Böcker utgivna av Mdpi AG

Geophysical, environmental, and urban fluid flows (i.e., flows developing in oceans, seas, estuaries, rivers, aquifers, reservoirs, etc.) exhibit a wide range of reactive and transport processes. Therefore, identifying key phenomena, understanding their relative importance, and establishing causal relationships between them is no trivial task. Analysis of primitive variables (e.g., velocity components, pressure, temperature, concentration) is not always conducive to the most fruitful interpretations. Examining auxiliary variables introduced for diagnostic purposes is an option worth considering. In this respect, tracer and timescale methods are proving to be very effective. Such methods can help address questions such as, "where does a fluid-born dissolved or particulate substance come from and where will it go?" or, "how fast are the transport and reaction phenomena controlling the appearance and disappearance such substances?" These issues have been dealt with since the 19th century, essentially by means of ad hoc approaches. However, over the past three decades, methods resting on solid theoretical foundations have been developed, which permit the evaluation of tracer concentrations and diagnostic timescales (age, residence/exposure time, etc.) across space and time and using numerical models and field data. This book comprises research and review articles, introducing state-of-the-art diagnostic theories and their applications to domains ranging from shallow human-made reservoirs to lakes, river networks, marine domains, and subsurface flows

Oceanic internal waves (IWs) at frequencies from local inertial (e.g., near-inertial internal waves) to buoyancy frequencies (nonlinear internal waves or internal solitary waves), sometimes including diurnal and semidiurnal tidal frequencies, play an important role in redistributing heat, momentum, materials, and energy via turbulent mixing. IWs are found ubiquitously in many seas, including East Asian marginal seas (Indonesian Seas, South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea, and East Sea or Japan Sea), significantly affecting underwater acoustics, coastal and offshore engineering, submarine navigation, biological productivity, and the local and global climate. Despite decades of study on the IWs in some regions, our understanding of the IWs in the East Asian marginal seas is still in a primitive state and the mechanisms underlying every stage (generation, propagation, evolution, and dissipation) of IWs are not always clear. This Special Issue includes papers related to all fields of both low- and high-frequency IW studies in the specified region, including remote sensing, in situ observations, theories, and numerical models.

Since the advent of the first drugs to treat herpesvirus infections, the antimicrobial community has been looking for better and more specific drugs and vaccines to both prevent and suppress these infections. The greatest active pharmaceutical ingredient that has been discovered since then is acyclovir and its derivatives, and the greatest vaccine successes against human herpesviruses have been against the varicella zoster virus. Antiherpetic drug and vaccine discovery continues to this day, an example of which being the recent clinical licensing of drugs such as letermovir and animamevir and vaccines such as Shingrix. This Special Issue takes a look at both the current antiherpetic interventions that are available today, such as the medications and vaccines that are used both prophylactically and therapeutically, and the direction that the field is headed toward in the near future. We also explore newer ideas for long-term suppression.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of nanostructures and methods used to design biosensors, as well as applications for these biosensor nanotechnologies in the biological, chemical, and environmental monitoring fields. Biological sensing has proven to be an essential tool for understanding living systems, but it also has practical applications in medicine, drug discovery, food safety, environmental monitoring, defense, personal security, etc. In healthcare, advancements in telecommunications, expert systems, and distributed diagnostics are challenging current delivery models, while robust industrial sensors enable new approaches to research and development.Experts from around the world have written five articles on topics including:Diagnosing and treating intraocular cancers such as retinoblastoma; Nanomedicine in cancer management; Engineered nanomaterials in osteosarcoma diagnosis and treatment; Practical design of nanoscale devices; Detect alkaline phosphatase quantitatively in clinical diagnosis; Progress in the area of non-enzymatic sensing of dual/multi biomolecules; Developments in non-enzymatic glucose and H2O2 (NEGH) sensing; Multi-functionalized nanocarrier therapies for targeting retinoblastoma; Galactose functionalized nanocarriers; Sensing performance, electro-catalytic mechanism, and morphology and design of electrode materials; Biosensors along with their applications and the benefits of machine learning; Innovative approaches to improve the NEGH sensitivity, selectivity, and stability in real-time applications; Challenges and solutions in the field of biosensors.

Dear colleagues,This Special Issue aims to publish new and innovative research that could demonstrate the therapeutic potential of natural health products, through relevant in vitro and/or in vivo biological activities, to prevent or alleviate degenerative diseases. The interaction of natural health products with human microbiota represents an essential aspect, because it could modulate the microbial pattern and alleviate more of a chronic disease's effects in the case of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular dysfunctions, neurodegenerative diseases, and inflammatory colon pathologies. Additionally, you are invited to send research based on the effect of different extracts or functional foods used in degenerative pathologies and interactions with human microbiota. We aim to identify new data on in vitro/in vivo research that could demonstrate the bioavailability of natural compounds and the relationship with antioxidant/antimicrobial capacity. Modulated microbiota aspects are expected to be published based on the interaction with natural compounds, natural sweeteners, or other molecules that influence the colon health status.

Concrete is one of the most widely used construction material in the word today. The research in concrete follows the environment impact, economy, population and advanced technology. This special issue presents the recent numerical study for research in concrete. The research topic includes the finite element analysis, digital concrete, reinforcement technique without rebars and 3D printing.

This collection of papers provides a comprehensive knowledge on several food systems, focusing on composition, new processing technologies, material structures, interactions, and functionality and digestion characteristics. This will be an excellent source of information for students, academics and industry researchers.

Educating Informal Educators'' draws on the range of expertise in Higher Education courses across the UK and seeks to emphasise the value of informal education and its values and practices, not only for students of education or informal education but also for society as a whole. This Special Issue seeks to capture the particular pedagogies of youth and community work courses that sustain distinctive informal education practice.

How can a city advance from social invention to social innovation, to attain sustainable urban development (SUD)? Many new ideas, initiatives, and showcases for social innovation have been introduced; however, project-based forms of experimentation are often just part of the ongoing urban politics (or governmentality), and consequently somewhat ephemeral, with traditional siloed city administrations remaining a central obstacle to SUD. Our Special Issue presents twelve papers that address the question of social innovation in sustainable urban development from very different angles. The contributions span issues concerning smart cities, innovation in the adaptive reuse of urban heritage, as well as policy options for regions in transition. In terms of social innovation for SUD purposes, the presented solutions range from transferable legal formalizations to the creation of urban ecosystems whose institutional structures ensure the inclusion of the civil society. Instead of a comprehensive, integrative SUD, robust sectoral solutions, or even phased solutions, are more likely to be sought.

Most real-world search and optimization problems naturally involve multiple criteria as objectives. Generally, symmetry, asymmetry, and anti-symmetry are basic characteristics of binary relationships used when modeling optimization problems. Moreover, the notion of symmetry has appeared in many articles about uncertainty theories that are employed in multi-criteria problems. Different solutions may produce trade-offs (conflicting scenarios) among different objectives. A better solution with respect to one objective may compromise other objectives. There are various factors that need to be considered to address the problems in multidisciplinary research, which is critical for the overall sustainability of human development and activity. In this regard, in recent decades, decision-making theory has been the subject of intense research activities due to its wide applications in different areas. The decision-making theory approach has become an important means to provide real-time solutions to uncertainty problems. Theories such as probability theory, fuzzy set theory, type-2 fuzzy set theory, rough set, and uncertainty theory, available in the existing literature, deal with such uncertainties. Nevertheless, the uncertain multi-criteria characteristics in such problems have not yet been explored in depth, and there is much left to be achieved in this direction. Hence, different mathematical models of real-life multi-criteria optimization problems can be developed in various uncertain frameworks with special emphasis on optimization problems.

The potential of cold plasma-based applications in sustainable agriculture is supported by numerous studies which have gathered experimental evidence that the plasma treatment of seeds, water or plants can be used to improve yields, increase the size and the robustness of plants and to reduce the need of antifungal agents, as well as other chemicals. However, the development of reliable and manageable agro-biotechnologies is ultimately based on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying such effects. Despite considerable efforts, such knowledge still remains elusive. Recent breakthroughs in this area are strongly linked to recent discoveries in plant physiology and biochemistry related to topics of plant plasticity, adaptability, stress response and communication. Short plasma treatments of plant materials can induce various changes in plant development and metabolism that persist for a long time. We are only just beginning to understand how to use very complex molecular mechanisms for the mobilisation of plant resources and for the improvement in agricultural plant performance. It is likely that investigations of plasma-induced changes in plant physiological and biochemical processes may reveal new facts of both fundamental and applied importance. This Special Issue of Plants aims to present the most recent findings on changes in plant signal transduction, metabolism, development and physiological processes induced by the exposure of seeds or plants to cold plasma or plasma-activated water, leading to increased plant productivity.

The world is changing rapidly in the age beyond Coronavirus. The current period of deprivation and anxiety, together with the coming global economic crisis, will usher in new consumer attitudes and behaviors that will change the nature of today's capitalism. There are signs today of a growing anti-consuming movement with five types of anti-consumerists: life simplifiers, degrowth activists, climate activists, food choosers, and conservation activists. Citizens will reexamine what they eat, how much they eat, and how all this is influenced by class issues and inequality. Consequently, the food supply chain network will have to change dramatically, adjusting to the new attitudes, perceptions and preferences of the consumers of a post-COVID-19 era. Innovation will play a vital role in modernizing the food supply chain to meet the new challenges of the upcoming global economy. The process "from farm to fork" as the holistic approach to the production and consumption of food will become a key factor for the sustainability and the progress of the food industry. This Special Issue is focused on 11 selected topics from different parts of the agrifood supply chain in view of the post-COVID-19 era expanding from innovative scientific insights and technological advances of natural resources, organic pollutants identification, new food product development, traceability, and packaging, chain management, to consumer's attitudes, and eating motivations, aiming to tackle the foreseen changes of global economy.

Being the largest animal protein producer, the poultry industry is in the focus of mixed-diet consumers (from a welfare point of view, as a medium of functional foods, environmental issues, the use of antibiotics, etc.), as well as the livestock industry in general. The poultry industry is also extremely quick to uptake new technologies (such as biotechnology, mechanization, robotics, and climate and nutrient control) in order to be economically efficient and sustainable. There is constant pressure from pathogens and new threats, such as avian flu, that requires new treatments and biosecurity measures. There are many novel approaches and answers to these challenges. In breeding, molecular genetic tools (genomic selection and genome editing) can be used to increase production efficiency and fitness, especially immunity traits, or to characterize local genetic pools. The One Health approach, which requires a holistic approach, where genetics, nutrition, health treatment, and management need to be considered together, has gained ground in the poultry industry. The gut microbiome seems to be a good indicator of the balanced health of an animal. Artificial intelligence, built into robotic supervision and handling, helps to increase animal comfort and save costs in the workforce. Organic farming takes a different approach and faces different challenges. What could the possible answers be? We are facing a new era in poultry science. The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight the importance of new findings.

At present, the manufacturing industry is focused on the production of lighter weight components with better mechanical properties and always fulfilling all the environmental requirements. These challenges have caused a need for developing manufacturing processes in general, including obviously those devoted in particular to the development of thin-walled metallic shapes, as is the case with tubular and sheet metal parts and devices. This Special Issue is thus devoted to research in the fields of sheet metal forming and tube forming, and their applications, including both experimental and numerical approaches and using a variety of scientific and technological tools, such as forming limit diagrams (FLDs), analysis on formability and failure, strain analysis based on circle grids or digital image correlation (DIC), and finite element analysis (FEA), among others. In this context, we are pleased to present this Special Issue dealing with recent studies in the field of tube and sheet metal forming processes and their main applications within different high-tech industries, such as the aerospace, automotive, or medical sectors, among others.

This work covers all aspects related to the obtainment, production, design, and processing of biopolymers obtained from natural resources. Moreover, it studies characteristics related to the improvement of their performance to increase their potential application at an industrial level, in line with the concept of a global circular economy. Thus, this work firstly classifies biopolymers obtained from natural resources (e.g., biobased building blocks and biopolymers extracted directly from plants and biomass), and then summarizes several cutting-edge research works focused on enhancing the performance of biopolymers from natural resources to extend their application in the industrial sector, and contribute to the transition to more sustainable plastics.

This book is a collation of articles published in the Special Issue CESE-2019: Applications of Membranes in the journal Sustainability. It contains a wide variety of topics such as the removal of trace organic contaminants using combined direct contact membrane distillation-UV photolysis; evaluating the feasibility of forward osmosis in diluting reverse osmosis concentrate; tailoring the effects of titanium dioxide (TiO2) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) in the separation and antifouling performance of thin-film composite polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) membrane; enhancing the antibacterial properties of PVDF membrane by surface modification using TiO2 and silver nanoparticles; and reviews on membrane fouling in membrane bioreactor (MBR) systems and recent advances in the prediction of fouling in MBRs. The book is suitable for postgraduate students and researchers working in the field of membrane applications for treating aqueous solutions.

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue "Rehabilitation and Robotics: Are They Working Well Together?" It reports contributes on the integration of robotics in the rehabilitation processes focused on the clinical experience and acceptance, the emerging risks, the ethics, and new researches in the field of the social robots.

This reprint is a reprint of the articles that appeared in Sensors' (MDPI) Special Issue on "Sensors and Systems for Indoor Positioning". The published original contributions focused on systems and technologies to enable indoor applications.

Biomass has received significant attention as a sustainable feedstock that can replace diminishing fossil fuels in the production of value-added chemicals and energy. Many new catalytic technologies have been developed for the conversion of biomass feedstocks into valuable biofuels and bioproducts. However, many of these still suffer from several disadvantages, such as weak catalytic performance, harsh reaction conditions, a high processing cost, and questionable sustainability, which limit their further applicability/development in the immediate future. In this context, the esterification of carboxylic acids represents a very valuable solution to these problems, requiring mild reaction conditions and being advantageously integrable with many existing processes of biomass conversion. An emblematic example is the acid-catalyzed hydrothermal route for levulinic acid production, already upgraded to that of higher value alkyl levulinates, obtained by esterification or directly by biomass alcoholysis. Many other chemical processes benefit from esterification, such as the synthesis of biodiesel, which includes monoalkyl esters of long-chain fatty acids prepared from renewable vegetable oils and animal fats, or that of cellulose esters, mainly acetates, for textile uses. Even pyrolysis bio-oil should be stabilized by esterification to neutralize the acidity of carboxylic acids and moderate the reactivity of other typical biomass-derived compounds, such as sugars, furans, aldehydes, and phenolics. This Special Issue reports on the recent main advances in the homogeneous/heterogeneous catalytic conversion of model/real biomass components into ester derivatives that are extremely attractive for both the academic and industrial fields.

This Special Issue was intended as a forum to advance research and apply machine-learning and data-mining methods to facilitate the development of modern electric power systems, grids and devices, and smart grids and protection devices, as well as to develop tools for more accurate and efficient power system analysis. Conventional signal processing is no longer adequate to extract all the relevant information from distorted signals through filtering, estimation, and detection to facilitate decision-making and control actions. Machine learning algorithms, optimization techniques and efficient numerical algorithms, distributed signal processing, machine learning, data-mining statistical signal detection, and estimation may help to solve contemporary challenges in modern power systems. The increased use of digital information and control technology can improve the grid's reliability, security, and efficiency; the dynamic optimization of grid operations; demand response; the incorporation of demand-side resources and integration of energy-efficient resources; distribution automation; and the integration of smart appliances and consumer devices. Signal processing offers the tools needed to convert measurement data to information, and to transform information into actionable intelligence. This Special Issue includes fifteen articles, authored by international research teams from several countries.

The recent revolution in deep learning has enabled considerable development in the fields of object and activity detection. Visual object detection tries to find objects of target classes with precise localisation in an image and assign each object instance a corresponding class label. At the same time, activity recognition aims to determine the actions or activities of an agent or group of agents based on sensor or video observation data. It is a very important and challenging problem to detect, identify, track, and understand the behaviour of objects through images and videos taken by various cameras. Together, objects and their activity recognition in imaging data captured by remote sensing platforms is a highly dynamic and challenging research topic. During the last decade, there has been significant growth in the number of publications in the field of object and activity recognition. In particular, many researchers have proposed application domains to identify objects and their specific behaviours from air and spaceborne imagery.This Special Issue includes papers that explore novel and challenging topics for object and activity detection in remote sensing images and videos acquired by diverse platforms.

The Special Issue "Anticancer Drugs 2021" of Pharmaceuticals is focused on recent significant advances in the design, synthesis, molecular mechanism of action and therapeutic applications of anticancer drugs. This collection of preclinical research papers and reviews includes designed chemotherapeutic agents, targeted therapies and biological agents. The rationalization for the biological activity of these drugs is presented, which helps to guide the design of more effective agents. Structure-activity relationships, together with the biological context in which targets are selected for oncology drug development, are also considered.

Catalysts are widely used in a great variety of technologies, providing remarkable efficiency in order to address sustainable energy production, climate change challenges, and to reduce industrial emissions. In the framework of the Environmental Catalysis section promoted by the Catalysts Editorial Office, this Special Issue, entitled "Environmental Friendly Catalysts for Energy and Pollution Control Applications", comprises novel studies representing the state-of-the-art research for efficient energy generation and industrial emission control based on new environmentally friendly catalyst materials (EFCs). In particular, in this Special Issue (SI), different kinds of catalysts are presented for catalytic solutions, including the reduction of NOx emissions (new zeolite catalyst modified with Pt), the elimination of volatile organic compounds (Co3O4@SiO2 and acidic surface transformed natural zeolite) and the removal of SO2 emissions (through adsorption processes with sodium citrate). Moreover, novel biocatalysts for bioanodes and new functional nanostructured catalysts based on metal-organic framework (MOFs) for different applications are also included. Additionally, articles compiled in this SI are also focused on the improvement of catalytic processes. Thus, selected processes based on activated carbons (modified with titanium dioxide) and optimized Fenton processes for the removal of aqueous organic pollutants or for the inactivation of bacteria are also presented.

The chapter 'Water Engineering in Ancient Societies' involves the use of modern hydraulic engineering principles to describe the design, construction and use of ancient World Heritage water-system structures in South America and the Middle East.

Pesticides are used worldwide, and despite the fact that organic farming is increasing, they are still widely applied in different countries with pesticide regulations and monitoring programs. This Special Issue will cover the topic of the presence of pesticide residues in food, paying special attention to the use of modern analytical techniques based on chromatographic techniques coupled to mass spectrometry. Generic extraction methods are needed to allow the detection of pesticides with different physic-chemical properties, as well as different families of contaminants can be extracted simultaneously. Nevertheless, pluriresidue methods are still necessary for "orphan" compounds that cannot be included in multiresidue methods. Thus, in addition to targeted pesticides, the scope of this analysis can be increased and nowadays, metabolites are also detected, evaluating the degradation of pesticide residues in different food matrices.

People who have chronic diseases spend a significant amount of time in self-management in out-of-hospital environments, in their homes and in their community settings. These patients have different disease statuses and management requirements, so providing personalized care is key.Personalized care is a collaborative process that should be used in chronic condition management in which patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers identify and discuss problems caused by or related to the patient's condition and then develop plans and goals to empower patients.Personalized care can improve aspects of physical health, mental health, and the ability to self-manage conditions. Thus, a personalized care approach could greatly benefit patients with chronic conditions.In this book, we have included 20 articles that expand the current knowledge on the personalized care approach to diagnosing and treating chronically ill patients.

This book focuses on systematics, biogeography, and evolution of arachnids, a group of ancient chelicerate lineages that have taken on terrestrial lifestyles. The book opens with the questions of what arachnology represents, and where the field should go in the future. Twelve original contributions then dissect the current state-of-the-art in arachnological research. These papers provide innovative phylogenomic, evolutionary and biogeographic analyses and interpretations of new data and/or synthesize our knowledge to offer new directions for the future of arachnology.

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue "Intelligent Autonomous Decision-Making and Cooperative Control Technology of High-Speed Vehicle Swarms",which was published in Applied Sciences.

Sight is the dominant sense of mankind to apprehend the world at the earth scale and beyond the frontiers of the infinite, from the nanometer to the incommensurable. Primarily based on sunlight and natural and artificial light sources, optics has been the major companion of spectroscopy since scientific observation began. The invention of the laser in the early sixties has boosted optical spectroscopy through the intrinsic or specific symmetry electronic properties of materials at the multiscale (birefringence, nonlinear and photonic crystals), revealed by the ability to monitor light polarization inside or on the surface of designed objects. This Special Issue of Symmetry features articles and reviews that are of tremendous interest to scientists who study linear and nonlinear optics, all oriented around the common axis of symmetry. Contributions transverse the entire breadth of this field, including those concerning polarization and anisotropy within colloids of chromophores and metal/semiconducting nanoparticles probed by UV-visible and fluorescence spectroscopies; microscopic structures of liquid-liquid, liquid-gas, and liquid-solid interfaces; surface- and symmetry-specific optical techniques and simulations, including second-harmonic and sum-frequency generations, and surface-enhanced and coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopies; orientation and chirality of bio-molecular interfaces; symmetry breaking in photochemistry; symmetric multipolar molecules; reversible electronic energy transfer within supramolecular systems; plasmonics; and light polarization effects in materials.

The book gives an overview on the progress that has been made in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), of acute and chronic myeloid leukemia (AML, CML) and of juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML). Leukemia is the most common malignant disease in children, and 80% of patients are diagnosed with ALL and 15-20% with AML, whereas CML and JMML are rather rare. Although ALL was considered an incurable disease until the early 1960s, with the availability of cytotoxic drugs and the start of clinical multicenter studies, ALL has become an almost curable disease with a survival rate exceeding 90 % in high-income countries. These impressive results have mainly been achieved by a deeper understanding of the genomic landscape of the disease and the introduction of risk stratifications based on genetic features and response to chemotherapy as determined by the presence or absence of minimal residual disease (MRD). Immunotherapies including bispecific T-cell Engagers (BiTEs), Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells, monoclonal antibodies and improvements in the outcome of allogeneic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) have shown impressive results in chemorefractory or relapsed patients, and it is anticipated that the cure rate can be further increased. For countries with less resources, therapies have to be adapted to increase survival as well. This book also updates on the progress made in the treatment of AML. As in ALL, risk classification based on genetic factors and response to chemotherapy is most important for therapy guidance. The book also provides updates and guidance for the treatment of CML and JMML.