The United States has publicly funded its human spaceflight program on a continuous basis for more than a half-century, through three wars and a half-dozen recessions, from the early Mercury and Gemini suborbital and Earth orbital missions, to the lunar landings, and thence to the first reusable winged crewed spaceplane that the United States operated for three decades. Today the United States is the major partner in a massive orbital facility - the International Space Station - that is becoming the focal point for the first tentative steps in commercial cargo and crewed orbital space flights. And yet, the long-term future of human spaceflight beyond this project is unclear. Pronouncements by multiple presidents of bold new ventures by Americans to the Moon, to Mars, and to an asteroid in its native orbit, have not been matched by the same commitment that accompanied President Kennedy\'s now fabled 1961 speech-namely, the substantial increase in NASA funding needed to make it happen. Are we still committed to advancing human spaceflight? What should a long-term goal be, and what does the United States need to do to achieve it? Pathways to Exploration explores the case for advancing this endeavor, drawing on the history of rationales for human spaceflight, examining the attitudes of stakeholders and the public, and carefully assessing the technical and fiscal realities. This report recommends maintaining the long-term focus on Mars as the horizon goal for human space exploration. With this goal in mind, the report considers funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and international cooperation that could contribute to the achievement of spaceflight to Mars. According to Pathways to Exploration, a successful U.S. program would require sustained national commitment and a budget that increases by more than the rate of inflation. In reviving a U.S. human exploration program capable of answering the enduring questions about humanity's destiny beyond our tiny blue planet, the nation will need to grapple with the attitudinal and fiscal realities of the nation today while staying true to a small but crucial set of fundamental principles for the conduct of exploration of the endless frontier. The recommendations of Pathways to Exploration provide a clear map toward a human spaceflight program that inspires students and citizens by furthering human exploration and discovery, while taking into account the long-term commitment necessary to achieve this goal.

Help students be more focused and team-oriented, and become the true drivers of their own learning by centering learning and planning around one of several broad career avenues.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, ISBRA 2008, held in Atlanta, GA, USA in May 2008. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 6 workshop papers and 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 94 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics, including clustering and classification, gene expression analysis, gene networks, genome analysis, motif finding, pathways, protein structure prediction, protein domain interactions, phylogenetics, and software tools.

This book, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of genetic programming (GP), explores the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP. In this year’s edition, the topics covered include many of the most important issues and research questions in the field, such as opportune application domains for GP-based methods, game playing and co-evolutionary search, symbolic regression and efficient learning strategies, encodings and representations for GP, schema theorems, and new selection mechanisms. The book includes several chapters on best practices and lessons learned from hands-on experience. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This book is a compilation of articles on various aspects of bioresources and the processes employed for its judicious utilization. Biodiversity and conservation, food security, gene banks and repositories, laws governing biodiversity, bioprospecting, bioresources in traditional medicine and biodiversity mining are some of the important topics covered in the book. The unique contents of the book make it an important source of information for conservation scientists, academics, activists and to those who are actively involved in product oriented research from bioresources.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2023, held in September 2023 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The 24 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Flexible Queries over Semantic Systems; Advanced Methods and Applications in Natural Language; Processing (NLP); New Advances in Disinformation Detection; Data and Text Mining; Applying AI to Social Science and Social Science to AI; Artificial Intelligence Law and Regulation.

This edited volume brings together a collection of chapters from leading scholars in rural education with the purpose of linking knowledge from the rural education field to the wider discipline of education studies. Through addressing significant issues in the rural education field, the book gives insights from rural education that have general relevance for the wider disciplines of education, and provides up-to-date scholarship in research in rural contexts. This book aims to be a definitive and comprehensive edition of contemporary rural education scholarship that works as a guide for those new to researching in and for rural contexts, as well as actively expand the other sub-fields of education from a rural perspective. It examines the connection between rurality and the other domains of educational research, exploring what a rural perspective might bring to the broader fields of educational research, and how it might evolve them. In its unique approach, this book brings the concept of ‘rural’ to the disciplines of education; chapters regarding the ethics of research in the rural context speaks to a gap in rural education, and provide tools for engaging marginalised communities more generally in educational research.

This book covers various aspects of cancer chemoprevention, including an overview of chemoprevention in the process of tumorigenesis; the roles of various phytochemicals, functional foods, and dietary interventions in disease prevention; and techniques such as cancer stem cell targeting, nano-formulations, and so forth. The nutrigenomic and epigenetic effects of natural products at the molecular and genetic levels are also covered alongside their potential for additive and synergistic effect, as well as overcoming drug resistance. The key selling features of the book are as follows: Discusses holistic and comprehensive areas of chemoprevention Includes diverse techniques, such as cancer stem cell targeting, nano-formulations, and nanotechnology-based drug delivery systems Introduces various mechanisms involved in prevention of the diseases, including targeting cancer stem cells Reviews various aspects which can reduce the toxicity and cost of treatment of diseases by alternative medicine Explores various sources, mechanisms, and ways to develop cancer chemopreventive agents with minimal toxicity compared to traditional cancer therapy drugs This book is focused on researchers and graduate students in drug delivery and formulation, nanobiotechnology, cancer chemoprevention, prevention, and therapeutics.

Rivers are essential to every aspect of civilization, yet how many understand how they work? Fleming takes readers on a journey along our planet's waterways, providing a scientist's reflections on the profound interrelationships that rivers have with landscapes, ecosystems, and societies.