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\"An illustrated exploration of Byzantine culture, its past history and its relevance to design today, looking at the style and influence of woven silk textiles\"-- Provided by publisher.

Explore this authoritative guide to transforming the silk industry written by two emerging leaders in the industry Sustainable Uses of Byproducts from Silk Processing delivers a detailed treatment of the properties and potential applications of silk sources, by-products, and waste. The book describes the composition, structure, processability, and potential applications of all of the different kinds of silk by-products. Highly relevant to those working in mulberry cultivation, silkworm rearing, and silk processing, the distinguished authors offer information on how to transform silk by-products into new materials, energy, fuel, fibers, composites, food, cosmetics, and feed. Using a valorisation approach to the silk protein sericin and its by-products and taking an application-oriented view of materials sources and wastes in the silk industry. Implementation of these techniques promises to further industries as diverse as cancer treatment, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and environmental cleanup.  Readers will also benefit from the inclusion of: A thorough introduction to sericin, including its structure and properties, how to process it, and its various applications An exploration of mulberry leaves, stems, and fruits, including their composition and properties, processing, and non-feed applications Discussions of the various uses of silkworm pupae, including food and feed, pupae oil properties and applications, biodiesel, byproducts of biodiesel, and the extraction of chitin and proteins from the pupae shell An examination of the applications of silkworm litter Perfect for protein chemists, biotechnologists, cosmetics industry professionals, and materials scientists, Sustainable Uses of Byproducts from Silk Processing will also earn a place in the libraries of polymer and cosmetic chemists who seek a one-stop reference for current and emerging sustainability practices in the silk industry.

An economic history of the silk industry, 1830-1930 is an ambitious and innovative historical analysis of the development of a major commodity. Doctor Federico examines the rapid growth of the world silk industry from the early nineteenth-century to the eve of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is one of the most talked about and little understood policy initiatives of China. This short book offers a comprehensive, balanced and policy-oriented analysis of the BRI and what it means for western businesses and polities.

Borocera cajani or \"Landibe\" (vernacular name) is the wild silk moth that is currently used to produce silk textiles in Madagascar. This species is endemic to Madagascar, and is distributed throughout the island, colonizing the Uapaca bojeri or \"Tapia\" forest of the central highlands. The forest provides food in the form of plants for B. cajani, including U. bojeri leaves. The species secretes silk at the onset of pupation and for making cocoons. Borocera cajani and its natural habitat are threatened by human destruction, such as bush fires, firewood collection, charcoal production, and the over-harvesting of their cocoons. Wild silk production largely disappeared when the silk industry utilized many people on the island as the collectors of cocoons, spinners, dyers, weavers, and artists who transform the silk into clothes, accessories, and objects. Therefore, it is important to study the biology of B. cajani to revitalize silk production in a way that helps conserve this species and the Tapia forest. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Ancient mud-brick architecture along the Silk Road has been an under-studied subject in the world literature of architectural history. Employing results of the microscopic and particle size analyses, this paper seeks to characterize a few examples of mud-brick recently discovered at the Bronze Age settlement of Xichengyi in Northwest China, and demonstrate a new type of mud-brick building technique. The field observation identifies two types of mud-brick. While one type is thick and used together with mortar, which is commonly seen in the existing literature, the other is thin and bound together by ramming, which is unprecedented in the mud-brick architecture over the world. The site is located in the Hexi Corridor, a critical section of the Silk Road, and the multi-room layout of the buildings and the wheat/barley crops hint at dual directions of inspiration, but it is yet uncertain whether the Xichengyi community absorbed the mud-brick building technology from Central Asia. The microscopic and particle size analyses, however, confirm that the second type of mud-brick was ingeniously fused with the earth ramming technique from China proper. L’histoire de l’architecture s’est peu intéressée aux constructions anciennes en briques crues le long de la route de la soie. Grâce aux résultats des analyses microscopiques et granulométriques réalisées sur de telles briques récemment découvertes dans le site de l’âge du Bronze de Xichengyi, dans le Nord-Ouest de la Chine, il est désormais possible de démontrer qu’une nouvelle technique de construction avec des briques crues a été utilisée. Deux sortes de terre crue ont été identifié lors de l’observation sur le terrain. L’une est couramment décrite dans la littérature – il s’agit de briques épaisses confectionnées avec du mortier –, l’autre est fine et obtenue par le damage de la terre ; la seconde est sans précédent dans l’architecture en briques crues, pratiquée ailleurs dans le monde. Le site de Xichengyi se trouve dans le couloir de Hexi, un tronçon important de la route de la soie ; la disposition des bâtiments d’une part et la culture du blé et de l’orge d’autre part suggèrent deux sources d’influence possibles. On ne sait pas encore si la communauté à Xichengyi a adopté les techniques de construction en briques crues depuis l’Asie centrale, mais les analyses microscopiques et granulométriques confirment que la seconde sorte de briques intègre de façon ingénieuse la technique de damage de la terre pratiquée en Chine.

In 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced a campaign for national rejuvenation. The One Belt One Road initiative, or OBOR, has become the largest infrastructure program in history. Nearly every Chinese province, city, major business, bank, and university have been mobilized to serve it, spending hundreds of billions of dollars overseas building ports and railroads, laying fiber cables, and launching satellites. Using a trove of Chinese sources, author Eyck Freymann argues these infrastructure projects are a sideshow. OBOR is primarily a campaign to restore an ancient model in which foreign emissaries paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, offering gifts in exchange for political patronage. Xi sees himself as a sort of modern-day emperor, determined to restore China’s past greatness.Many experts assume that Xi’s nakedly neo-imperial scheme couldn’t possibly work. Freymann shows how wrong they are. China isn’t preying on victims, Freymann argues. It’s attracting willing partners—including Western allies—from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the Persian Gulf. Even in countries where OBOR megaprojects fail, Freymann finds that political leaders still want closer ties with China.Freymann tells the monumental story of Xi’s project on the global stage. Drawing on primary documents in five languages, interviews with senior officials, and on-the-ground case studies from Malaysia to Greece, Russia to Iran, Freymann pulls back the veil of propaganda about OBOR, giving readers a page-turning world tour of the burgeoning Chinese empire, a guide for understanding China’s motives and tactics, and clear recommendations for how the West can compete.

The sex-determining system differs considerably among organisms. Even among insect species, the genetic system for sexdetermination is highly diversified. In Drosophila melanogaster, somatic sexual differentiation is regulated by a well characterized genetic hierarchy X:A Sxl tra/tra2 dsx and fru. This cascade seems to control sex determination in all Drosophila species and is partially conserved in another dipteran species, Ceratitis capitata: Cctra/Cctra-2 Ccdsx and Ccfru. However, in the silkworm, Bombyx mori, femaleness is determined by the presence of a dominant feminizing factor on the W chromosome. Moreover, no sex-specific regulatory Sxl homolog has been isolated from B. mori. Also, no tra homolog has yet been found in the Bombyx genome. Despite such differences, dsx homolog of B. mori (Bmdsx) is implicated in the sex determination. Bmdsx produces alternatively spliced mRNA isoforms that encode sex specific transcription factors as observed in dsx. While the female-specific splicing of dsx is activated by splicing activators, Tra and Tra2, the female splicing of Bmdsx represents the default mode. Instead, a splicing inhibitor, BmPSI is involved in the regulation of male-specific splicing of Bmdsx. Since BmPSI does not exhibit any sequence relationship to known SR proteins, such as Tra and Tra2, the regulatory mechanism of sex-specific alternative splicing of Bmdsx is distinct from that of dsx.

The sex-linked balanced lethal (SLBL) strains of silkworm serve as an effective system for sex-control in silkworm. To gain comprehensive insight into the effect of one sex-linked balanced lethal gene l₂, comparative proteomic analysis was carried out between the survival embryos (W∨+l₁Z∨l₁+l₂) and lethal embryos (W∨+l₁Z∨+l₁l₂) before the lethal stage. The lethal stage of l₂ was confirmed by observing the typical dead embryo morphology. The two genotype embryos before lethal stage were distinguished using polymorphic simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers closely linked to l₂ on the sex chromosome. Finally, 11 differentially expressed protein spots were successfully identified by MALDI-TOF/TOF mass spectrometry (MS). Among them, only 1 protein identified as heat shock protein 20.4 (HSP20.4) was up-regulated in the lethal embryos, while the other 10 were down-regulated. The up-regulation of HSP20.4 suggests that there may be abnormal polypeptides produced in the lethal embryos. The gene ontology (GO) annotation indicated those down-regulated proteins are involved in important biological processes including embryo development, nucleoside metabolism, tRNA splicing, translation and protein folding. The biological pathway analysis showed that those down-regulated proteins are mainly involved in spindle assemblage and morphogenesis. Based on our results, we suggest that the l₂ may be the mutant expressing abnormal polypeptides. Its expression has a negative effect on mitosis and morphogenesis processes. The death of the embryos may be caused by the accumulation of abnormal polypeptides and the handicap of cell proliferation and morphogenesis.