In this second volume of Professor Needham's proposed eight-volume treatise on Chinese science and civilization, he describes in extensive and loving detail the philosophical background against which the specific sciences in China developed. In the first part, Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism and Legalism are analyzed with special attention being paid to the implications of these philosophies for w...

The controversial question of the relationship between obesity and disease has been considerably clearer after the demonstration in several prospective, epidemiological studies that the subgroup of central, visceral obesity is particularly prone to develop cardiovascular disease, stroke, and non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus. Visceral obesity is associated with multiple central endocrine ...

Although dry farming is important in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Khorasan, as well as some other districts, a large proportion of Iran’s agriculture has always depended upon irrigation. Approximately half the annual grain crop, and an overwhelming proportion of other crops, are irrigated. With the exception of the Caspian littoral almost the whole of Iran is classified as semi-arid or arid. As i...

Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread across their galaxies and contain huge numbers of individuals. Unless the proportion of such large civilizations is unreasonably tiny, most observers belong to t...

rought up in a world whose culture and religion are rooted in the civilizations of the eastern crescent of the Mediterranean Sea, one is led to believe that the progress made in overcoming the prejudice that Peter Singer calls speciesism is of relatively recent development. But this stems from the limitations of the Western background; animal liberation has been known and widely practiced in Fa...