Labor is a physiological event involving a sequential, integrated set of changes within the myometrium, deciduas, and uterine cervix that occur gradually over a period of days to weeks. Biochemical connective tissue changes in the uterine cervix appear to precede uterine contractions and cervical dilation, and all of these events usually occur before rupture of the fetal membranes. In other wor...

This paper discusses a practical, computerised eco-management system for agriculture which has been developed at the University of Hertfordshire, UK for use by farmers and their advisers to encourage more sustainable practices. The research and software development has been funded by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Milk Development Council. The computerised system h...

Product design is one of the most important sectors influencing global sustainability, as almost all the products consumed by people are outputs of the product development process. In particular, early design decisions can have a very significant impact on sustainability. These decisions not only relate to material and manufacturing choices but have a far-reaching effect on the product’s entire...

Climate change is strongly linked to human behavior and technologies, and many of the barriers to sustainable behavior are rather psychological than technological. More sustainable technologies and food products have been introduced to combat climate change, most often labeled with morally loaded labels such as “organic” or “environmentally friendly”. The purpose of this thesis was, first, to g...

This article describes the study of the eco-impact of plastic and paper bags using the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) technique under three different options: usage and disposal criteria with the existing usage behavior to reuse and governmental policies to recycle (option1), usage and disposal criteria as per consumers’ perceptions if systems are in place (option2) and usage and disposal ...

In this report, we present the Eco aspect-oriented framework for Java. Eco’s main goals are a flexible and open design and allowing static type-checking. Eco realizes its flexibility and openness by employing a pure and well-designed object-oriented approach. Static type-checking is realized by exploiting the novel Java generics feature. In this report, we evaluate Eco with respect to these goa...

In this paper, the authors propose a non-linear cost function based on ecological considerations for lot-size planning. The classical approaches of lot-size optimization, the Wagner-Whitin algorithm and the Part-Period Balancing heuristic, are enhanced with so-called eco-factors. These eco-enhanced approaches combined with eco-balancing help to reduce overall production costs. Simultaneously, t...

A lake ecosystem is continuously exposed to environmental stressors with non-linear interrelationships between abiotic factors and aquatic organisms. Ecosystem health depicts the capacity of system to respond to external perturbations and still maintain structure and function. In this study, we explored the effects of abiotic factors on ecosystem health of Taihu Lake in 2013, China from a syste...

Endocrine-cerebro-osteodysplasia (ECO) syndrome is a recessive genetic disorder associated with multiple congenital defects in endocrine, cerebral, and skeletal systems that is caused by a missense mutation in the mitogen-activated protein kinase-like intestinal cell kinase (ICK) gene. In algae and invertebrates, ICK homologs are involved in flagellar formation and ciliogenesis, respectively. H...

This paper mainly provides one new nature inspired Energy Conversation Optimization (ECO) method tosearch for the optimal sensor position of sensor network in the typical tunnels, fully covering the tunnel anddynamically locating the high-speed train in the tunnel. Firstly, one objective of this study is to briefly intro-duce the framework of transmitting the sensor’s data in th...