Self Organized Biological Dynamics And Nonlinear Control

The growing impact of nonlinear science on biology and medicine is fundamentally changing our view of living organisms and disease processes. This book introduces the application to biomedicine of a broad range of interdisciplinary concepts from nonlinear dynamics, such as self-organization, complexity, coherence, stochastic resonance, fractals and chaos. It comprises 18 chapters written by leading figures in the field and covers experimental and theoretical research, as well as the emerging technological possibilities such as nonlinear control techniques for treating pathological biodynamics, including heart arrhythmias and epilepsy. This book will attract the interest of professionals and students from a wide range of disciplines, including physicists, chemists, biologists, sensory physiologists and medical researchers such as cardiologists, neurologists and biomedical engineers.

Reveals the use of direct perception in understanding Nature, medicinal plants, and the healing of human disease • Explores the techniques used by indigenous and Western peoples to learn directly from the plants themselves, including those of Henry David Thoreau, Goethe, and Masanobu Fukuoka, author of The One Straw Revolution • Contains leading-edge information on the heart as an organ of perception All ancient and indigenous peoples insisted their knowledge of plant medicines came from the plants themselves and not through trial-and-error experimentation. Less well known is that many Western peoples made this same assertion. There are, in fact, two modes of cognition available to all human beings--the brain-based linear and the heart-based holistic. The heart-centered mode of perception can be exceptionally accurate and detailed in its information gathering capacities if, as indigenous and ancient peoples asserted, the heart’s ability as an organ of perception is developed. Author Stephen Harrod Buhner explores this second mode of perception in great detail through the work of numerous remarkable people, from Luther Burbank, who cultivated the majority of food plants we now take for granted, to the great German poet and scientist Goethe and his studies of the metamorphosis of plants. Buhner explores the commonalities among these individuals in their approach to learning from the plant world and outlines the specific steps involved. Readers will gain the tools necessary to gather information directly from the heart of Nature, to directly learn the medicinal uses of plants, to engage in diagnosis of disease, and to understand the soul-making process that such deep connection with the world engenders.

This book provides a compilation of mathematical-computational tools that are used to analyze experimental data. The techniques presented are those that have been most widely and successfully applied to the analysis of physiological systems, and address issues such as randomness, determinism, dimension, and nonlinearity. In addition to bringing together the most useful methods, sufficient mathematical background is provided to enable non-specialists to understand and apply the computational techniques. Thus, the material will be useful to life-science investigators on several levels, from physiologists to bioengineer.Initial chapters present background material on dynamic systems, statistics, and linear system analysis. Each computational technique is demonstrated with examples drawn from physiology, and several chapters present case studies from oculomotor control, neuroscience, cardiology, psychology, and epidemiology. Throughout the text, historical notes give a sense of the development of the field and provide a perspective on how the techniques were developed and where they might lead. The overall approach is based largely on the analysis of trajectories in the state space, with emphasis on time-delay reconstruction of state-space trajectories. The goal of the book is to enable readers to apply these methods to their own research.

The book "Hyperthermia", published by InTech, and edited by Dr. Nagraj Huilgol, of the Department of Radiation Oncology, Dr. Balabhai Nanavati Hospital, India, is comprised of 8 Open Access chapters, covering a wide range of Hyperthermia-related scientific research.

This is the first of two volumes offering the very first comprehensive treatise of self-organization and non-linear dynamics in electrochemical systems. The second volume covers spatiotemporal patterns and the control of chaos. The content of both volumes is organized so that each description of a particular electrochemical system is preceded by an introduction to basic concepts of nonlinear dynamics, in order to help the reader unfamiliar with this discipline to understand at least fundamental concepts and the methods of stability analysis. The presentation of the systems is not limited to laboratory models but stretches out to real-life objects and processes, including systems of biological importance, such as neurons in living matter. Marek Orlik presents a comprehensive and consistent survey of the field.

The essential reference for human development theory, updatedand reconceptualized The Handbook of Child Psychology and DevelopmentalScience, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work towhich all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now inits Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been consideredthe definitive guide to the field of developmental science. Volume 1, Theory and Method, presents a rich mix ofclassic and contemporary theoretical perspectives, but the dominantviews throughout are marked by an emphasis on the dynamic interplayof all facets of the developmental system across the life span,incorporating the range of biological, cognitive, emotional,social, cultural, and ecological levels of analysis. Examples ofthe theoretical approaches discussed in the volume include thosepertinent to human evolution, self regulation, the development ofdynamic skills, and positive youth development. The research,methodological, and applied implications of the theoretical modelsdiscussed in the volume are presented. Understand the contributions of biology, person, and context todevelopment within the embodied ecological system Discover the relations among individual, the social world,culture, and history that constitute human development Examine the methods of dynamic, developmental research Learn person-oriented methodological approaches to assessingdevelopmental change The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the fourvolumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science isin the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shiftthat involves increasingly greater understanding of how todescribe, explain, and optimize the course of human life fordiverse individuals living within diverse contexts. ThisHandbook is the definitive reference for educators,policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in humandevelopment, psychology, sociology, anthropology, andneuroscience.

The next generation of oncological hyperthermia involves the medical innovation of selectively heating up the malignant cells of the body in a controlled way. The easily-distinguishable biophysical and physiological characteristics of cancer cells and their immediate environment are the focus of the targeted energy delivery of this treatment. This heterogenic heating concept breaks with the homogeneous nature of conventional hyperthermia, where an isothermally equal temperature is applied to the large surface area of a solid tumor. Due to its selectivity, the new concept enables the usage of a significantly lower energy, making it safer, less toxic, and easier to use. This book shows the challenges facing oncological hyperthermia, and highlights clinical results obtained in various countries. It also presents discussions about the theoretical basis of the method, adding some technical discussions and clarifying the most difficult points of its design. The contributions dealing with clinical results use state-of-art conventional therapies with complementary hyperthermia and show the advantages of such a combination.

This book, along with its companion volume, Nonlinear Dynamics New Directions: Theoretical Aspects, covers topics ranging from fractal analysis to very specific applications of the theory of dynamical systems to biology. This second volume contains mostly new applications of the theory of dynamical systems to both engineering and biology. The first volume is devoted to fundamental aspects and includes a number of important new contributions as well as some review articles that emphasize new development prospects. The topics addressed in the two volumes include a rigorous treatment of fluctuations in dynamical systems, topics in fractal analysis, studies of the transient dynamics in biological networks, synchronization in lasers, and control of chaotic systems, among others. This book also: · Develops applications of nonlinear dynamics on a diversity of topics such as patterns of synchrony in neuronal networks, laser synchronization, control of chaotic systems, and the study of transient dynamics in biological · Includes a study of self-organized regularity in long-range systems · Explains use of Levenstein's distance for measuring lexical evolution rates