With the novice user in mind, this beginner's guide explains thebasics behind microwave technology, evaluates available instrumentsand reaction modes, and provides practical hints for everyeventuality. Includes 27 detailed protocols for often-usedreactions. From the contents: 1 Microwave Synthesis - An Introduction 2 Microwave Theory 3 Equipment Review 4 Microwave Processing Techniques 5 Starting With Microwave Chemistry 6 Experimental Protocols 6.1 General Small-Scale Sealed-Vessel Microwave Processing 6.2 Reaction Optimization 6.3 Library Generation 6.4 Reaction Scale-Up 6.5 Special Processing Techniques

Magnetic nanocatalysts are becoming an important tool for greener catalytic processes in chemical transformations in view of the ease of their removal from a reaction medium. This book explores assorted magnetic nanocatalysts, their deployment in synthesis, chemical transformation and their recovery and reuse. Various thematic topics embodied include magnetic nanocatalysts for S-S bond formation, N-heterocycle formation, C-heteroatom bond formation, silica-supported catalysts, multicomponent reactions, including their recyclability; another available volume emphasizes the utility of magnetic nanocatalysts in industrial appliances.

The authors of this guide are experts on the use of microwaves for drug synthesis as well as having much experience in teaching courses held under the auspices of the American Chemical Society and the IUPAC. In this handy source of information for any practicing synthetic chemist they focus on common reaction types in medicinal chemistry, including solid-phase and combinatorial methods. They consider the underlying theory, latest developments in microwave applications and include a variety of examples from recent literature, as well as less common applications that are equally relevant for organic and medicinal chemists. An indispensable reference for researchers with an affinity to modern methods.

Preface International conferences are not organized overnight—especially not when high ranking personalities from politics, business and academia should be offered an adequate platform for addressing and discussing highly relevant contemporary issues. The conference on “The Role of Law and Ethics in the Globalized Economy,” which took place on May 22 and 23, 2008 in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich, was no exception. When the first preparations started at the end of 2006, neither the subprime crises nor the general crises of the global financial system, whose shock waves have rocked the financial businesses in subsequent months, were known; nor were they predictable or even imaginable. Based on our monitoring of the globalization process and its apparent impact—not only on the economic and technological environment, but also on the social en- ronment—it was appropriate for the conference to begin by serving as a platform for analysing the status quo of the process of globalization, as relevant to politics, business and academia, and for exploring how the interest groups in those domains cope with the challenges of globalization. In the end, however, the purpose of the conference was to produce proposals for conditions for “upwards” global compe- tion, meaning that minimum conditions should be worked out to enable people to live and labour humanely. Such conditions would be those which should help avoid otherwise inevitable frictions in society, both nationally and internationally.

This intriguing book was born out of the many discussions the authors had in the past 10 years about the role of scale-free structure and dynamics in producing intelligent behavior in brains. The microscopic dynamics of neural networks is well described by the prevailing paradigm based in a narrow interpretation of the neuron doctrine. This book broadens the doctrine by incorporating the dynamics of neural fields, as first revealed by modeling with differential equations (K-sets). The book broadens that approach by application of random graph theory (neuropercolation). The book concludes with diverse commentaries that exemplify the wide range of mathematical/conceptual approaches to neural fields. This book is intended for researchers, postdocs, and graduate students, who see the limitations of network theory and seek a beachhead from which to embark on mesoscopic and macroscopic neurodynamics.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51), author of Machine Man (1747), was the most uncompromising of the materialists of the eighteenth century, and the provocative title of his work ensured it a succès de scandale in his own time. It was however a serious, if polemical, attempt to provide an explanation of the workings of the human body and mind in purely material terms and to show that thought was the product of the workings of the brain alone. This fully annotated edition presents an English translation of the text together with the most important of La Mettrie's other philosophical works translated into English, and Ann Thomson's introduction examines his aims and the scandalous moral consequences which he drew from his materialism.