The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 615 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented, and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographic index. 211 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 145 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.
The humble soybean is the world’s most widely grown and most traded oilseed. And though found in everything from veggie burgers to cosmetics, breakfast cereals to plastics, soy is also a poorly understood crop often viewed in extreme terms—either as a superfood or a deadly poison. In this illuminating book, Christine M. Du Bois reveals soy’s hugely significant role in human history as she traces the story of soy from its domestication in ancient Asia to the promise and peril ascribed to it in the twenty-first century. Traveling across the globe and through millennia, The Story of Soy includes a cast of fascinating characters as vast as the soy fields themselves—entities who’ve applauded, experimented with, or despised soy. From Neolithic villagers to Buddhist missionaries, European colonialists, Japanese soldiers, and Nazi strategists; from George Washington Carver to Henry Ford, Monsanto, and Greenpeace; from landless peasants to petroleum refiners, Du Bois explores soy subjects as diverse as its impact on international conflicts, its role in large-scale meat production and disaster relief, its troubling ecological impacts, and the nutritional controversies swirling around soy today. She also describes its genetic modification, the scandals and pirates involved in the international trade in soybeans, and the potential of soy as an intriguing renewable fuel. Featuring compelling historical and contemporary photographs, The Story of Soy is a potent reminder never to underestimate the importance of even the most unprepossesing sprout.
At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America. The soybean’s journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In Asia, the soybean had been bred and cultivated into a nutritious staple food over the course of centuries. Its adoption by Americans was long in coming— the outcome of migration and innovation, changing tastes and habits, and the transformation of food, farming, breeding, marketing, and indeed the bean itself, during the twentieth century. All come in for scrutiny as Roth traces the ups and downs of the soybean’s journey. Along the way, he uncovers surprising developments, including a series of catastrophic explosions at soy-processing plants in the 1930s, the widespread production of tofu in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, the decades-long project to improve the blandness of soybean oil, the creation of new southern soybean varieties named after Confederate generals, the role of the San Francisco Bay Area counterculture in popularizing soy foods, and the discovery of soy phytoestrogens in the late 1980s. We also encounter fascinating figures in their own right, such as Yamei Kin, the Chinese American who promoted tofu during World War I, and African American chemist Percy Lavon Julian, who played a critical role in the story of synthetic human hormones derived from soy sterols. A thoroughly engaging work of narrative history, Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America is the first comprehensive account of the soybean in America over the entire course of the twentieth century.
Polyurethane nanocomposites present an attractive and sustainable way for designing smart materials that can be used in packaging, health and energy applications. Biobased Smart Polyurethane Nanocomposites brings together the most recent research in the field from the basic concepts through to their applications. Special emphasis is given to sustainable biodegradable polyurethane nanocomposites with hyperbranched architecture. The book introduces biobased polyurethanes and the nanomaterials that can be used as nanocomposites followed by the resulting polyurethane nanocomposites. The second part then explores important applications in paints and surface coatings, shape memory, self-healing, self-cleaning, biomaterials and packaging materials. Written by a leading expert on polyurethane nanocomposites, the book is a great introduction to this smart material and its applications.
Many modern surface coatings and adhesives are derived from fossil feedstocks. With fossil fuels becoming more polluting and expensive to extract as supplies dwindle, industry is turning increasingly to nature, mimicking natural solutions using renewable raw materials and employing new technologies. Highlighting sustainable technologies and applications of renewable raw materials within the framework of green and sustainable chemistry, circular economy and resource efficiency, this book provides a cradle-to-cradle perspective. From potential feedstocks to recycling/reuse opportunities and the de-manufacture of adhesives and solvents, green chemistry principles are applied to all aspects of surface coating, printing, adhesive and sealant manufacture. This book is ideal for students, researchers and industrialists working in green sustainable chemistry, industrial coatings, adhesives, inks and printing technologies.
The world's most comprehensive, well documented and well illustrated book on this subject. With extensive subject and geographical index. 66 photographs and illustrations - mostly color. Free of charge in digital PDF format on Google Books.
