Flowers

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Louis P. Ronse De Craene

"Floral morphology remains the cornerstone for plant identification and studies of plant evolution. This guide gives a global overview of the floral diversity of the angiosperms through the use of detailed floral diagrams. These schematic diagrams replace long descriptions or complicated drawings as a tool for understanding floral structure and evolution. They show important features of flowers, such as the relative positions of the different organs, their fusion, symmetry, and structural details. The relevance of the diagrams is discussed, and pertinent evolutionary trends are illustrated. The range of plant species represented reflects the most recent classification of flowering plants based mainly on molecular data, which is expected to remain stable in the future. This book is invaluable for researchers and students working on plant structure, development and systematics, as well as being an important resource for plant ecologists, evolutionary botanists and horticulturists." --NHBS Environment Bookstore.

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Marco Mamei, Franco Zambonelli

More and more, software systems involve autonomous and distributed software components that have to execute and interact in open and dynamic environments, such as in pervasive, autonomous, and mobile applications. The requirements with respect to dynamics, openness, scalability, and decentralization call for new approaches to software design and development, capable of supporting spontaneous configuration, tolerating partial failures, or arranging adaptive reorganization of the whole system. Inspired by the behaviour of complex natural systems, scientists and engineers have started to adjust their mechanisms and techniques for self-organization and adaption to changing environments. In line with these considerations, Mamei and Zambonelli propose an interaction model inspired by the way masses and particles in our universe move and self-organize according to contextual information represented by gravitational and electromagnetic fields. The key idea is to have the components’ actions driven by computational force fields, generated by the components themselves or by some infrastructures, and propagated across the environment. Together with its supporting middleware infrastructure – available with additional information under – this model can serve as the basis for a general purpose and widely applicable approach for the design and development of adaptive distributed applications.

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Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin's seminal work laying the foundations for the principles of evolutionary biology via natural selection, based on evidence that he collected during his expedition on *HMS Beagle* in the 1830s.

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Horst Rauchfuss, Terence N. Mitchell

"Up to now, we do not have a generally accepted theory about the origin of life and about the process of development of life, we only have a great number of - to some extent even contradictory - hypotheses. Meanwhile there came up some scientific findings beyond thought only a few years ago. Horst Rauchfuss is comparing the different theories from the view of the latest results and is giving an exciting and easy understandable insight into the present state of research."--BOOK JACKET.