Nicolas Buclet and Olivier Godard In terms of economic scale, waste management is one of the two most important environmentally oriented sectors. 1 It stands at the cross-roads in the material organization of society, resource management, changing lifestyles and consumption patterns, and ecological issues. For many years waste management has been perceived as aresources and health issue, confined mainly to dense urban areas, and not an environmental issue. In contemporary affiuent societies, however, the scale reached by waste flows, the inheritance of accumulated deposits in soils from the...

The ATP-sensitive potassium channel (K_ATP) was discovered in 1983. Since then, an enormous amount of research has been undertaken to characterize it in detail. This volume consolidates both the current knowledge and most recent advances on the subject, and its relationship to myocardial protection. To this end, the editors have assembled investigators at the forefront of ongoing basic and clinical research to provide scholarly and candid comments concerning each of the pertinent issues, including: a comprehensive review of the biology of the channel with respect to the...

Diamond-based composites, with their advantages of hardness, high Young's modulus and the like, have demonstrated new and unusual features, such as stability to high temperatures and pressure shocks and a large internal surface that can be controlled to offer customised electrical, magnetic and optical properties, leading to efficient filters, absorbents, sensors and other tools for environmental control and monitoring.
The current book covers the synthesis of materials, their characterization and properties, trends in high pressure and high temperature technologies, low pressure...

DEFINITE is a decision support software package that improves the quality of environmental decision making since it:
-structures the decision process;
-makes full use of available information;
-provides a rational, responsible and justifiable decision that is open for external review; and
allows the exploration of all the options by the use of what if?' scenarios. DEFINITE is, in fact, a whole toolkit of methods that can be used on a wide variety of problems. If there is a problem to be solved and alternative solutions can be identified, then...