Books published by Springer Verlag, Japan

Congenital Heart Disease

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is an age-related, nonmalignant condition that may lead to bothersome lower urinary tract symptoms. Transurethral microwave thermotherapy, visual laser ablation with the Nd:YAG laser, high-intensity focused ultrasound, and transurethral electrovaporization are some of the techniques described in this book.

In recent years, there has been a huge necessity to attempt the complementary co-evolution among technologies, urban management, and policy design by putting greater emphasis on local orientation while fully utilizing academic traditions of civil engineering, architecture, environmental engineering and disaster prevention research.

Supported by a rapidly developing Chinese economy and the dissemination of effective technology, the Grain-for-Green Project and Western Development Action launched by the Chinese government have resulted in successful ecological restoration and protection over the past 30 years.

Based on data collected from around ten Asian cities, including both developed and developing cities, this book presents a pathway to sustainable transport on the continent with a focus on economic and environmental sustainability.

How You Can Live With a Hearing Impairment

Air Pollution and Plant Biotechnology presents recent results in this field, including plant responses during phytomonitoring, pollution-resistant plant species, imaging diagnosis of plant responses, and the use of novel transgenic plants, along with reviews of basic plant physiology and biochemistry where appropriate.

Next-generation sustainable forest management is being practiced in the natural tropical rain forest of a model site in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, while earlier sustainable management practices have generally failed, leading to extensive deforestation and forest degradation elsewhere in the tropics.

The conference from which this book derives took place in Tsukuba, Japan in March 2004. The fifth in a continuing series of conferences, this one was organized to examine dynamic processes in "lower order" cognition from perception to attention to memory, considering both the behavioral and the neural levels. We were fortunate to attract a terrific group of con­ tributors representing five countries, which resulted in an exciting confer­ ence and, as the reader will quickly discover, an excellent set of chapters. In Chapter 1, we will provide a sketchy "road map" to these chapters, elu­ cidating some of the themes that emerged at the conference. The conference itself was wonderful. We very much enjoyed the vari­ ety of viewpoints and issues that we all had the opportunity to grapple with. There were lively and spirited exchanges, and many chances to talk to each other about exciting new research, precisely what a good confer­ ence should promote. We hope that the readers of this book will have the same experience-moving from careful experimental designs in the cogni­ tive laboratory to neural mechanisms measured by new technologies, from the laboratory to the emergency room, from perceptual learning to changes in memory over decades, all the while squarely focusing on how best to explain cognition, not simply to measure it. Ultimately, the goal of science is, of course, explanation. We also hope that the reader will come away absolutely convinced that cognition is a thoroughly dynamic, interactive system.

This volume presents overviews of and the latest findings in many of the interconnected aspects of plant photomorphogenesis, including photoreceptors (phytochromes, cryptochromes, and phototropins), signal transduction, photoperiodism, and circadian rhythms, in 42 chapters.

Universities and research institutes are increasingly expected to contribute to society by creating innovation from the returns of their research results and the establishment of new technologies.

Graph theory, homology theory, and the theory of covering maps are employed to introduce the notion of the topological crystal which retains, in the abstract, all the information on the connectivity of atoms in the crystal.

Polar regions play a major role in the global agenda as they are rich in oil and other resources, marking them for contamination, overfishing, and further degradation. A global protection role model and several outlook scenarios are proposed to help set in motion polar protection priorities that are actually valid.

This book offers a systematic introduction to the optimal stochastic control theory via the dynamic programming principle, which is a powerful tool to analyze control problems. First we consider completely observable control problems with finite horizons.

Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS) has evolved from an obscure method of investigation in the 1980s to a distinct endoscopy subspecialty with interventional and therapeutic capabilities.

For the middle ear to maintain its most important function, sound con duction, its pressure always needs to be kept around atmospheric level.

Since the First International Symposium on Superconductivity (ISS '88) was held in Nagoya, Japan in 1988, significant advances have been achieved in a wide range of high temperature superconductivity research.

Many organisms in deep-sea environments are extremophiles thriving in extreme conditions: high pressure, high or low temperature, or high concentrations of inorganic compounds.

Japan's traditional and fragile satoyama landscape system was developed over centuries of human life on mountainous island terrain in a monsoon climate. There is a new realization that these woodlands still play a vital role in the management of the Japanese landscape and a new determination to manage them for the future.

This volume of the Keio University International Symposia for LifeSciences and Medicine contains the proceedings of the eleventh symposium held under the sponsorship of the Keio University Medical Science Fund.

Now, as biological science has entered the genome era, the medaka provides significant advantages that make it one of the most valuable vertebrate models: a large collection of spontaneous mutants collected over a century, the presence of highly polymorphic inbred lines established over decades, and a recently completed genome sequence.

Remote photography and infrared sensors are widely used in the sampling of wildlife populations worldwide, especially for cryptic or elusive species.

This book provides data about the actual movement and accumulation of radioactivity in the ecological system-for example, whether debris deposited on mountains can be a cause of secondary contamination, under what conditions plants accumulate radioactive cesium in their edible parts, and how radioactivity is transferred from hay to milk.

When I entered the field of allergy in the early 1970s, the standard textbook was a few hundred pages, and the specialty was so compact that texts were often authored entirely by a single individual and were never larger than one volume.

Developments in cognitive science indicate that human and nonhuman primates share a range of behavioral and physiological characteristics that speak to the issue of language origins.

Within the natural range of variation of capacities and armed with biologically conditioned learning mechanisms we live out lives of meaning - in which we hold some things to be real, rational, valuable or morally right, and others not.

The purpose of this book is to describe hearing problems which are caused by various kinds of brain diseases in the central auditory pathway. It explains what happens in patients when the bilateral auditory nerve and auditory cortex are damaged.

This book is a pioneering regional work and provides a balanced approach of theory and practice in disaster risk reduction (DRR) in Pakistan.