for its toxic effects on different organs. Throughout this book, the readers will obtain information on the effects of BPA on different systems. They will also get information on the prenatal and postnatal effects of BPA. We believe that readers will get qualified scientific knowledge and a general overview of the toxic effects of BPA exposure and its consequences from this book.