Books on the topic 'Insect Growth Regulator'

The book is devoted to the problems of preserving the biodiversity of insects and pollinators through the use of inoffensive methods of agricultural crops cultivating and bio-rational means of protecting them from pests and diseases in an ecological crisis. The results of many years of research on the development of technological processes for obtaining biological preparations based on secondary metabolites of higher plants and microorganisms are presented. Their effectiveness in increasing the resistance of cultivated plants to the influences of abiotic and biotic environmental factors has been shown. The results of plant extracts testing with biopesticidal activity against insects and mites-phytophages and as growth regulators of vegetable and cereal crops are presented. The characteristic features of the interaction of useful fauna organisms and pests of agricultural crops, as well as the possibility of attracting pollinators through the use of semiochemicals are described. The mechanisms of microbiological preparations action and their effectiveness against phytopathogens are revealed. The prospects of biological preparations introducing for a gentle impact on the environment and beneficial insects, as well as obtaining safe food products, have been demonstrated. The book is intended for farmers and beekeepers, and can be used as a teaching aid in various courses on ecology, biology, plant protection and entomology.

The book is devoted to the problems of preserving the biodiversity of insects and pollinators through the use of inoffensive methods of agricultural crops cultivating and bio-rational means of protecting them from pests and diseases in an ecological crisis. The results of many years of research on the development of technological processes for obtaining biological preparations based on secondary metabolites of higher plants and microorganisms are presented. Their effectiveness in increasing the resistance of cultivated plants to the influences of abiotic and biotic environmental factors has been shown. The results of plant extracts testing with biopesticidal activity against insects and mites-phytophages and as growth regulators of vegetable and cereal crops are presented. The characteristic features of the interaction of useful fauna organisms and pests of agricultural crops, as well as the possibility of attracting pollinators through the use of semiochemicals are described. The mechanisms of microbiological preparations action and their effectiveness against phytopathogens are revealed. The prospects of biological preparations introducing for a gentle impact on the environment and beneficial insects, as well as obtaining safe food products, have been demonstrated. The book is intended for farmers and beekeepers, and can be used as a teaching aid in various courses on ecology, biology, plant protection and entomology.

Jennifer Thomson is one of the world’s leading advisors on genetically modified crops. In Food for Africa she traces, through anecdote and science, her career and the development of this area of research — from the dawn of genetic engineering in the USA in 1974, through the early stages of its testing in Europe and regulation in South Africa, to the latest developments in South Africa, where an updated Bioeconomy Strategy was approved in early 2013. As a young scientist she chose to study bacterial genetics, negotiating her way in a very male-dominated arena. It led to her path-breaking involvement in the development of GM research in South Africa — where approximately 80% of maize grown currently is genetically modified for insect and herbicide resistance ­— and the spread of this technology to other parts of Africa. Experiments conducted with smallholder farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Mozambique now mean that insect-resistant cowpea, disease-resistant bananas, virus-resistant cassava, drought-tolerant maize and vitamin-enriched sorghum can be grown in Africa successfully. This book describes a remarkable personal and scientific evolution and looks to a future in which GM technology allows for the possibility of achieving food security throughout Africa by means of staple crops grown in difficult conditions by smallholder farmers.

This book is an ethnographic study of controversial sounds and noise control debates in Latin America’s most populous city. It discusses the politics of collective living by following several threads linking sound-making practices to governance issues. Rather than discussing sound within a self-enclosed “cultural” field, I examine it as a point of entry for analyzing the state. At the same time, rather than portraying the state as a self-enclosed “apparatus” with seemingly inexhaustible homogeneous power, I describe it as a collection of unstable (and often contradictory) sectors, personnel, strategies, discourses, documents, and agencies. My goal is to approach sound as an analytical category that allows us to access citizenship issues. As I show, environmental noise in São Paulo has been entangled in a wide range of debates, including public health, religious intolerance, crime control, urban planning, cultural rights, and economic growth. The book’s guiding question can be summarized as follows: how do sounds enter and leave the sphere of state control? I answer this question by examining a multifaceted process I define as “sound-politics.” The term refers to sounds as objects that are susceptible to state intervention through specific regulatory, disciplinary, and punishment mechanisms. Both “sound” and “politics” in “sound-politics” are nouns, with the hyphen serving as a bridge that expresses the instability that each concept inserts into the other.

Meeting future food needs without compromising environmental integrity is a central challenge for agriculture globally but especially for the Asia Pacific region – where 60% of the global population, including some of the world’s poorest, live on only 30% of the land mass. To guarantee the food security of this and other regions, growers worldwide are rapidly adopting genetically modified (GM) crops as the forerunner to protect against many biotic and abiotic stresses. Asia Pacific countries play an important role in this, with India, China and Pakistan appearing in the top 10 countries with acreage of GM crops, primarily devoted to Bt cotton. Genetically Modified Crops in Asia Pacific discusses the progress of GM crop adoption across the Asia Pacific region over the past two decades, including research, development, adoption and sustainability, as well as the cultivation of insect resistant Bt brinjal, drought-tolerant sugarcane, late blight resistant potato and biotech rice more specific to this region. Regulatory efforts of the Asia Pacific member nations to ensure the safety of GM crops to both humans and the environment are also outlined to provide impetus in other countries initiating biotech crops. The authors also probe into some aspects of gene editing and nanobiotechnology to expand the scope into next generation GM crops, including the potential to grow crops in acidic soil, reduce methane production, remove poisonous elements from plants and improve overall nutritional quality. Genetically Modified Crops in Asia Pacific provides a comprehensive reference not only for academics, researchers and private sectors in crop systems but also policy makers in the Asia Pacific region. Beyond this region, readers will benefit from understanding how GM crops have been integrated into many different countries and, in particular, the effects of the take-up of GM cropping systems by farmers with different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Liberalism—and its promise of market-led prosperity—was in crisis well before Covid-19. Recent decades have seen a rise in concentrated unemployment, and a long-term stagnation in real wages, in many of the world’s leading economies. At the same time, the world has witnessed a dramatic rise of corporate power, and the wealth of the top 1%. Alongside this has been the failure of liberal societies to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate change. Covid-19 has only exacerbated the fragility of work, and the effects of corporate power and inequality. When Covid-19 is over, liberalism will therefore be badly in need of renovation. Indeed, to survive, liberalism will need a radical reboot—to find new ways of tackling the current challenges posed by corporate power, inequality, and climate change. This also means moving beyond recent “neoliberal” versions of liberalism toward a more truly democratic form of liberalism, or from the idea of free markets to a vision of fair markets. Fair market policies are not democratic socialist: they hold on to the idea of markets as promoting growth and freedom. But they insist that markets must be subject to wide-ranging democratic regulation. This book offers a new vision of a “fair markets” approach–and the concrete policies that could make this ideal a reality. It proposes: (1) a universal “green” jobs guarantee; (2) a significant increase in the minimum wage and government support for wages; (3) universal healthcare based on a two-track model of public and private provision, and (4) a similar public baseline for childcare and basic leave benefits for all workers; (5) a new critical infrastructure policy for nation states to sit alongside a commitment to global free trade; and (6) universal pollution taxes, with all proceeds returned directly to citizens by way of a green dividend. The common theme of all the policies is that they combine a commitment to markets with democratic commitments to equal dignity for all citizens, and the regulation of markets in line with majority interests and understandings—or the idea that markets should be both free and fair, and well-functioning, as opposed to simply “free.” Because of this, they are also policies that are “blue,” “pink,” and “green.” The book also explains how to pay for these ideas, and the kind of democratic politics needed to make them a reality.

Today, tens of millions of Americans rely on reproductive advances to help them carry out decisions more personal and far-reaching than almost any other they will ever make: They use birth control or abortion to delay or avoid having children; surrogacy or tissue donation to start or grow a family; and genetic diagnosis or embryo selection to have offspring who survive and flourish. This is no less than the medicine of miracles: It fills empty cradles; frees families from debilitating disease; and empowers them to plan a life that doesn’t include parenthood. But accidents happen: Embryologists miss ailments; egg vendors switch donors; obstetricians tell pregnant women their healthy fetuses will be stillborn. The aftermaths can last a lifetime, yet political and economic forces conspire against regulation to prevent negligence from happening in the first place. After the fact, social stigma and lawyers’ fees stave off lawsuits, and legal relief is a long shot: Judges and juries are reluctant to designate reproductive losses as worthy of redress when mix-ups foist parenthood on patients who didn’t want it, or childlessness on those who did. Some courts insist that babies are blessings, planned or not; others shrug over the fact that infertile couples weren’t assured offspring anyway. The result is a society that lets badly behaving specialists off the hook and leaves broken victims to pick up the pieces. Failed abortions, switched donors, and lost embryos may be First World problems—but these aren’t innocent lapses or harmless errors: They’re wrongs in need of rights.

It is obvious that the process of developing cancer—oncogenesis—is a multistep process. We know that smoking, obesity, and a family history are strong independent predictors of developing malignancy; yet, in clinics, we often see that some heavy smokers live into their nineties and that some people with close relatives affected by cancer spend many years worrying about a disease that, in the end, they never contract. For many centuries scientists have struggled to understand the process that make cancer cells different from normal cells. There were those in ancient times who believed that tumours were attributable to acts of the gods. Hippocrates suggested that cancer resulted from an imbalance between the black humour that came from the spleen, and the other three humours: blood, phlegm, and bile. It is only in the last 100 years that biologists have been able to characterize some of the pathways that lead to the uncontrolled replication seen in cancer, and subsequently examine exactly how these pathways evolve. The rampant nature by which cancer invades local and distant tissues, as well its apparent ability to spread between related individuals led some, such as Peyton Rous in 1910, to suggest that cancer was an infectious condition. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1966 for the 50 years of work into investigating a link between sarcoma in chickens and a retrovirus that became known as Rous sarcoma virus. He had shown how retroviruses are able to integrate sequences of DNA coding for errors in cellular replication control (oncogenes) by introducing into the human cell viral RNA together with a reverse transcriptase. Viruses are now implicated in many cancers, and in countries where viruses such as HIV and EBV are endemic, the high incidence of malignancies such as Kaposi’s sarcoma and Burkitt’s lymphoma is likely to be directly related. There are several families of viruses associated with cancer, broadly classed into DNA viruses, which mutate human genes using their own DNA, and retroviruses, like Rous sarcoma virus, which insert viral RNA into the cell, where it is then transcribed into genes. This link with viruses has not only led to an understanding that cancer originates from genetic mutations, but has also become a key focus in the design of new anticancer therapies. Traditional chemotherapies either alter DNA structure (as with cisplatin) or inhibit production of its component parts (as with 5-fluorouracil.) These broad-spectrum agents have many and varied side effects, largely due to their non-specific activity on replicating DNA throughout the body, not just in tumour cells. New vaccine therapies utilizing gene-coding viruses aim to restore deficient biological pathways or inhibit mutated ones specific to tumour cells. The hope is that these gene therapies will be effective and easily tolerated by patients, but development is currently progressing with caution. In a trial in France of ten children suffering from X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency and who were injected with a vector that coded for the gene product they lacked, two of the children subsequently died from leukaemia. Further analysis confirmed that the DNA from the viral vector had become integrated into an existing, but normally inactive, proto-oncogene, LM02, triggering its conversion into an active oncogene, and the development of life-threatening malignancy. To understand how a tiny change in genetic structure could lead to such tragic consequences, we need to understand the molecular biology of the cell and, in particular, to pay attention to the pathways of growth regulation that are necessary in all mammalian cell populations. Errors in six key regulatory pathways are known as the ‘hallmarks of cancer’ and will be discussed in the rest of this chapter.