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Extreme places : could you live here?
Describes inhabited locations on Earth with some of the most extreme climates and weather patterns, including the coldest place on Earth and the most polluted city.
Book
Test No. 444A: In Vitro Immunotoxicity
This Test Guideline (TG) describes the IL-2 Luc and IL-2 Luc Leukocyte Toxicity Test (LTT)Assays to evaluate the potential immunotoxic effects of chemicals on T lymphoblastic cell line. This cell line allows quantitative measurement of luciferase gene induction by detecting luminescence from well-established light producing luciferase substrates as indicators of the activity of IL-2, IFN-γ and GAPDH in cells following exposure to immunotoxic chemicals. The method is intended to be used as a part of a battery to determine immunotoxic potential of chemicals.
eBook
The art of play
A photographic exploration of the world's most imaginative and surprising playscapes, spanning artist-designed play sculptures, picturesque soft plays and wildly creative conceptual playgrounds, from Copenhagen to Canberra, via Bangkok and Beijing. Discover more than 100 playful environments - some recently installed, others currently serving their third generation of children, some private and many more public, but all united by their originality, visual appeal and power to help children unleash their creativity and adventurous spirit.
BOOK
Long-distance electron transport occurs globally in marine sediments
Recently, long filamentous bacteria have been reported conducting electrons over centimetre distances in marine sediments. These so-called cable bacteria perform an electrogenic form of sulfur oxidation, whereby long-distance electron transport links sulfide oxidation in deeper sediment horizons to oxygen reduction in the upper millimetres of the sediment. Electrogenic sulfur oxidation exerts a strong impact on the local sediment biogeochemistry, but it is currently unknown how prevalent the process is within the seafloor. Here we provide a state-of-the-art assessment of its global distribution by combining new field observations with previous reports from the literature. This synthesis demonstrates that electrogenic sulfur oxidation, and hence microbial long-distance electron transport, is a widespread phenomenon in the present-day seafloor. The process is found in coastal sediments within different climate zones (off the Netherlands, Greenland, the USA, Australia) and thrives on a range of different coastal habitats (estuaries, salt marshes, mangroves, coastal hypoxic basins, intertidal flats). The combination of a widespread occurrence and a strong local geochemical imprint suggests that electrogenic sulfur oxidation could be an important, and hitherto overlooked, component of the marine cycle of carbon, sulfur and other elements.
Journal Article
Extreme animals : the toughest creatures on Earth
Animals adapt to their surroundings for survival. Learn how they survive in conditions that humans never would. Are you ready for the competition? From the persevering emperor penguins of the South Pole to the brave bacteria inside bubbling volcanoes, from the hardy reptiles of the driest deserts to the squash-proof creatures of the deepest seabeds, animals have adapted to survive in conditions that would kill a human faster than you can say \"coffin.\" Discover how they do it in this amazing natural history book from a celebrated team - and find out who wins the title of the toughtest animal of them all!
Book
Making Virtual Worlds
The past decade has seen phenomenal growth in the development and use of virtual worlds. In one of the most notable, Second Life, millions of people have created online avatars in order to play games, take classes, socialize, and conduct business transactions. Second Life offers a gathering point and the tools for people to create a new world online.
Too often neglected in popular and scholarly accounts of such groundbreaking new environments is the simple truth that, of necessity, such virtual worlds emerge from physical workplaces marked by negotiation, creation, and constant change. Thomas Malaby spent a year at Linden Lab, the real-world home of Second Life, observing those who develop and profit from the sprawling, self-generating system they have created.
Some of the challenges created by Second Life for its developers were of a very traditional nature, such as how to cope with a business that is growing more quickly than existing staff can handle. Others are seemingly new: How, for instance, does one regulate something that is supposed to run on its own? Is it possible simply to create a space for people to use and then not govern its use? Can one apply these same free-range/free-market principles to the office environment in which the game is produced? \"Lindens\"-as the Linden Lab employees call themselves-found that their efforts to prompt user behavior of one sort or another were fraught with complexities, as a number of ongoing processes collided with their own interventions.
InMaking Virtual Worlds, Malaby thoughtfully describes the world of Linden Lab and the challenges faced while he was conducting his in-depth ethnographic research there. He shows how the workers of a very young but quickly growing company were themselves caught up in ideas about technology, games, and organizations, and struggled to manage not only their virtual world but also themselves in a nonhierarchical fashion. In exploring the practices the Lindens employed, he questions what was at stake in their virtual world, what a game really is (and how people participate), and the role of the unexpected in a product like Second Life and an organization like Linden Lab.
eBook
Why do glaciers grind? : all about extreme environments
This volume introduces readers to the idea of extreme environments.
Book
Benthic perspective on Earth’s oldest evidence for oxygenic photosynthesis
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE) is currently viewed as a protracted process during which atmospheric oxygen increased above ∼10 ⁻⁵ times the present atmospheric level (PAL). This threshold represents an estimated upper limit for sulfur isotope mass-independent fractionation (S-MIF), an Archean signature of atmospheric anoxia that begins to disappear from the rock record at 2.45 Ga. However, an increasing number of papers have suggested that the timing for oxidative continental weathering, and by conventional thinking the onset of atmospheric oxygenation, was hundreds of million years earlier than previously thought despite the presence of S-MIF. We suggest that this apparent discrepancy can be resolved by the earliest oxidative-weathering reactions occurring in benthic and soil environments at profound redox disequilibrium with the atmosphere, such as biological soil crusts and freshwater microbial mats covering riverbed, lacustrine, and estuarine sediments. We calculate that oxygenic photosynthesis in these millimeter-thick ecosystems provides sufficient oxidizing equivalents to mobilize sulfate and redox-sensitive trace metals from land to the oceans while the atmosphere itself remained anoxic with its attendant S-MIF signature. As continental freeboard increased significantly between 3.0 and 2.5 Ga, the chemical and isotopic signatures of benthic oxidative weathering would have become more globally significant from a mass-balance perspective. These observations help reconcile evidence for pre-GOE oxidative weathering with the history of atmospheric chemistry, and support the plausible antiquity of a terrestrial biosphere populated by cyanobacteria well before the GOE.
Significance The history of oxygen at Earth’s surface is intimately tied to its production by oxygenic photosynthesis, whereby plants, algae, and cyanobacteria release O ₂ as a waste product. Despite this metabolism’s profound importance, its evolutionary timing is poorly understood. Studies have increasingly revealed a temporal disconnect between evidence for the presence of O ₂ during weathering as early as 3.0 billion years ago and its atmospheric accumulation 500 million years later. We review this problem and numerically demonstrate that local O ₂ production and immediate consumption in surface-bound (benthic) microbial ecosystems at profound disequilibrium conditions is the most parsimonious explanation for this delay. Thus, emergence of continental landmass was likely a crucial factor in the earliest oxygenation of Earth’s surface environment.
Journal Article