Crude is the unexpurgated story of oil, from the circumstances of its birth millions of years ago to the spectacle of its rise as the indispensable ingredient of modern life. In addition to fueling our SUVs and illuminating our cities, crude oil and its byproducts fertilize our produce, pave our roads, and make plastic possible. "Newborn babies," observes author Sonia Shah, "slide from their mothers into petro-plastic-gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and are hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters." The modern world is drenched in oil; Crude tells how it came to be. A great human drama emerges, of discovery and innovation, risk, the promise of riches, and the power of greed. Shah infuses recent twists in the story with equal drama, through chronicles of colorful modern-day characters — from the hundreds of Nigerian women who stormed a Chevron plant to a monomaniacal scientist for whom life is the pursuit of this earthblood and its elusive secret. Shah moves masterfully between scientific, economic, political, and social analysis, capturing the many sides of the indispensable mineral that we someday may have to find a way to live without.

Geomechanics has a marked impact on the safe and sustainable use of the subsurface. Along with an ongoing demand for hydrocarbon resources there is also a growing emphasis on sustainable subsurface exploitation and development, storage of carbon, hydrogen, energy and (radioactive) waste, as well as sustainable geothermal resource utilization. Such activities are accompanied by an ever-increasing need for higher resolution, fit-for-purpose solutions, workflows and approaches to constrain present-day subsurface stresses and minimize associated uncertainties. Building high fidelity geomechanical-numerical models provides critical input and understanding for diverse engineering designs and construction as well as geoscience applications. Such models greatly contribute towards uncertainty reduction, risk management and risk mitigation during the operational life of a given subsurface development and associated infrastructures (both on and below the surface). This Special Publication contains contributions detailing the latest efforts and perspectives in present-day in-situ stress characterization, prediction and modelling from the borehole to plate-tectonic scale. There is particular emphasis on the uncertainties that are often associated with data and models.

Continuous Renal Replacement Therapy provides concise, evidence-based, bedside guidance for the management of critically ill patients with acute renal failure, offering quick reference answers to clinicians' questions about treatments and situations encountered in daily practice.

Following the successful publication of the proceedings of 6th Green House Gas Control Technology conference (GHGT-6), Elsevier is proud to publish the proceedings from the 7th conference, held in Vancouver in September 2004. The Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies conference series has established itself as the foremost conference bringing together the international energy community, providing a forum for the discussion of the latest advances in the field of greenhouse gas control technologies.