bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Earthquakes as Urban Renewal?
Authors: Hough Susan Elizabeth , Bilham Roger G.
Published: November 2020

Whether or not the reader finds it convincing, by now the thesis of this book is clear. At least throughout recent history, earthquakes have taken a temporarily heavy toll in some areas, devastating cities, claiming lives, and shaking faith. Yet taking a step back to consider the longer-term impact, one finds that, almost without exception in recent historic times, cities and societies rebound with elasticity to mirror the earth itself. Elastic rebound. These two words represent not only the single most fundamental tenet of earthquake theory but also the most apt metaphor to describe societal response to even the most catastrophic seismic events. As previous chapters have illustrated, mankind’s capacity for elastic rebound is largely a reflection of man’s capacity for elastic rebound. Recall the challenge to Voltaire,“Alas, times and men are like each other and will always be like each other.” These words might have been penned in the context of matters of philosophy: How do we make sense of our existence and our place in the universe? But at the end of the day, most days have not concerned themselves with philosophy, and politics is left to the politicians. At the end of the day, people are people. When a devastating earthquake strikes, perhaps the complex superstructure of society crumbles along with the buildings. When elaborate social and political facades are stripped away, perhaps the finer inclinations of the individual are not changed but rather showcased. It’s a nice thought, at any rate. Whether or not it explains the predilection for resiliency and compassion following disasters is open to debate, but a consideration of history, as outlined in the previous chapters, suggests that the predilection is real—whatever the cause. This remarkable human capacity for rebound is clearly a critical factor mitigating the overall societal impact of earthquakes and other natural disasters. But resiliency and compassion alone cannot hope to rebuild modern cities following a major loss of life and property: recovery requires resources. Having considered important individual earthquakes at some length, we now turn to a general consideration of the economics of earthquakes. Considered dispassionately, one can make the argument that earthquakes invariably become a catalyst for urban renewal.
Automation and High- Throughput Flow Cytometry
Authors: Edwards Bruce S. , Sklar Larry A.
Published: November 2020

The flow cytometer is unique among biomedical analysis instruments in its ability to make multiple correlated optical measurements on individual cells or particles at high rates. Moreover, an ever-expanding arsenal of fluorescent probes enables the modern flow cytometer to quantify a large and growing diversity of cell-associated macromolecules and physiological processes. Modern flow cytometers have achieved such a level of sophistication and reliability that unattended operation by automated systems is a practical reality. From its inception, flow cytometry has been in the vanguard of automation in cytological analysis. One of the most powerful automated features is cell sorting, an operation in which highly purified subsets of cells or particles are isolated from heterogeneous source populations on the basis of a targeted, multiparameter phenotype. The method most widely used for sorting today, which is based on electrostatic deflection of charged droplets, was developed over 30 years ago and led to commercial flow cytometers that were capable of sorting cells at rates of hundreds of cells per second. Influenced by the need of the Human Genome Project for efficient isolation of purified chromosomes, a high-speed chromosome flow sorter was developed and patented in 1982 that increased sort rates to tens of thousands of events per second (13). Commercial systems subsequently became available in the 1990s that permitted sorting of cells at such high rates (www.bdbiosciences.com; www.dakocytomation. com). Thus, since the initial development of the technology, the throughput of automated cell sorting has increased by nearly two orders of magnitude. In single cell analysis and sorting, throughput is determined by the rate at which the flow cytometer can process individual cells as they pass single file through the point of detection. Another aspect of flow cytometer throughput concerns the rate at which the flow cytometer can sequentially process multiple discreet collections of cells. This component of throughput will be important, for example, in the screening of collections of test compounds for their effects on bulk populations of cells. This is of particular relevance for modern drug discovery, in which there is a need to test cellular targets against millions of potentially valuable compounds that may bind cellular receptors to effect clinically therapeutic cellular responses.
DNA Fragment Sizing by High-Sensitivity Flow Cytometry: Applications in Bacterial Identification
Authors: Marrone Babetta L. , Habbersett Robert C.
Published: November 2020

High-sensitivity, single-molecule detection in flow is a paradigm that has been defined at Los Alamos over the last two decades. A recent focus has been on applications of single- molecule detection for DNA fragment sizing using a compact, low-power, highsensitivity flow cytometer (HSFCM). There are three key aspects of our approach that distinguish it from conventional flow cytometry and yield the high level of sensitivity that we achieve: a detector with high photon-detection efficiency, a small probe volume to reduce background noise, and slow flow to provide extended analyte dwell time in the probe volume. An additional factor for applications in DNA fragment sizing is a DNA stain with significant fluorescence enhancement when bound to double-stranded DNA, and low background fluorescence in the unbound state. DNA fragment sizing by HSFCM has important applications in bacterial species and strain identification, where it can replace the cumbersome and time-consuming pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) approach routinely used by public health labs for bacterial identification. The revolutionary capability to interrogate single DNA molecules, as well as potentially other submicron-sized biological particles, in a high-sensitivity flow cytometer will provide new scientific insights into cellular and molecular biology and introduce high-sensitivity flow cytometry to a wide variety of new applications in biotechnology. Flow cytometry has enabled major advances in the biomedical sciences by providing rapid, quantitative, and sensitive multiparameter measurements of individual cells and subcellular particles such as chromosomes. This analysis of individual entities produces information on population heterogeneity that is not revealed in ensemble measurements and that allows more precise quantitation of distinct attributes than is possi ble when measurements are done in bulk. However, one limitation of conventional flow cytometry is the inability to measure submicron-sized particles or weakly fluorescent particles labeled with fewer than several hundred fluorophores, primarily as a result of insufficient detection sensitivity. A wide variety of important biological particles, molecules, and molecular assemblies fall into these categories. There have been many reports of bacterial measurement and characterization by conventional flow cytometry, dating back to 1947. In 1979, Steen developed a microscope-based system specifically for applications in microbiology. Many bacteria are large enough to generate a light-scatter signal, which is useful for their detection.
FACS-Based High-Throughput Functional Screening of Genetic Libraries for Drug Target Discovery
Authors: Pali Erlina , Powell Mark
Published: November 2020

A primary aim of functional genomics in pharmaceutical applications is to identify genes whose function is critical to maintaining a disease state and to determining whether therapeutic modulation of this function results in a beneficial clinical response. However, although many genomic approaches can identify disease-associated genes, lengthy follow-up studies are usually required to determine which genes are functionally important and are causally linked to a given disease. In contrast, retrovirally mediated functional genetic screening approaches enable rapid identification of physiologically relevant targets. Genetic screens are designed to detect functional changes that result in changes in cellular function that correlate with disease amelioration. Retroviruses possess unique properties that allow delivery of complex libraries of potential genetic effectors to a variety of cell types. These effectors can perturb specific interactions required to achieve a complete functional response and establish a direct relationship with a cellular function. Functional screens are employed to select for cells endowed with a desired genetic effector–induced change in phenotype. Identification of a genetic effector that causes an altered cellular phenotype that correlates with clinical benefit can explicate critical signaling components suitable for therapeutic intervention. Flow cytometry represents a uniquely powerful methodology to monitor complex multiparametric changes of individual cells in large populations. In conjunction with recent advances in retroviral expression systems, the sensitivity and speed of flow cytometry enables a highly efficient functional screening of complex libraries in a wide range of cell-based assays. In this chapter, we discuss the process of functional genetic screening and show specific examples of its implementation. We focus particularly on the critical parameters involved in the design and execution of functional genetic screening approaches based on FACS (fluorescence activated cell sorter). Retroviruses provide a powerful method of introducing genes into mammalian cells in an efficient and stable manner. Recent advances in retroviral vector technology and packaging systems have extended their application to allow efficient and stable delivery of highly diverse libraries encoding various types of genetic effectors, including cDNAs, peptides, and ribozymes, into a broad range of cell types.
Uses of Flow Cytometry in Preclinical Safety Pharmacology and Toxicology
Authors: Burchiel Scott W. , Weaver James L.
Published: November 2020

During the last decade, commercial bench-top and multilaser flow cytometers have become widely available in academic, industrial, and government research laboratories. These flow cytometers provide a broad range of applications for multilaser and multiparameter analyses with user-friendly software interfaces. The purpose of this chapter is to review currently available and specialized applications of flow cytometry in preclinical pharmacology and toxicology. It is now common for most research and development, safety pharmacology, and safety assessment/toxicology groups to have direct access to flow cytometry instrumentation and technology. Many pharmaceutical companies have developed preclinical research groups that combine certain aspects of pharmacology and toxicology into early stages of drug discovery and development. The reason for this is that many new chemical entities (these are usually xenobiotics, i.e., nonindigenous chemicals) with interesting pharmacologic properties have proved to have unsuspected toxicities, but these effects are often undetected until late in development. Because drug toxicity is often not associated with the pharmacology of chemical agents, it is sometimes possible to select novel chemicals with excellent pharmacologic efficacy with minimal or reduced toxicity or potential for drug interactions. As will be discussed later in this chapter, flow cytometry has many desirable features that allow for high-throughput analysis of xenobiotics, as well as a definition of rare target cells and the measurement of biochemical endpoints. Thus, flow cytometry is finding increasing numbers of applications in preclinical pharmacology and toxicology and is being incorporated into all phases of drug discovery: development, preclinical, and clinical safety evaluation. Because of the longstanding use of flow cytometry in the evaluation of peripheral blood and hematopoietic cells in humans and other species, immunotoxicology was one of the first areas of toxicology to use flow cytometry and to develop routine testing procedures. Therefore, this chapter will largely focus on numerous applications of flow cytometry in immunotoxicity evaluation. Another factor that is driving the use of flow cytometry in immunotoxicology is that new regulations have been implemented in Europe and are being proposed in the United States and Japan to incorporate flow cytometry surface marker evaluation of circulating leukocytes in routine preclinical toxicology testing of pharmaceuticals in animals.
Chemorheology of Thermosets
Authors: Han Chang Dae
Published: November 2020

Thermosets (e.g., unsaturated polyester, epoxy, urethane) are small molecules containing functional groups, which undergo chemical reactions (commonly referred to as “cure”) in the presence of an initiator(s) or a catalyst(s). In a broader sense, thermosets can be regarded as being parts of reactive polymer systems, which include pairs of polymers (e.g., blends of maleated polyolefin and nylon 6, as presented in Chapter 11) that undergo chemical reactions during compounding, and mixtures of an elastomer and a vulcanizing agent that undergo cross-link reactions (commonly referred to as vulcanization) at an elevated temperature. The subject of investigating the rheological behavior of reactive polymer systems is referred to as “chemorheology.” Since chemorheology is such a very broad field of investigation, one must specify the polymer system under consideration, classifying as chemorheology of thermosets, chemorheology of reactive polymer blends, chemorheology of elastomer vulcanization, and so on. In this chapter, for a number of reasons we restrict our presentation to the chemorheology of thermosets only. These reasons include (1) the limited space available here, meaning that it is not possible to present the chemorheology of every reactive polymer system, (2) thermosets play a very important role in polymer processing from an industrial point of view, and (3) the presentation of the chemorheology of thermosets in this chapter lays the foundation for the presentation of processing of thermosets in Chapters 11–13 of Volume 2. In the 1970s and 1980s, considerable amounts of effort were spent on investigating the chemorheology of thermosets. There are many experimental techniques that have been used to investigate the cure kinetics of thermosets: differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, dielectric measurements, and rheokinetic measurements. There are monographs (Kock 1977; May 1983; Turi 1981) and a comprehensive review article (Halley and Mackay 1996) on the subject. A better understanding of the chemorheology of thermosets requires an understanding of the kinetics of chemical reactions during cure. It can then easily be surmised that an understanding of the chemorheology of thermosets is much more complex than the rheology of thermoplastics presented in Chapter 6 through Chapter 12.
Foam Extrusion
Authors: Han Chang Dae
Published: November 2020

There are two processes used in the production of thermoplastic foams, namely, foam extrusion and structural foam injection molding (Benning 1969; Frisch and Saunders 1973). Foam extrusion, in which either chemical or physical blowing agents are used, is the focus of this chapter. Investigations of foam extrusion have dealt with the type and choice of process equipment (Collins and Brown 1973; Knau and Collins 1974; Senn and Shenefiel 1971; Wacehter 1970), the effect of die design (Fehn 1967; Han and Ma 1983b), the effect of blowing agents on foaming characteristics (Burt 1978, 1979; Han and Ma 1983b; Hansen 1962; Ma and Han 1983), and relationships between the foam density, cell geometry, and mechanical properties (Croft 1964; Kanakkanatt 1973; Mehta and Colombo 1976; Meinecke and Clark 1973). Chemical blowing agents are generally low-molecular-weight organic compounds, which decompose at and above a critical temperature and thereby release a gas (or gases), for example, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or carbon monoxide. Examples of physical blowing agents include nitrogen, carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons (e.g., trichlorofluoromethane, dichlorodifluoromethane, and dichlorotetrafluoroethane), pentane, etc. They are introduced as a component of the polymer charge or under pressure into the molten polymer in the barrel of the extruder. It is extremely important to control the formation and growth of gas bubbles in order to produce foams of uniform quality (i.e., uniform cell structure). The fundamental questions one may ask in thermoplastic foam processing are: (1) What is the optimal concentration of blowing agent in order to have the minimum number of open cells and thus the best achievable mechanical property? (2) How many bubbles will be nucleated at the instant of nucleation? (3) What is the critical pressure at which bubbles nucleate in a molten polymer? (4) What are the processing–property relationships in foam extrusion and structural foam injection molding? Understandably, the answers to such questions depend, among many factors, on: (1) the solubility of the blowing agent in a molten polymer, (2) the diffusivity of the blowing agent in a molten polymer, (3) the concentration of the blowing agent in the mixture with a molten polymer, (4) the chemical structure of the polymers, (5) the initial pressure of the system, and (6) the equilibrium (or initial) temperature of the system.
Oxidation-Reduction Reactions
Authors: Jordan Robert B.
Published: November 2020

For most purposes, inorganic reactions can be classified as either substitution reactions or oxidation-reduction reactions. The latter involve the transfer of at least one electron from the reducing agent to the oxidizing agent. Such reactions are widely used in analytical procedures and are important in many biological processes. One of the mechanistic types in this area is unique in having a fairly simple theoretical basis for predicting rate constants in solution from measurable input parameters. Oxidation-reduction reactions have been classified in two general ways; the first, historically, is by stoichiometry and the second is by mechanism. The Stoichiometric classification only requires a knowledge of the reaction stoichiometry but has limited kinetic applicability. The change in oxidation state of the reducing agent is the same as the change in oxidation state of the oxidizing agent.
Traumatic Brain Injury
Authors: Rao Vani
Published: November 2020

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a significant cause of disability in the United States, with an incidence of about 1.5 million cases per year (National Institutes of Health Consensus Development Panel, 1999). It is associated with both neurologic and psychiatric consequences. Although the neurologic problems usually stabilize with time, the psychiatric disorders often continue to remit and relapse. Factors associated with the development of psychiatric disorders include older age, arteriosclerosis, and chronic alcoholism, all of which interfere with the reparative process within the central nervous system. Other contributors to psychiatric disability include a pre-TBI history of psychiatric illness, illicit drug abuse, and lack of social support. Because post-TBI psychiatric disturbances interfere with rehabilitation and cause emotional and financial burden for patients and caregivers, early diagnosis and treatment are important. Post-TBI psychiatric disturbances are best classified according to their clinical presentation. These disturbances are discussed below and their pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic treatment strategies are recommended. The mood disturbances most commonly associated with TBI are major depression, mania, anxiety, and apathy. Major depression is seen in about 25% of people with TBI. Symptoms of major depression include persistent sadness; guilt; feelings of worthlessness; hopelessness; suicidal thoughts; anhedonia; and changes in patterns of sleep, appetite, and energy. Sometimes these symptoms may be associated with psychotic features such as delusions and hallucinations. It is important to remember that changes in sleep, appetite, or energy are not specific to the syndrome of major depression and may be due to the brain injury itself, or to the noise, stimulation, or deconditioning associated with hospitalization. If due to the latter conditions, gradual improvement occurs with time in most patients. Sadness in excess of the severity of injury and poor participation in rehabilitation are strong indicators of the presence of major depression. The presence of poor social functioning pre-TBI and left dorsolateral frontal and/or left basal ganglia lesion have been associated with an increased probability of developing major depression following brain injury ( Jorge et al., 1993a; Jorge et al., 2004). Major depression should be differentiated from demoralization, primary apathy syndrome, and pathologic crying.
Neuroleptics
Authors: Johnston Deirdre
Published: November 2020

The ‘‘neuroleptic’’ antipsychotic group of pharmacologic agents was so named because the original agents, now called ‘‘conventional’’ antipsychotics, produced significant neurologic side effects in the form of extrapyramidal symptoms (EPS). However, neuroleptics were the first drugs to be effective in treating psychosis and remain the cornerstone of pharmacologic management of psychotic symptoms, whether such symptoms are primary or arise in the context of neurologic disorders. Although the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved use of antipsychotic agents is for the treatment of schizophrenia, mania, and ‘‘psychosis,’’ there is strong agreement among dementia experts that both the conventional antipsychotics and the newer ‘‘atypical’’ agents have a place in the management of several behavioral symptoms in persons with dementia (Small et al., 1997). Concerns have been raised regarding increased risk of stroke and increased mortality in the elderly, and a recent meta-analysis found the use of both conventional and atypical antipsychotics in dementia to be associated with a small increased risk for death compared with placebo (Schneider, Dagerman, and Insel, 2005). When choosing an antipsychotic medication, these and other risks should be considered within the context of an individual patient’s medical need for the drug, medical comorbidity, and the efficacy and safety of alternatives. In psychiatric disorders complicating neurologic diseases, antipsychotic drugs are used to treat specific syndromes (mania, delusional depression, schizophrenia) and target symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, tics in Tourette’s syndrome, chorea in Huntington’s disease). They are also used to ameliorate severe agitation or other behavioral problems that threaten the safety of the patient or others and have not responded to alternative interventions. These indications for antipsychotic drug use are further detailed in the chapters on specific neurologic diseases. Antipsychotic medications should not be used for milder behavioral disturbances, such as the wandering, disinhibited social intrusiveness, or frustration-induced emotional lability seen in some patients with cognitive impairment. In these instances, nonpharmacologic methods such as environmental manipulation should be tried first. For example, gentle redirection of the patient, assistance with activities of daily living, a night light in the bedroom, structured schedules of activities, and caregiver education about such strategies may alleviate some problem behaviors.
Educating Deaf Students: An Introduction
Authors: Marschark Marc , Lang Harry G. , Albertini John A.
Published: November 2020

Consider this passage from a letter written by Robert H. Weitbrecht, a physicist who was born deaf and went on to change the lives of deaf people throughout the world: . . . Perhaps I was more fortunate than the average deaf child. My family had upheavals during my teens—my father passed away and we had difficult circumstances. My mother had faith in me and saw to it that I was given the best possible chance during these times. (Weitbrecht to Srnka, 1966) . . . As a young boy, Weitbrecht had difficulties learning to speak. His parents and teachers were not sure about his potential to acquire a normal education. Weitbrecht was teased by his peers because of his deafness. He did not have very positive self-esteem, and he was not happy in school. Despite the doubts and challenges, he went on to earn several academic degrees. In 1964, Weitbrecht developed a modem (“acoustic coupler”) which enabled deaf people to use the telephone via a teletypewriter (TTY). Weitbrecht’s modem was a major breakthrough in the lives of deaf and hard-of-hearing people, who had waited more than 90 years since the invention of the voice telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. It brought to them both access and independence with regard to long-distance communication. Weitbrecht’s story is one of a young deaf child with questionable abilities who went on to be successful in his chosen field. It is also a story that has often been repeated (Lang & Meath-Lang, 1995). Despite all of the hurdles which have threatened to thwart their progress, deaf people have found ways to go over, under, and around the barriers of attitude and access to distinguish themselves in many fields of endeavor. Imagine how much more they could do if society did not make it so hard for them. This book is about learning, teaching, and the education of children who are deaf or hard of hearing, but it is not intended solely for those who make their living by teaching. Rather, it is intended for parents, service providers, policymakers, and lay readers as well as teachers—anyone interested in the education of deaf children, whether or not they have a formal educational role.
Cognitive Development and Deaf Children
Authors: Marschark Marc , Lang Harry G. , Albertini John A.
Published: November 2020

There is a long history of investigations reporting that deaf children lag behind hearing peers in learning, problem solving, and creativity. In this chapter we describe the kinds of evidence that led to such conclusions and the extent to which they appear to be valid today. Early research concerning cognitive development in deaf children often was aimed at understanding intellectual growth “in the absence of language.” Other investigations involved tasks that required comprehension of English or histories of reading. More recently, we have come to understand that both kinds of evaluation might be biased against deaf children. Still, ways in which deaf children’s atypical histories of language functioning and educational experience might influence their cognitive development are largely unexplored. There have been a variety of studies dealing with deaf children’s cognitive skills, and especially memory, sometimes including consideration of language fluencies and degree of hearing loss. More recently, various tests of cognitive ability have been developed that are nonverbal in nature or can be administered through sign language. The extent to which those tests accurately reflect the thinking skills of deaf children still remains poorly understood, as does the question of whether such tests tap the same skills that they do in hearing children. Further, some people still make the appealing but dubious assumption that cognitive development is essentially the same for deaf and hearing children (see Braden, 2001; Marschark & Lukomski, 2001, for discussion). Studies of intelligence and academic abilities of minority and underprivileged children during the 1960s and 1970s led to a concern about the lack of cultural fairness in testing. It was recognized at the time that the nature of children’s early environments could influence later performance on intelligence measures and academic achievement. This issue was never adequately addressed with regard to deaf children, most of whom clearly have early childhood experiences that could cause differences in test performance. As a result, deaf children were often described as “deficient” or as “concrete, literal thinkers” who were unlikely to be able to grasp the kinds of abstract concepts necessary for academic success.
The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean, 350 BC–100 BC
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along the shores of the Mediterranean, and marched south through Syria and Palestine, where he ruthlessly took charge of the Phoenician cities that had in the past provided Persia with its fleets; Tyre resisted him for seven months, much to his fury, even after he built the great mole that for ever after joined the island city to the mainland. Once he had captured Tyre, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered, enslaved or crucified. He bypassed Jerusalem, choosing the road through Gaza, since his real target at this stage was Egypt, ruled by a Persian satrap for nearly 200 years, since the days of Cambyses, and his conquest of this land transformed not just Egypt but the entire eastern Mediterranean. The result of his victory was that Egypt was turned around, looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to the Nile valley. In 331 BC he decided to found a city on the northernmost edge of Egypt, on a limestone spur separated from the alluvial lands of the interior by a freshwater lake – a city next to rather than actually in Egypt, as its designation in later Latin documents as Alexandria ad Aegyptum, ‘Alexandria on the way to [or ‘next to’] Egypt’, affirms. This sense that Alexandria was more a city of the Mediterranean than of Egypt would persist for over two millennia, until the expulsion of its foreign communities in the twentieth century. For much of that period it was the greatest city in the Mediterranean. Alexander’s motives certainly included his own glorification.
Old and New Faiths, AD 1–450
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

As in any port city of the Roman world, the population of Ostia was very mixed. An extraordinary discovery was made on the outskirts of Ostia in 1961, while a road was being constructed linking Rome to its new door to the world, Fiumicino airport: the synagogue of Ostia, the oldest synagogue structure to have survived in Europe. The earliest part dates from the first century AD, but the building was repaired or partly rebuilt in the fourth century. It was in continuous use for Jewish prayer for at least 300 years. An inscription from the second century commemorates the building of the Ark for the scrolls of the Law, at the expense of a certain Mindis Faustos; the inscription is mainly in Greek, with a few Latin words, for the Jews of Rome, with their connections to the East, continued to use Greek as their daily language. The building and its annexes have an area of 856 square metres, and everything suggests that this was the major synagogue of a prosperous community of hundreds of Jews. More than a synagogue, by the fourth century the complex contained an oven, possibly for the baking of unleavened bread for Passover, and a ritual bath. There were side rooms that were probably used for teaching and for meetings of the Jewish council and of the rabbinical court. A carved architrave portrayed the great candlestick that had stood in the Temple, the ram’s horn blown at New Year, and the symbols of the Feast of Tabernacles, the citron and decorated palm branch. Nor was Judaism the only eastern cult with many followers in Ostia. A small brick-built temple elsewhere in the city has been identified as a shrine of Sarapis. Within the precinct there was a courtyard paved with a black-and-white mosaic of Nile scenes. Plenty of inscriptions refer to the cult of Isis; there were several shrines to Mithras, much favoured in the Roman army; during their wild ecstasies, male devotees of the mother-goddess Cybele, who was also worshipped at Ostia, were said to castrate themselves.
Mediterranean Troughs, 600–900
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

By the sixth century, the unity of the Mediterranean had been shattered; it was no longer mare nostrum, either politically or commercially. There have been attempts to show that the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean as a trading space, at least, survived until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century (culminating in the invasion of Spain in 711), or even until the Frankish empire of the incestuous mass-murderer Charlemagne acquired control of Italy and Catalonia. There have also been attempts to show that recovery began much earlier than past generations of historians had assumed, and was well under way in the tenth or even the ninth century. It would be hard to dispute this in the case of the Byzantine East, which had already shown some resilience, or in the case of the Islamic lands that by then stretched from Syria and Egypt to Spain and Portugal, but the West is more of a puzzle. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some historians observe decline at the same moments as others detect expansion. To this one can sensibly answer that there was enormous regional variation; but the question remains when and whether the Mediterranean lost, and then recovered, its unity. Just as in antiquity the integration of the Mediterranean into a single trading area, and subsequently into a single political area, had taken many centuries, from the Dark Age of the tenth century BC to the emergence of the Roman Empire, so in the era of the ‘Third Mediterranean’ the process of integration was painfully slow. Full political integration was never again achieved, despite the best efforts of invading Arabs and, much later, Turks. The loss by Byzantium of so many of its mainland possessions to the Slavs and other foes did leave the empire with several remarkable assets. Sicily, parts of southern Italy, Cyprus and the Aegean islands remained under Byzantine rule, and the empire drew wealth from gold and silver mines in several of these lands. Even Sardinia and Majorca were under Byzantine suzerainty, but it is unclear whether a functioning network of communication across the Mediterranean still existed.
‘The Profit That God Shall Give’, 1100–1200
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

In 1095, preaching at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II set in motion a movement that would transform the political, religious and economic map of the Mediterranean and Europe. His theme was the shame heaped on Christendom by the oppression of Christians in the Muslim East, the defeat of Christian armies fighting the Turks and the scandal that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, should now be in Infidel hands. What Pope Urban intended as a recruitment speech summoning southern French volunteers to go east and aid Byzantium against the Turks was understood as an appeal to the knighthood of Christendom to cease fighting one another (which they did in peril of their souls), and to direct their force against the Infidel, united in a holy pilgrimage, under arms, in the sure knowledge that those who died on the great journey would earn eternal salvation. Here was an opportunity to substitute for acts of penance imposed by the Church an act for which no one was better suited than the knightly class – warfare, but this time in the service of God. Only gradually did the concept of remission of all past sins for those who joined a crusading campaign become official doctrine. But popular understanding of what the pope had offered, in the name of Christ, leaped ahead of the more cautious formulations of the canon lawyers. The principal route followed by the First Crusade bypassed the Mediterranean and took the army overland through the Balkans and Anatolia; many crusaders never saw more of the sea than the Bosphorus at Constantinople until, much reduced in numbers through war, disease and exhaustion, they reached Syria. And even in the East their target was not a maritime city but Jerusalem, so that its conquest in 1099 created an enclave cut off from the sea, a problem which, as will be seen, only Italian navies could resolve. Another force left from Apulia, where Robert Guiscard’s son Bohemond brought together an army.
Would-be Roman Emperors, 1350–1480
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

Following the arrival of the plague, and the dramatic fall in population, pressure on food supplies within the Mediterranean diminished. This did not mean that the old Mediterranean grain trade withered. In fact, it flourished: as inferior lands were abandoned and turned over to pasture, and as other areas became dedicated to products such as sugar and dyestuffs, the economic life of the lands bordering the Great Sea became more varied. As specialization increased, trade in all manner of goods was stimulated. The Mediterranean economy began to take on a new shape. Local contacts came to the fore: products such as timber were ferried down the coasts of Catalonia; wool was sent across the Adriatic from Apulia to the burgeoning towns of Dalmatia, and from Minorca (famous for its sheep) to Tuscany, where around 1400 the ‘Merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, obsessively ensured that every bale was recorded and every piece of correspondence was preserved – about 150,000 letters – to the great advantage of historians. One of his agents in Ibiza complained: ‘this land is unhealthy, the bread is bad, the wine is bad – God forgive me, nothing is good! I fear I shall leave my skin here.’ But the demands of business came before personal comfort. The Merchant of Prato also had Tuscan agents based in San Mateu on the Spanish coast, where they could collect the best Aragonese wools, while deep within the Spanish interior sheep were conquering the Meseta, as millions of animals grazed the high ground in summer and the plateau in winter. Datini’s reach extended to the Maghrib and eastwards to the Balkans and the Black Sea. In the 1390s, he was involved in the slave trade, at a time when Circassians from the Black Sea and Berbers from North Africa were being sold in the slave markets of Majorca and Sicily. From oriental lands beyond the Mediterranean he obtained indigo, brazilwood, pepper, aloes, zedoary and galingale, as well as cotton, mastic and refined sugar from within the Great Sea. From Spain and Morocco, he imported, besides vast amounts of raw wool, ostrich feathers, elephant ivory, rice, almonds and dates.
Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700
Authors: Abulafia David
Published: November 2020

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).
Merck’s Triumph
Authors: Li Jie Jack
Published: November 2020

Merck was not the first to discover a statin (Akira Endo at Sankyo was), but it was the first company to bring one successfully to market. In September 1987, the FDA approved Merck’s Mevacor (lovastatin) for marketing in the United States while Sankyo’s mevastatin was resting in peace in the big graveyard of drugs that failed to reach the market. In 2007, Merck & Co. was ranked the third largest pharmaceutical company in the world, both by capital and by revenue, behind only Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. The drug juggernaut traces its origin to a humble apothecary shop in Darmstadt, a central German city 20 miles south of Frankfurt. In 1668, 47-year-old apothecary Friedrich Jacob Merck purchased the Engelapotheke (Angel Pharmacy) in the Hessian town and began trading fine chemicals. Most popular was laudanum, an alcoholic solution of opium, which was in every physician’s medicine chest and used as a “panacea” for many illnesses. In 1827, Heinrich E. Merck inherited the family business and established a chemical laboratory named “E. Merck & Co.” beside the Angel Pharmacy. There, he pioneered the commercial large-scale production of various medicinal alkaloids, including veratrine, codeine, atropine, quinine, coniine, and morphine. In 1860, Albert Niemann, working in Friedrich Wöhler’s laboratory in Göttingen, Germany, isolated the active principle of coca leaves as a white crystalline alkaloid and christened it “cocaine.” Since new compounds were routinely tasted, Wöhler recorded that “cocaine was a substance which had a somewhat bitter taste and exerted a numbing influence upon the gustatory nerve, so that they became almost completely insensitive.” Capitalizing on its financial success with alkaloids, E. Merck began to isolate cocaine from coca leaves in the early 1880s and aggressively marketed it as a pain killer. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, enthusiastically took part in exploring cocaine’s medical utilities. After procuring some cocaine from E. Merck, the young neurologist swallowed a small quantity of the drug, which calmed his stomach and boosted his libido. Freud also applied some cocaine locally to himself and found that it temporarily paralyzed the sensitivity of a certain area without any marked effect on the central nervous system.
Introduction to the Six Eye Movement Systems and the Visual Fixation System
Authors: Wong Agnes
Published: November 2020

One main reason that we make eye movements is to solve a problem of information overload. A large field of vision allows an animal to survey the environment for food and to avoid predators, thus increasing its survival rate. Similarly, a high visual acuity also increases survival rates by allowing an animal to aim at a target more accurately, leading to higher killing rates and more food. However, there are simply not enough neurons in the brain to support a visual system that has high resolution over the entire field of vision. Faced with the competing evolutionary demands for high visual acuity and a large field of vision, an effective strategy is needed so that the brain will not be overwhelmed by a large amount of visual input. Some animals, such as rabbits, give up high resolution in favor of a larger field of vision (rabbits can see nearly 360°), whereas others, such as hawks, restrict their field of vision in return for a high visual acuity (hawks have vision as good as 20/2, about 10 times better than humans). In humans, rather than using one strategy over the other, the retina develops a very high spatial resolution in the center (i.e., the fovea), and a much lower resolution in the periphery. Although this “foveal compromise” strategy solves the problem of information overload, one result is that unless the image of an object of interest happens to fall on the fovea, the image is relegated to the low-resolution retinal periphery. The evolution of a mechanism to move the eyes is therefore necessary to complement this foveal compromise strategy by ensuring that an object of interest is maintained or brought to the fovea. To maintain the image of an object on the fovea, the vestibulo-ocular (VOR) and optokinetic systems generate eye movements to compensate for head motions. Likewise, the saccadic, smooth pursuit, and vergence systems generate eye movements to bring the image of an object of interest on the fovea. These different eye movements have different characteristics and involve different parts of the brain.
Energy Today
Authors: Crane Hewitt , Kinderman Edwin , Malhotra Ripudaman
Published: November 2020

The energy industry is one of the largest of the world’s industries and one that directly influences the lives of the vast majority of the world’s population. However, the industry’s day-to-day conduct generally receives minimal public attention. Such exceptional events as an embargo on fuel shipments, a sudden rise in fuel prices, a widespread electricity shortage or outage, the rare nuclear accident, or a massive hurricane that affects oil production do make the national news, of course, and often receive prolonged coverage. Yet the more common events such as refinery fires, oil tanker wrecks, pipeline leaks and explosions, and coal-mine disasters attract the attention of only a relatively few, and then too often only in passing. And while the public attention to its activities can be fleeting, the industry is massive. Its size and influence are often overlooked, and the investments required to produce our needed energy are difficult to calculate. Using Exxon-Mobil, the largest of the petroleum companies, as a model, we estimate that the depreciated capital costs for the production of oil, gas, and chemical products derived from them are about $2.5 trillion per CMO. New investments required could be twice as large. A lack of public knowledge and the consequent lack of political will can only exacerbate our general inability to understand the enormity of rapidly changing the resources and technologies this industry employs. We begin our analysis of the state of the energy industry by first distinguishing between primary and secondary sources of energy. Next we examine the overall production of energy by the different primary sources. We then discuss the production and consumption of energy in different regions across the globe. We also look at the per capita consumption in these regions because it is germane to the discussion in chapter 4 of the projections for future energy use. Finally, because more than 40% of primary energy is converted into secondary sources or energy carriers (mainly electricity) before its end use, we survey the different secondary energy sources and their markets.