Extremophiles

Extremophiles are extreme nature devotees, mostly bacteria and archaea, which bloom with extreme environmental parameters like temperature, pH, pressure, and salinity. Extremophiles are responsible for the beginning of geographical structures throughout the evolution and establishment of all presently known ecological units. They are classified into several categories like acidophiles, alkaliphiles, psychrophiles, thermophiles, xerophiles, piezophiles/barophiles, halophiles, and many more, as given in this chapter. The subsistence of these microorganisms in extreme environments produces extremolytes and extremozymes that have the potential of valued resources for the enlargement of a bio-based economy. In addition to their solicitations, extremophiles offer treasured information regarding the physiochemical limitations of natural life. This chapter mainly evaluates extremophiles, the classification of extremophiles, and their biotechnological applications in grey, white, and red biotechnologies with the perspective of exploring celestial life.

Scrutiny of Self in Arun Joshi’s The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

An Outstanding novelist of human predicament, Arun Joshi is ranked with the great masters of contemporary Indian fiction in English. He believes that reality lies within the consciousness of isolated individuals. As he is the great writer of psychological perception, he envisions the inner crisis of the modern man in his five novels. In particular, his second novel The Strange Case of Billy Biswas is the apple of his eye. It portrays the story of the protagonist who is dragged by the mysterious world of the tribal society. The protagonist, Billy’s strange quest leads him to leave his position as the sole inheritor of a wealthy family and lead to live a natural life. There is no comfort in his American life as well as in his marital life too. Further, the story visualises Billy’s quest for individualism and self-identity at the cost of leaving materialistic world. This paper focuses on the clashes between the civilised world and the primitive one as well as it looks at the root of the protagonist Billy’s quest for the self.

Traces of Honeybees, Api-Tourism and Beekeeping: From Past to Present

Throughout history, honey has been used for many different purposes and due to its medicinal properties, has been one of the products marketed by traders. The figure of the bee first appeared in drawings on rock with the history of humanity, then on statues, as a logo, on money or stamps, and also in movies. Beekeeping museums, which present the historical process of beekeeping, also reflect an important culture with their ancient hives, documents, beekeeping materials, and historical antiquities. The contribution of bees to the sustainability of natural life is very important and has a history of 100 million years. The importance of bees and their by-products is increasing day by day, and the demand for the beekeeping industry as alternative income determines the emergence of new products and activities. Based on its health properties, apitherapy is the basis of activities such as api-air and api-diet. In natural regions (i.e., mountainous areas, forests) where beekeeping is carried out, people’s tradition, food culture, and healthy lifestyle attract society’s attention. In this context, api-tourist activity appears as a new phenomenon. In this article, the existing literature was scanned to create a resource about these new fields triggered by the beekeeping sector.

Improving Well and Reservoir Management Practice Through New Flow Control Philosophy that Prolongs the Life of Production Wells Affected by Water Breakthrough in A Giant Carbonate Oil Field, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

X Field located in the United Arab Emirates has been developed since 1970's by waterflooding as secondary recovery strategy. As water front advances into oil bank, the well operation practice commonly adopted in many fields for oil wells cutting water has consisted in reducing choke aperture in an attempt to control the water cut trend. However, in wells producing moderate to high water cut, this practice has proven to generate excess water settling in the bottom of the wellbore leading to premature inactivation of the wells. The reservoir Z in the north of X Field, is a black oil block operated by peripheral and pattern waterflooding. The production wells have been operating by natural lifting since first oil and will continue in natural flow until the Artificial Lift projects are commissioned within a few years. Meanwhile, the field production plateau has been increased arising challenges of production sustainability due to higher risk of acceleration of water breakthrough and consequently higher number of wells becoming inactive earlier. This led to re-assess the Well and Reservoir management strategy to define improved practices oriented to maximize the natural life cycle of wet wells and ensure the compliance of the field production quota. As a result, a new well management approach was devised and adopted to identify and optimize at the earliest stage, wells potentially affected by water loading mismanage. Conceptually, this new practice consisted in comprehensively analyzing well operating conditions, which ultimately generated a flow operating window that improved the multiphase flow performance in wellbores, minimized water slippage avoiding it to settle down and its associated problems, whilst respecting the compliance of technical guidelines for optimum reservoir management. Based on observations and data gathered from portable testing jobs, saturation logs, PLT and production monitoring; a methodology referred in this work as Critical Flow Analysis, has been successfully implemented in several naturally flowing wells with water cuts ranging from 15 – 40 % in Reservoir Z in X Field, which resulted in prolonged natural life, extra oil recovered, and avoided the negative impact of inactive string count on the Field Management KPI. The Critical Flow analysis has been a comprehensive well management evaluation and operation philosophy in Reservoir Z which helped to manage more efficiently and in cost-saving fashion the performance of oil wells located in high risk areas, in addition to contribute with stablishing best practices for well and reservoir management that could be extended to analog fields in the area.

Local Knowledge, Community Experiences, Nature, Collaboration, and Resilience in Times of Pandemic, Uncertainty, and Climate Change in the Anthropocene Era

The pandemic afflicting the world is accompanied by a social, economic, political, cultural, and climatic multi-crisis. It is the crisis of the Anthropocene Era and modern paradigms. Modern society is in a complex situation. The responses to the multicrisis, including the pandemic, will probably come from the revalorization and resignification of experiences and socioecological knowledge of communities. Their historical experiences, currently fragmented by modernization processes, will be able to intercommunicate and, with resilient energy, open new possibilities for human and planetary life. It will be a great transformation, in which old and new models of development will be in tension. These tensions will also be expressed in the form of social and political radicalization and result in conflicts over natural resources, especially water, natural forests, ecosystems, and productive land. Human and planetary life is seriously threatened. Intellectual and scientific activity must connect with the ecological knowledge of local communities to defend human and natural life.

Pliny the Elder: Lessons from the Naturalist as an Early Neuroscientist

Pliny the Elder was a prolific Roman author, naturalist, and military leader. Yet, his impact on modern-day neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology has been little explored. Here, we aimed to trace the origins of our current understanding of the brain in ancient Rome through Pliny and his work, Natural History. As his magnum opus, this 37-book tome catalogs the facts and observations of natural life collected by Pliny, reflecting the knowledge of his time. Following the cephalocentric school of thought, Pliny places the brain as an agent for consciousness and details its diseases. Further, we explore Pliny’s methods, which allow him to build a thorough collection of clinical descriptions and remedies. This body of work serves as an important lesson for future neuroscientists on the power of observation, the role of the humanities, and the necessity of understanding the origin of modern scientific thinking.

How to present the analysis of qualitative data within interdisciplinary studies for readers in the life and natural sciences

Research that addresses complex challenges often requires contributions from the social, life and natural sciences. The disciplines that contribute subject response data, and more specifically qualitative analyses of subject response data, to interdisciplinary studies are characterised by low consensus with respect to methods they use a diversity of terms to describe those methods and they often work from assumptions that are foreign to readers in the natural and life sciences. The first contribution this paper makes is to demonstrate that the forms of reporting that may be adequate for communicating quantitative analysis do not provide teams that include members from natural, life and social sciences with useful accounts of qualitative analysis. Our second contribution is to discuss and model how to report four methods appropriate for qualitative contributions to interdisciplinary projects.