Beyond the Biophysical provides a broad overview of agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) scholarship and practice that lies beyond the biophysical, emphasizing instead epistemological, cultural, and political foundations of NRM. The volume is oriented toward professionals with expertise in agriculture and natural resource management scholarship and practice, but who lack exposure to the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of critical theory, the anthropology of development, ecological anthropology, and other relevant scholarship. It therefore follows common standards of academic rigour, but minimizes the use of jargon, integrates detailed case studies with conceptual syntheses, and attempts to move from critique to concrete recommendations for scholarship and practice. The volume seeks to foster a more nuanced and responsible engagement with local communities and the natural world among NRM scholars and practitioners.

Beyond the Biophysical provides a broad overview of agriculture and natural resource management (NRM) scholarship and practice that lies beyond the biophysical, emphasizing instead epistemological, cultural, and political foundations of NRM. The volume is oriented toward professionals with expertise in agriculture and natural resource management scholarship and practice, but who lack exposure to the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of critical theory, the anthropology of development, ecological anthropology, and other relevant scholarship. It therefore follows common standards of academic rigour, but minimizes the use of jargon, integrates detailed case studies with conceptual syntheses, and attempts to move from critique to concrete recommendations for scholarship and practice. The volume seeks to foster a more nuanced and responsible engagement with local communities and the natural world among NRM scholars and practitioners.

The objective of this book is to make analytical methods available to students of ecology. The text deals with concepts of energy exchange, gas exchange, and chemical kinetics involving the interactions of plants and animals with their environments. The first four chapters are designed to show the applications of biophysical ecology in a preliminary, sim plified manner. Chapters 5-10, treating the topics of radiation, convec tion, conduction, and evaporation, are concerned with the physical environment. The spectral properties of radiation and matter are thoroughly described, as well as the geometrical, instantaneous, daily, and annual amounts of both shortwave and longwave radiation. Later chapters give the more elaborate analytical methods necessary for the study of photosynthesis in plants and energy budgets in animals. The final chapter describes the temperature responses of plants and animals. The discipline of biophysical ecology is rapidly growing, and some important topics and references are not included due to limitations of space, cost, and time. The methodology of some aspects of ecology is illustrated by the subject matter of this book. It is hoped that future students of the subject will carry it far beyond its present status. Ideas for advancing the subject matter of biophysical ecology exceed individual capacities for effort, and even today, many investigators in ecology are studying subjects for which they are inadequately prepared. The potential of modern science, in the minds and hands of skilled investigators, to of the interactions of organisms with their advance our understanding environment is enormous.

Interactions between the fields of physics and biology reach back over a century, and some of the most significant developments in biology--from the discovery of DNA's structure to imaging of the human brain--have involved collaboration across this disciplinary boundary. For a new generation of physicists, the phenomena of life pose exciting challenges to physics itself, and biophysics has emerged as an important subfield of this discipline. Here, William Bialek provides the first graduate-level introduction to biophysics aimed at physics students. Bialek begins by exploring how photon counting in vision offers important lessons about the opportunities for quantitative, physics-style experiments on diverse biological phenomena. He draws from these lessons three general physical principles--the importance of noise, the need to understand the extraordinary performance of living systems without appealing to finely tuned parameters, and the critical role of the representation and flow of information in the business of life. Bialek then applies these principles to a broad range of phenomena, including the control of gene expression, perception and memory, protein folding, the mechanics of the inner ear, the dynamics of biochemical reactions, and pattern formation in developing embryos. Featuring numerous problems and exercises throughout, Biophysics emphasizes the unifying power of abstract physical principles to motivate new and novel experiments on biological systems. Covers a range of biological phenomena from the physicist's perspective Features 200 problems Draws on statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and related mathematical concepts Includes an annotated bibliography and detailed appendixes Instructor's manual (available only to teachers)

What every neuroscientist should know about the mathematical modeling of excitable cells, presented at an introductory level.

The binding of small ligands to biological molecules is central to most aspects of biological function. The past twenty years has seen the development of an increasing armoury of biophysical methods that not only detect such binding, but also provide varying degrees of information about the kinetics, thermodynamics and structural aspects of the process. These methods have received increasing attention with the growth in more rational approaches to drug discovery and design. This book reviews the latest advances in the application of biophysics to the study of ligand binding. It provides a complete overview of current techniques to identify ligands, characterise their binding sites and understand their binding mechanisms. Particular emphasis is given to the combined use of different techniques and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Consistency in the way each technique is described makes it easy for readers to select the most suitable protocol for their research. The introduction explains why some techniques are more suitable than others and emphasizes the possible synergies between them. The following chapters, all written by a specialist in the particular technique, focus on each method individually. The book finishes by describing how several complimentary techniques can be used together for maximum effectiveness. This book is suitable for biomolecular scientists at graduate or post-doctoral level in academia and industry. Biologists and chemists will also find it a useful introduction to the techniques available.

The Encyclopedia of Biophysics is envisioned both as an easily accessible source of information and as an introductory guide to the scientific literature. It includes entries describing both Techniques and Systems. In the Techniques entries, each of the wide range of methods which fall under the heading of Biophysics are explained in detail, together with the value and the limitations of the information each provides. Techniques covered range from diffraction (X-ray, electron and neutron) through a wide range of spectroscopic methods (X-ray, optical, EPR, NMR) to imaging (from electron microscopy to live cell imaging and MRI), as well as computational and simulation approaches. In the Systems entries, biophysical approaches to specific biological systems or problems – from protein and nucleic acid structure to membranes, ion channels and receptors – are described. These sections, which place emphasis on the integration of the different techniques, therefore provide an inroad into Biophysics from a biological more than from a technique-oriented physical/chemical perspective. Thus the Encyclopedia is intended to provide a resource both for biophysicists interested in methods beyond those used in their immediate sub-discipline and for those readers who are approaching biophysics from either a physical or biological background.