social incentives that bring them into existence and sustain them in the course of time. non-governmental organizations (ngos), whether based in the global north or south, are not different. unfortunately, numerous ngos start up and then fail, because the passion of the founder is not supported by a sustainable organization volunteers in all sectors are working with ngos. the ngos are citizen...

The pressing need for empirically informed public policies aimed at understanding and promoting children's health has challenged environmental scientists to modify traditional research paradigms and reevaluate their roles and obligations toward research participants. Methodologic approaches to children's environmental health research raise ethical challenges for which federal regulations may pr...

It is now time to begin the study of personal genome services based on the interdisciplinary theories and technologies of genomics and artificial intelligence (AI). Although recently much attention has been given to personal genome services for realizing personal medicine, little systematic research has been done on their communication and computational aspects for intelligent wellness service ...

Prenatal exposure of the developing brain to various environmental challenges increases susceptibility to late onset of neuropsychiatric dysfunction; still, the underlying mechanisms remain obscure. Here we show that exposure of embryos to a variety of environmental factors such as alcohol, methylmercury, and maternal seizure activates HSF1 in cerebral cortical cells. Furthermore, Hsf1 deficien...

RoboCup was started in 1997 by a group of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics researchers with the following grand challenge, to be achieved by 2050 [9]: “to build a team of robot soccer players, which can beat a human World Cup champion team.” Since then, RoboCup Federation1 established itself as a structured organization and as one of the major events in the research field of Artificial Inte...

Servitization is a grand challenge for all manufacturing companies to extend their business. As main result this paper presents an approach and corresponding research questions on how to integrate servitization in manufacturing businesses by making use of an innovation ecosystem. Companies might benefit from this approach, as it indicates how relevant characteristics to evolve in order to take ...

In March 2010, the Dagstuhl Seminar 10102 explored the grand challenges confronting research and practice in the domain of discrete event logistics systems. This Executive Summary describes the process of the seminar and discusses the key conclusions regarding grand challenges for research and practice. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar are put together in the online proce...

With rapid development since the 1970s, China is entering a period of social transformation, which not only creates favorable conditions for sustainable development but also presents new challenges. The transitional period in China is a stage in which two types of social transformation coexist, the first is the social transformation from agricultural society to industrial society; the second is...

M. Gross and H. Heinrichs (eds.), Environmental Sociology: European Perspectives and Interdisciplinary Challenges, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8730-0_2, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract For quite some time environmental sociology has been preoccupied with understanding the fundamental causes of environmental crises. It is only since the 1990s that attention has shifted stronger t...