total petroleum hydrocarbon ( tph ) are environmental contaminants that are released into the marine environment through oil spills, industrial and domestic activities. tph are readily transformed into more hydrophilic metabolites, which are accumulated in bile. thus fish bile can be used as a biomarker of exposure of fish to tph in the marine environment. in this study several stations were se...

Reclamation of Arid LandsIt is our pleasure to inform you that Springer International Publisher (2017) has published a book entitled "Reclamation of Arid Lands" in English.This book is the result of joint collaboration between the University of Tehran, University of Kashan and Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands, whose authors are as follows:Mohammad Jafari: Professor, Faculty of Natur...

Modern production processes continuously require enhancement in production time and the quality of the products. The use of robots in this field of application has formed an increasingly important aspect of the drive for efficiency. These robots typically work in restricted areas to prevent any harmful interaction with humans and are designed for repeatability, speed and precision. However, new...

Modeling real-world systems plays a pivotal role in their analysis and contributes to a better understanding of their behavior and performance. Classification, optimization, control, and pattern recognition problems rely heavily on modeling techniques. Such models can be categorized into three classes: white-box, black-box, and gray-box (Nelles, 2001). White-box models are fully derived from fi...

Preface From the nucleus to the apoplast: building the plant's cell wall The plant cell wall has a crucial role in any aspect of a plant's life cycle and, as a result, cell wall research touches all aspects of plant biology (Keegstra, 2010). New and exciting work on cell wall research is constantly being published that has refined and sometimes even challenged the way we see cell wall biosynthe...

The human-centric facet of intelligent systems, which are inherently based upon the principle of hybridization of the individual information technologies, is definitely an interesting and highly promising avenue to follow. The diversity of communication channels between information systems and the environment is immense, and their effective realization does call for a truly heterogeneous nature...

It is well established that learning and experience lead to auditory cortical plasticity that is highly specific to the frequency of the acquired sound. Frequency specificity is demonstrated as the shift in the receptive field of cortical neurons towards the frequency of the acquired sound. Jafari and others showed that this frequency-specific receptive field shift of cortical neurons can be in...