Squalene is a natural dehydrotriterpenic hydrocarbon (C30H50) with six double bonds, known as an intermediate in the biosynthesis of phytosterol or cholesterol in plants or animals. We have briefly reviewed the natural sources for squalene and focused on the main methods and techniques to obtain and to determine it. Some of its applications in different fields of human activity are also mentioned.

Linear infrastructure such as roads, highways, power lines and gas lines are omnipresent features of human activity and are rapidly expanding in the tropics. Tropical species are especially vulnerable to such infrastructure because they include many ecological specialists that avoid even narrow (<30-m wide) clearings and forest edges, as well as other species that are susceptible to road kill, ...

Flooding is not a recent hazard in the Philippines but one that has occurred throughout the recorded history of the archipelago. On the one hand, it is related to a wider global ecological crisis to do with climatic change and rising sea levels but on the other hand, it is also the effect of more localised human activities. A whole range of socio-economic factors such as land use practices, liv...

This paper deals with the problem of classification of human activities from video as one way of performing activity monitoring. Our approach uses motion features that are computed very efficiently and subsequently projected into a lower dimension space where matching is performed. Each action is represented as a manifold in this lower dimension space and matching is done by comparing these man...

The ability to recognize the actions of our conspecifics constitutes one of our fundamental cognitive abilities. The ability to understand, and to react to, human actions is thus crucial for cognitive systems of the future. Actions are complex entities, possessing several representations linguistic, visual, cognitive, and motor. The key to understanding actions is to understand the relationship...

The consequences of climate change and the impacts of human activity on the environment have made it clearer than ever before that we must evolve our current model of public health to better account for the inextricable link between human health and the natural systems on which it depends-creating a "public health 2.0" that builds on the innovations of the twentieth century to account for a wor...

A few years ago, I wrote on the need for expansion of the environmental areas of bioethics, and covered some of the topics touched on here. Sadly, although it is possible to find some notable exceptions, bioethics does not provide much of an ethical base for considering human-nature relationships. Here I’m not going to deal with these philosophical issues or others about the nature of ethical d...

The term "natural childbirth" encompasses a variety of methods, including the Lamaze, Bradley, and home-birth approaches, which place more or less reliance on medical technology. Aristotle's analysis of three levels of human activity--digestion and reproduction, perception and locomotion, and abstract thinking--and Pellegrino and Thomasma's classification of the "living body," "lived body," and...

A seismic isolation system for the proposed 'Advanced LIGO' detector upgrade is under development. It consists of a two-stage in-vacuum active isolation platform that is supported by an external hydraulic actuation stage. A full-scale preliminary-design technology demonstrator of the in-vacuum platform has been assembled and is being tested at Stanford's engineering test facility. Unanticipated...

Biological invasions are often closely associated with human impacts and it is difficult to determine whether either or both are responsible for the negative impacts on native communities. Here, we show that human activity, not biological invasion, is the primary driver of negative effects on native communities and of the process of invasion itself. In a large-scale experiment, we combined addi...