Detailed coverage of the latest research on plant physiology, including flowering and pollination in trees, apple fruit development and ripening;Reviews current best practice in tree training, pruning and thinning operations, including the use of growth regulators and new areas such as mechanisation and automation;Discusses the range of fungal and viral diseases affecting apples

Reviews key developments in understanding crop physiology and genetic diversity and how they have informed advances in breeding new varietiesCoverage of advances across the value chain for grain legume cultivation, from variety selection to post-harvest storageDiscusses the latest trends in disease, insect pest and weed management

Since the first edition of this very successful book was written to synthesise and review the enormous body of work covering falls in older people, there has been an even greater wealth of informative and promising studies designed to increase our understanding of risk factors and prevention strategies. This second edition, first published in 2007, is written in three parts: epidemiology, strategies for prevention, and future research directions. New material includes recent studies coveri...

This collection features five peer-reviewed reviews on optimising rootstock health.The first chapter explores optimising rootstock health to improve root function, resource-use efficiency, sustainability and agricultural productivity. The chapter also presents a case study on tomato rootstocks as a viable strategy to overcome abiotic stresses in Ghana.The second chapter reviews the important aspects of tree growth and development in apple production which a...

Speculation is rife that by 2012 the elusive Higgs boson will be found at the Large Hadron Collider. If found, the Higgs boson would help explain why everything has mass. But there's more at stake -- what we're really testing is our capacity to make the universe reasonable.Our best understanding of physics is predicated on something known as quantum field theory. Unfortunately, in its raw form, it doesn't't make sense -- its outputs are physically impossible infinite percentages wh...

Nuclear physics began long before the identification of fundamental particles, with J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron at the end of the nineteenth century, which implied the existence of a positive charge in the atom to make it neutral. In this Very Short Introduction, Frank Close gives an account of how this area of physics has progressed, including the recognition of how heavy nuclei are built up in the cores of stars and in supernovae, the identification of quarks and g...

Humans have long been aware of the electric and magnetic forces around us, and scientific investigation showed that the two are intimately connected as electromagnetism. Lightning shows how devastating electricity can be in nature, while humans learned to exploit the flow of negatively charged electrons that make up an electric current. In the early twentieth century, the experiments of Ernest Rutherford showed that at the heart of atoms lies a positively charged nucleus. The positive char...

Latin American Politics, Second Edition is a thematic introduction to the political systems of all 20 Latin American countries. The approach is self-consciously comparative and encourages students to develop stronger comparative analysis skills through such topics as history, violence, democracy, and political economy. Fully updated and revised, this second edition also includes a new chapter on parties, elections, and movements. Each chapter is now framed by a prologue and an epi...

Child Labour in the Global Human Rights Regime is about children’s rights, child labour and child slavery in modern and modernizing societies in the context of what has been summarized as a well-established and increasingly sophisticated framework of treaties, institutions, networks and ambitious standards with respect to human rights.The main focus is on the implications of children’s forced labour within compulsory systems of formal education, or schooling, that have bee...

An irresistible comedy of manners about three generations of a Chicago restaurant family and the deep-fried, beer-battered, cream cheese-frosted love that feeds them all—from the best-selling author of Girls in White Dresses“Laugh-out-loud funny, and deeply resonant to our times. I was so happy to be in the Sullivan family’s Chicago bar, caught in the swirl of three generations of grudges, love affairs and fraught personal decisions.”—Ann Na...

What are neutrinos? Why does nature need them? What use are they?Neutrinos are perhaps the most enigmatic particles in the universe. Formed in certain radioactive decays, they pass through most matter with ease. These tiny, ghostly particles are formed in millions in the Sun and pass through us constantly. For a long time they were thought to be massless, and passing as they do like ghosts they were not regarded as significant. Now we know they have a very small mass, and there are strong ...

Modern mergers and acquisitions, or M&A as it's more commonly known, is a new phenomenon. The buying and selling, the breaking up and combining of companies-the essence of M&A-has been a part of commerce throughout history, but only in our era has M&A itself become a business. In 2007, before the recession hit, it was a $4.4 trillion global enterprise. And yet, it remains largely unexplored. Discrete stories have been pulled from the annals of M&A, both true and fictionalized, that have be...