Editorial

The demand for advanced scientific methods and tools for environmental protection is increasing worldwide. Today, the issues of ecological safety and environmental quality have got acute in all countries all over the world. The cardinal question is: How to balance rapid technological development with vital needs of the environmental protection?

This basic question was one of the issues raised and actively discussed at the National Workshop on the Environment Quality organised by the Israel Ministries of the Environment and Immigrant Absorption in cooperation with the Israeli Forum of Immigrant Scientists, held in Jerusalem, Israel, on May 3, 2004. More than 50 scientists and engineers from different Israeli companies and universities, mostly new immigrants, presented their ideas, projects, and findings related to different aspects of the environmental policy, natural resources management, and ecology-aware technologies.

The present issue of the journal on the Environmental Studies has been initiated by this Jerusalem Workshop. It contains extended and enlarged versions of several selected talks from the workshop together with other related papers submitted to the HAIT Journal of Science and Engineering after the workshop. All the papers included in this volume have been thoroughly refereed and, when needed, revised by the authors.

The papers are organised in three sections. The first section is devoted to mathematical methods and models in environmental studies. It starts with the invited paper Environmental Quality and Satisficing Games by Charles Tapiero, one of the pioneers of ecological risk mathematics. The author overviews the concepts of environmental quality and strategic environmental risk, and then introduces the so-called environmental games which can be used for improving the process of investment in environmental technologies and environmental control. Another invited paper is that by Konstantin Atoev, a renowned specialist in mathematical ecology. Using non-standard catastrophe-theoretic techniques, he develops advanced mathematical models of metabolic and hormonal regulation in human organisms. The paper by Alexander Kaplunovsky Factor Analysis in Environmental Studies gives a wide picture of successful applications of statistical methods for analysis of various water, air, and terrestrial ecological systems.

The second section displays several physical methods and approaches to solving environmental problems. Boris Khesin, a pioneer of geophysical methods in ecology in the Former Soviet Union who now lives and works in Israel, suggests a wide and thoughtful program toward the use of geophysical methods for the solution of environmental problems in Israel. Arie Gilat and Alexander Vol elaborate a fundamental hypothesis stating that the primordial hydrogen-helium degassing is the major energy source for internal terrestrial processes. Leonid Dinevich, Boris Leskov, and Sofia Dinevich summarize the results of their many year's experimental studies on cloud modification aimed at rain enhancement. Extensive field experimental results obtained by the authors in Moldova and Ukraine can be of a wide interest to researchers and specialists in Israel and elsewhere in the world.

The third section is devoted to new ecology-aware technologies and materials. It contains the paper by Vasily Dimitrov on the design of low-speed scrubbing technology, the paper by Michael Levitsky, Semyon Levitsky and Jehuda Haddad on reducing emissions in internal combustion engine, and the paper by Semyon Levitsky, Leonid Grinis, Jehuda Haddad, and Michael Levitsky on water oxygenation in an experimental aerator. The paper by Arieh Shenkman, Naum Sonkin, and Vitaly Kamensky develops a method for active protection of people from electromagnetic fields of high-voltage power lines. The paper by Oleg Figovsky, Leonid Shapovalov, Valeria Karchevsky, and Michael Ioelovich on the design of environmentally friendly polymeric materials concludes the volume.

We thank all the participants and organisers of the Jerusalem Workshop as well as all the authors for spending their time and helping us to get a closer view at the contemporary picture of the state-of-the-art in Environmental Sciences and Engineering.

This volume could not have been possible without the help of many people. We would like to thank them all. In particular, we thank Prof. David Moalem Maron and Prof. Israel Vagner whose initiative and encouragement allowed us to launch this volume. We are grateful to Dr. Yuri Shtern, a member of Knesset, Dr. Eli Stern, Chief Scientist of the Ministry of the Environment, and Dr. Miriam Haran, Director-General of the Ministry of the Environment, whose support and inspiration stimulated the Jerusalem Workshop from the very beginning. Our special thanks to the Israel Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and personally to Omri Ingber for continual and effective support of repatriate scientists. Last but not least, we thank all referees for their altruistic, unpaid work which helped us to create this volume.

Eugene Levner and Leonid Dinevich