Elements of molecular neurobiology

This edition of the popular text incorporates recent advances in neurobiology enabled by modern molecular biology techniques. Understanding how the brain works from a molecular level allows research to better understand behaviours, cognition, and neuropathologies. Since the appearance six years ago of the second edition, much more has been learned about the molecular biology of development and its relations with early evolution. This "evodevo" (as it has come to be known) framework also has a great deal of bearing on our understanding of neuropathologies as dysfunction of early onset genes can cause neurodegeneration in later life. Advances in our understanding of the genomes and proteomes of a number of organisms also greatly influence our understanding of neurobiology. This book will be of particular interest to biomedical undergraduates undertaking a neuroscience unit, neuroscience postgraduates, physiologists, pharmacologists. It is also a useful basic reference for university libraries.

The future of the public library:reimagining the moral economy of the 'people's university'

New media technologies, the digitisation of information, learning archives and heritage resources are changing the nature of the public library and museums services across the globe, and, in so doing, changing the way present and future users of these services interact with these institutions in real and virtual spaces. New digital technologies are rewriting the nature of participation, learning and engagement with the public library, and fashioning a new paradigm where virtual and physical spaces and educative and temporal environments operate symbiotically. It is with such a creatively disruptive paradigm that the £193 million Library of Birmingham project in the United Kingdom is being developed. New and old media forms and platforms are helping to fashion new public places and spaces that reaffirm the importance of public libraries as conceived in the nineteenth century. As people’s universities, the public library service offers a web of connective learning opportunities and affordances. This article considers the importance of community libraries as sites of intercultural understanding and practical social democracy. Their significance is reaffirmed through the initial findings in the first of a series of community interventions forming part of a long-term project, ‘Connecting Spaces and Places’, funded by the Royal Society of Arts.