With this valuable practical guide, three members of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have compiled and edited the definite handbook for the exciting new field of human embryonic stem cell research. The editors have gathered protocols from scientists with extensive reputation and expertise, describing and comparing currently used techniques for the culture of human stem cells and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.
Human Embryonic Stem Cells: The Practical Handbook contains the first centralised collection of methods used in human embryonic stem cell biology. The book covers the derivation of human stem cell lines, the obtaining of cells from human stem cell banks, the culturing and characterisation of the cells, and the differentiation of the cells in vitro and in vivo.

The book introduces students to the five core conceptual frameworks (or approaches) to psychology: biological, behaviourist, cognitive, psychodynamic and humanistic. The methods, theories and assumptions of each approach are explored so that the reader builds an understanding of psychology as it applies to human development, social and abnormal behaviour.

Dedicated to my friend Titita

What does it mean to be human? British writers in the Victorian period found a surprising answer to this question. What is human, they discovered, is nothing more or less than the human body itself. In literature of the period, as well as in scientific writing and journalism, the notion of an interior human essence came to be identified with the material existence of the body. The organs of sensory perception were understood as crucial routes of exchange between the interior and the external worlds.

In this highly original reanalysis of minimalist syntax, Thomas Stroik considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as his starting point Chomsky's minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, Stroik investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, he argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties.

What were the circumstances that led to the development of our cognitive abilities from a primitive hominid to an essentially modern human? The answer to this question is of profound importance to understanding our present nature. Since the steep path of our cognitive development is the attribute that most distinguishes humans from other mammals, this is also a quest to determine human origins. This collection of outstanding scientific problems and the revelation of the many ways they can be addressed indicates the scope of the field to be explored and reveals some avenues along which research is advancing.