Böcker utgivna av Mdpi AG

There have been recent significant improvements in the short-term survival of solid organ transplantation patients due to advances in immunosuppression and transplant techniques. However, long-term graft survival has still lagged behind other outcomes and has now become one of the main problems in solid organ transplantation.For this Special Issue, we invited researchers and clinicians to submit studies on solid organ transplantation. These have provided us with additional knowledge and skills that will ultimately help us to improve outcomes after solid organ transplantation.

Unhealthy food intake and insufficient physical activities are related to obesity or lifestyle diseases, which can cause cardiovascular diseases, ultimately leading to death. However, many people are not aware of the importance of these factors, especially before cardiovascular development, although there are several good food habits that can be adopted. After the development of obesity or lifestyle diseases, nutrition and exercise control with appropriate medical therapies are required. Still, many patients do not recognize the importance of these habits. After cardiovascular disease development, nutrition and exercise with optimal medical and/or interventional therapies are required. However, some patients are not able to control their food intake and physical activities. At the advanced stage of heart failure, many things are restricted, including food intake and quality of life issues. At the end of life, nutritional care should be discussed. This book, Nutrition, Exercise, and End-of-Life Discussion in the Cardiovascular Field, addresses the importance of nutrition control before and after cardiovascular disease development, which consists of 14 peer-reviewed papers that cover the general population and patients with end-stage cardiovascular diseases.

The health benefits of food, plants, fruits, and seaweeds stem from the biological activities of their constituents-namely, secondary metabolites. The study of secondary metabolites and their potential to treat and/or prevent a number of diseases has become a research topic of growing interest for biologists, pharmacists, and chemists. Notably, in order to propose a compound as a potential new drug with pharmacological effects, the chemical structure of this compound and its biological activity against a given target must be well established.The Special Issue, "Isolation and Identification of Bioactive Secondary Metabolites", considers species beyond their nutritional value and identifies instances of wider and more efficient use, thereby contributing to a more sustainable management of natural resources.The fifteen articles published in this Special Issue reflect the latest research trends, and consider the isolation, identification, and assessment of the beneficial effects of secondary metabolites from both edible and inedible species. Thus, these contributions collectively demonstrate that these compounds, and their plants of origin, should be valued beyond their nutritional benefits.

The Special Issue (SI) discusses the topic of Disaster Risk Management and its cornerstones: vulnerability reduction and resilience building. The focus of the SI is the impact of risk information, communication and representation, risk knowledge as related to science and practice, risk perception and awareness, and risk culture on multi-faceted vulnerability and several aspects of resilience.

The present book recapitulates the articles published within the Special Issue "Cartilage Repair and Regeneration: Focus on Multi-Disciplinary Strategies", Applied Sciences, MDPI, dealing with the innovative multi-disciplinary therapeutic approaches for musculoskeletal diseases. In particular the published studies space from advanced 3D bioprinting technology to obtain a scaffold with different zonal cell densities, and biphasic scaffold (ChondroMimetic) construction, pass through the comparison of different techniques for cartilage regeneration such as of mosaicplasty and matrix-assisted autologous chondrocyte transplantation (MACT) and histopathological features of osteochondral units, and end with the considerations regarding development of bioreactors able to mimic the biomechanical load on chondrocytes in vitro, giving some interesting insights in this specific scientific field.

This SI presents the latest achievements, challenges and prospects for drives, actuators, sensors, controls and robot navigation with reverse validation and applications in the field of industrial automation and robotics.Automation, supported by robotics, can effectively speed up and improve production. The industrialization of complex mechatronic components, especially robots, requires a large number of special processes already in the pre-production stage provided by modelling and simulation. This area of research from the very beginning includes drives, process technology, actuators, sensors, control systems and all connections in mechatronic systems.Automation and robotics form broad-spectrum areas of research, which are tightly interconnected. To reduce costs in the pre-production stage and to reduce production preparation time, it is necessary to solve complex tasks in the form of simulation with the use of standard software products and new technologies that allow, for example, machine vision and other imaging tools to examine new physical contexts, dependencies and connections.

Information is key, which means that measurements are key. For this reason, this book provides unique insight into state-of-the-art research works regarding optical measurement systems. Optical systems are fast and precise, and the ongoing challenge is to enable optical principles for in-process measurements. Presented within this book is a selection of promising optical measurement approaches for real-world applications.

There is a worldwide growing interest toward the nutritional and antioxidant values of fruits and vegetables, especially because phytochemicals in natural products are perceived as necessary for a healthier diet due to their high antioxidant capacity. This book provides readers with novel insights into how quality, in terms of nutritional and antioxidant values, is influenced and/or controlled genetically, environmentally, and by different postharvest treatments.This book is a collection of important pieces of research covering different aspects related to the nutritional and antioxidant values of some horticultural species, including edible flowers, Italian green tea, and stinging nettle, along with potato and sweet potato.Today's food products are all the more appreciated for their content of phytonutriceuticals, and, therefore, horticulture has to turn to the supply of products with a variety of valuable metabolites and aromas. It is the task of researchers to study these compounds and enable the enhancement of horticultural products.

The world needs an accelerated energy transition to meet sustainable development goals. Energy planning has a critical role in providing the information that can guide decision-makers, and energy planning methods continue to evolve rapidly. This Special Issue provides new insights for long-term energy planning, drawing on the Clean Energy Ministerial Long Term Energy Planning Scenarios initiative and the IRENA LTES network.

This monograph concerns the mathematical aspects of software reliability and quality assurance and consists of 11 technical papers in this emerging area. Included are the latest research results related to formal methods and design, automatic software testing, software verification and validation, coalgebra theory, automata theory, hybrid system and software reliability modeling and assessment.

Currently, water and energy are among the world biggest challenges. All countries working on increasing industries and searching for progress need energy. Beside the limitation on the energy in the world, the aspect that has limited the use of energy is global warming. Fossil fuels are mostly used in the industries produce greenhouse gasses that cause trapping of the heat in the atmosphere and thus lead to temperatures rising and climate change. The importance of green energy is that it does not have the negative effect of fossil fuels and does not release carbon dioxide as the main greenhouse gas through combustion. This book contains some new studies about the production of renewable energies and applications of green technologies in various processes. The book is useful for researchers in the field of green technologies and also post-graduate students who are interested in expanding their knowledge of novel technologies and green fuels. It contains six chapters. In Chapter 1, a microbial fuel cell was studied and optimized. In Chapter 2, an autonomous model that can be used in cars and agriculture was reviewed. Chapter 3 studies the dehumidification capacity of water walls. Chapter 4 discusses the performance of conventional and unconventional single U-Tube pipe configurations. Chapter 5 studies the power generation table of 40 different locations in Oman. Finally, in Chapter 6 the role of renewable energy in south Asian countries is discussed.

Everybody has made use of grease in their daily lives. The word "grease" originates from the early Latin word "crassus," meaning fat. For our purposes, in this Special Issue, we will be focusing on lubricating grease, for publication in the eponymous journal Lubricants. According to ASTM, lubricating grease may be defined as "a solid-to-semi-fluid product of dispersed thickening agents in a liquid lubricant". Other functional ingredients, such anti-wear and extreme pressure additives, may be included, with the overall goal of inducing special properties/functionalities.Grease is a very complex lubricant. We have never had a Special Issue focusing on this key product, and lubricating greases are often underrepresented in the technical literature. In recent years, there has been significant progress in research on greases, ranging from the specific chemical formulation of greases for special applications to how grease interacts with various surfaces, tribological advances in grease properties, new techniques for grease property measurements, etc. Recently, greases have also been evolving, as they and play a key role in the lubrication of electric vehicles. We aim to select the top research avenues and papers worldwide related to lubricating greases to form this compilation. This Special Issue wishes to be the first of its kind, and we plan to make this an annual exercise, where our compendium aims to discuss the latest developments worldwide encompassing all areas related to greases.

Ornamental crops account for more than US $42 billion globally. With the exception of few floral species, limited genetic, genomic, and breeding information is publicly available, owing to the fact that the majority of breeding work is performed by the private sector. Public research programs are increasingly participating in ornamental cultivar development and genetic studies. With lower sequencing costs, genomic information of non-model species including ornamental crops is continuously becoming available. Ornamental breeding utilizes a wide array of breeding strategies ranging from traditional crossing and selection methods to the use of next-generation sequencing in genomics and transcriptomics for gene identification and trait development. A continuing search of new species for the ornamentals industry has resulted in the utilization of tools that increase diversity and in the development of alternative methods for obtaining new crops by achieving interspecific and intergeneric crosses. This Special Issue aimed to present papers on new breeding methods, novel cultivars and species entering the ornamental industry, the identification of genes conferring novel traits, technological developments in ornamentals research, and the use of next-generation sequencing to improve ornamental plants.

With current infrastructure, meeting the ever-growing demand for electrical energy across the globe is becoming increasingly difficult. The widespread adoption of both commercial and residential non-dispatchable renewable energy facilities, such as solar and wind, further taxes the stability of the electrical grid, often causing traditional fossil fuel power plants to operate at lower efficiency, and with increased carbon emissions. Hydropower, as a proven renewable energy technology, has a significant part to play in the future global electrical power market, especially as increasing demand for electric vehicles will further amplify the need for dispatchable energy sources during peak charging times. Even with more than a century of proven experience, significant opportunities still exist to expand the worldwide hydropower resources and more efficiently utilize existing hydropower installations. Given this context, this Special Issue of Energies intended to present recent developments and advancements in hydropower design and operation. This Special Issue includes five articles, authored by international research teams from Japan, Pakistan, Sweden, Norway, the United States, and China. The authors bring the collective expertise of government research laboratories, university professors, industry research engineers, computer scientists, and economists. The articles explore advancements in hydroturbine and pump-turbine design, power plant operation, auxiliary equipment design to mitigate environmental damage, and an exploration of community-owned small hydropower facilities.

The rapid aging of populations in developed countries since the 2000s has placed increasing attention on the issue of musculoskeletal disorders in elderly patients. Notably, spinal disorders not only restrict the social activities of elderly patients, but they also lead to economic loss for society. "Current Advances in Spinal Diseases of Elderly Patients" is a topical collection of articles about current perspectives on diagnosis and treatment of spinal disorders including current surgical strategies. This Special Issue covers a broad range of issues, ranging from managing refractory states such as severe osteoporosis, spinal deformity, ossification of the spinal ligaments, and multiple arthropathy to managing lifestyle-related spinal diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic in elderly populations. We hope that the readers of this Special Issue find the contents interesting.

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI's journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human-computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations.

The Mediterranean diet is a model of eating based on the traditional foods and drinks of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. The cultural and the nutritional aspects of the multisecular Mediterranean civilization include diet as a central element of health and wellbeing, including wine, if it is consumed in moderation. In recent decades, it has been promoted worldwide (UNESCO 2010) as one of the healthiest dietary patterns. The objective of this book is to bring the role of wine as part of the Mediterranean diet to light, especially through policy makers, the medical world, and vectors of images.

Mixed cropping, also known as inter-cropping or co-cultivation, is a plant production system that involves planting two or more species (or cultivars) in the same field in a variable order-row or rowless-simultaneously. Mixed cropping plays an important role in sustainable agriculture by adding value to crop rotations and agroecosystems. Scientific investigations on environmentally friendly mixed cropping should be supported by studies on the direct costs and long-term benefits that are the most relevant to farmers. Meeting the need to strengthen the scientific basis for mixed crops, the papers in this Special Issue enhance our understanding of the following:¿ The selection of species and cultivars for a mixed crop system as well as the choice of agricultural treatments that will secure a stable yield of mixtures;¿ Inter- and intra- species competition of plants in a canopy;¿ Ecological intensification approaches and opportunities for maximizing crop performance and yield in mixtures;¿ The effects of mixed crops on crop rotations;¿ The short- and long-term ecosystem benefits of mixtures;¿ The effects on pests and the biodiversity of agroecosystems provided by mixtures;¿ The economic aspects of adopting the mixtures in farms;¿ The nutritive value of mixtures for livestock;¿ Other topics related to the mixed cropping.