Heritage and Resilience: Issues and Opportunities for Reducing Disaster Risks

This paper examines the unique role of cultural heritage in disaster risk reduction. Itintroduces various approaches to protect heritage from irreplaceable loss and considers ways to draw upon heritage as an asset in building the resilience of communities and nations to disasters. The paper proposes ways forward and builds on the current momentum provided by the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters” (HFA) and the advancement of a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction (HFA2) and the post-2015 development agenda. Cultural heritage is often associated with grandiose monuments and iconic archaeological sites that can hold us in awe of their beauty, history and sheer scale. However, the understanding of cultural heritage has undergone a marked shift during the last few decades in terms of what it is, why it is important, why it is at risk and what can be done to protect it. Cultural heritage today encompasses a broader array of places such as historic cities, living cultural landscapes, gardens or sacred forests and mountains, technological or industrial achievements in the recent past and even sites associated with painful memories and war. Collections of movable and immoveable items within sites, museums, historic properties and archives have also increased significantly in scope, testifying not only to the lifestyles of royalty and the achievements of great artists, but also to the everyday lives of ordinary people. At the same time intangibles such as knowledge, beliefs and value systems are fundamental aspects of heritage that have a powerful influence on people’s daily choices and behaviors. Heritage is at risk due to disasters, conflict, climate change and a host of other factors.At the same time, cultural heritage is increasingly recognized as a driver of resilience that can support efforts to reduce disaster risks more broadly. Recent years have seen greater emphasis and commitment to protecting heritage and leveraging it for resilience;but initiatives, such as the few examples that are presented here, need to be encouraged and brought more fully into the mainstream of both disaster risk reduction and heritage management. These are issues that can be productively addressed in a post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction and, likewise, in the post-2015 development agenda

Composite fiber structures for catalysts and electrodes

We have recently envisioned a process wherein fibers of various metals in the 0.5 to 15 micron diameter range are slurried in concert with cellulose fibers and various other materials in the form of particulates and/or fibers. The resulting slurry is cast via a wet-lay process into a sheet and dried to produce a free-standing sheet of 'composite paper.' When the 'preform' sheet is sintered in hydrogen, the bulk of the cellulose is removed with the secondary fibers and/or particulates being entrapped by the sinter-locked network provided by the metal fibers. The resulting material is unique, in that it allows the intimate contacting and combination of heretofore mutually exclusive materials and properties. Moreover, due to the ease of paper manufacture and processing, the resulting materials are relatively inexpensive and can be fabricated into a wide range of three-dimensional structures. Also, because cellulose is both a binder and a pore-former, structures combining high levels of active surface area and high void volume (i.e., low pressure drop) can be prepared as freestanding flow through monoliths

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16:Ligand-gated ion channels

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16 provides concise overviews of the key properties of over 1750 human drug targets with their pharmacology, plus links to an open access knowledgebase of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. The full contents can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.13349/full. Ligand-gated ion channels are one of the eight major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: ligand-gated ion channels, voltage-gated ion channels, other ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The Concise Guide is published in landscape format in order to facilitate comparison of related targets. It is a condensed version of material contemporary to late 2015, which is presented in greater detail and constantly updated on the website www.guidetopharmacology.org, superseding data presented in the previous Guides to Receptors &amp; Channels and the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2013/14. It is produced in conjunction with NC-IUPHAR and provides the official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate. It consolidates information previously curated and displayed separately in IUPHAR-DB and GRAC and provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates.</p

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16:Voltage-gated ion channels

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16 provides concise overviews of the key properties of over 1750 human drug targets with their pharmacology, plus links to an open access knowledgebase of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. The full contents can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.13350/full. Voltage-gated ion channels are one of the eight major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, ligand-gated ion channels, other ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The Concise Guide is published in landscape format in order to facilitate comparison of related targets. It is a condensed version of material contemporary to late 2015, which is presented in greater detail and constantly updated on the website www.guidetopharmacology.org, superseding data presented in the previous Guides to Receptors &amp; Channels and the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2013/14. It is produced in conjunction with NC-IUPHAR and provides the official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate. It consolidates information previously curated and displayed separately in IUPHAR-DB and GRAC and provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16:Catalytic receptors

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2015/16 provides concise overviews of the key properties of over 1750 human drug targets with their pharmacology, plus links to an open access knowledgebase of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. The full contents can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.13353/full. G protein-coupled receptors are one of the eight major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, ligand-gated ion channels, voltage-gated ion channels, other ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, enzymes and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The Concise Guide is published in landscape format in order to facilitate comparison of related targets. It is a condensed version of material contemporary to late 2015, which is presented in greater detail and constantly updated on the website www.guidetopharmacology.org, superseding data presented in the previous Guides to Receptors &amp; Channels and the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2013/14. It is produced in conjunction with NC-IUPHAR and provides the official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate. It consolidates information previously curated and displayed separately in IUPHAR-DB and GRAC and provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates.</p

THE CONCISE GUIDE TO PHARMACOLOGY 2017/18:Enzymes

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2017/18 provides concise overviews of the key properties of nearly 1800 human drug targets with an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to an open access knowledgebase of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.org), which provides more detailed views of target and ligand properties. Although the Concise Guide represents approximately 400 pages, the material presented is substantially reduced compared to information and links presented on the website. It provides a permanent, citable, point-in-time record that will survive database updates. The full contents of this section can be found at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bph.13877/full. Enzymes are one of the eight major pharmacological targets into which the Guide is divided, with the others being: G protein-coupled receptors, ligand-gated ion channels, voltage-gated ion channels, other ion channels, nuclear hormone receptors, catalytic receptors and transporters. These are presented with nomenclature guidance and summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading. The landscape format of the Concise Guide is designed to facilitate comparison of related targets from material contemporary to mid-2017, and supersedes data presented in the 2015/16 and 2013/14 Concise Guides and previous Guides to Receptors and Channels. It is produced in close conjunction with the Nomenclature Committee of the Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (NC-IUPHAR), therefore, providing official IUPHAR classification and nomenclature for human drug targets, where appropriate