Böcker utgivna av Mdpi AG

This book provides a collection of research and review articles useful for researchers, engineers, students and industry experts in the bioenergy field. The practical and valuable information can be utilized for developing and implementing renewable energy projects, selecting different waste feedstocks, technologies, and products. A detailed insight into advanced technologies such as hydrothermal liquefaction, torrefaction, and supercritical CO2 extraction for making sustainable biofuels and chemicals is provided. A case study on food waste-to-energy valorization processes in Latin America provides experts'' insights to promote a circular economy.

This book is a collection of papers for the Special Issue "Quantitative Methods for Economics and Finance" of the journal Mathematics. This Special Issue reflects on the latest developments in different fields of economics and finance where mathematics plays a significant role. The book gathers 19 papers on topics such as volatility clusters and volatility dynamic, forecasting, stocks, indexes, cryptocurrencies and commodities, trade agreements, the relationship between volume and price, trading strategies, efficiency, regression, utility models, fraud prediction, or intertemporal choice.

Medical centers are widely recognized as vital components of the healthcare system. However, academic medical centers are differentiated from their community counterparts by their mission, which typically focuses on clinical care, education, and research. Nonetheless, community clinics/hospitals fill a critical need and play a complementary role serving as the primary sites for health care in most communities. Furthermore, it is now increasingly recognized that in addition to physicians, physician-scientists, and other healthcare-related professionals, basic research scientists also contribute significantly to the emerging inter- and cross-disciplinary, team-oriented culture of translational science. Therefore, approaches that combine the knowledge, skills, experience, expertise, and visions of clinicians in academic medical centers and their affiliated community centers and hospitals, together with basic research scientists, are critical in shaping the emerging culture of translational research so that patients from the urban as well as suburban settings can avail the benefits of the latest developments in science and medicine. ''Integrating Clinical and Translational Research Networks-Building Team Medicine'' is an embodiment of this ethos at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. It includes a series of papers authored by teams of leading clinicians, basic research scientists, and translational researchers. The authors discuss how engaging and collaborating with community-based practices, where the majority of older patients with cancer receive their care, can ensure that these patients receive the highest-quality, evidence-based care. Based on our collective experience at City of Hope, we would like to stress that the success of academic-community collaborative programs not only depends on the goodwill and vision of the participants but also on the medical administration, academic leadership, and policymakers who define the principles and rules by which cooperation within the health care industry occurs. We trust that our experience embodied in this singular compendium will serve as a ''Rosetta Stone'' for other institutions and practitioners.

The papers in this SI present valuable results in the topics of soils, sediments, and water contamination according to the consideration of ecological and health risk. They also point out open questions and possible avenues for future research. Biochar application can benefit both soil conservation and contamination, but further research should be conducted to investigate whether these positive effects can be extended to the field scale. Similar to biochar, scale-up design will be helpful for thin-layer capping in in situ sediments using mixed active amendments. Both physiochemical analysis and bioassays mutually supported the evaluation results of river water quality. However, we need better approaches and policies for management to prevent further contamination from the discharge of untreated industrial and domestic waste into this aquatic ecosystem. The use of microorganisms to eliminate antibiotics is a promising strategy, but future work should verify the biodegradation ability of antibiotic-degrading bacteria in wastewater treatment plants.

In this issue, psychometrics researchers were invited to make reanalyses or extensions of a previously published dataset from a recent paper by Myszkowski and Storme (2018). The dataset analyzed consisted of responses to a multiple-choice logical reasoning nonverbal test, comprising the last series of Raven''s (1941) Standard Progressive Matrices. Although the original paper already proposed several modeling strategies, this issue presents new or improved procedures to study the psychometrics properties of tests of this type.

The interaction of bacteria with biomaterials'' surfaces has critical clinical implications on the development and progression of biofilm-related diseases. In this book "Bacterial Interactions with Dental and Medical Materials", encouraging findings on tissue-contacting biomaterials to control biofilms, enhanced understanding of key mechanisms, and clinical perspectives are discussed toward improving healthcare.

This special issue provides a current snapshot of recent advances and ongoing challenges in the development of titanium alloys for biomedical implants and devices. Titanium offers significant advantages over other materials including higher strength and better biocompatibility. This issue highlights current trends and recent developments, including the uptake of additive manufacturing (3D printing), and approaches to improve processing and performance of titanium alloys for medical applications.

This Special Issue is dedicated to neuroendocrine neoplasms (NENs), a category of malignancy that demonstrates wide clinical heterogeneity, posing major challenges in diagnosis and management. There have been significant advances in the field of NEN genomics, pathology, imaging, and treatment over the past five years. NENs are examples of rare tumours (although their incidence and prevalence are increasing) where international collaborative efforts have allowed the generation of high-level evidence to guide optimal patient-centred care. This issue presents both reviews and original papers to provide comprehensive state-of-the-art understanding of this fascinating disease.

In January 2020, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), The Food Trust, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Healthy Eating Research (HER) met for a Healthy Retail Research Convention in Washington, D.C. Attendees included food industry representatives, researchers, and nonprofit organizations. The objective of the convention was to develop a national healthy retail research agenda by (1) determining the effectiveness of government policies, corporate practices, and in-store pilots in promoting healthy eating; (2) identifying gaps in the healthy food retail literature and generating questions for future research, with an intentional focus on reducing health disparities and improving equity; (3) highlighting best practices for partnering with retailers and food manufacturers on healthy retail research; (4) facilitating relationships between retailers and researchers to implement and evaluate retail interventions; and (5) identifying existing datasets, ongoing work, and new opportunities for retail-research partnerships.

This book presents recent research results related to various applications of computer vision methods in the widely understood contexts of automation and robotics. As the current progress of image analysis applications may be easily observed in various areas of everyday life, it becomes one of the most essential elements of development of Industry 4.0 solutions. Some of the examples, partially discussed in individual chapters, may be related to the visual navigation of mobile robots and drones, monitoring of industrial production lines, non-destructive evaluation and testing, monitoring of the IoT devices or the 3D printing process and the quality assessment of manufactured objects, video surveillance systems, and decision support in autonomous vehicles.

Nutritional epidemiology examines dietary or nutritional factors in relation to the occurrence of disease in various populations. It is a fact that substantial progress has been made in recent years in nutritional epidemiology. Compared to the practice during the 1990s, and with the improvements in data analytics, several new approaches are gaining ground. Results from a variety of large-scale studies in the field of nutrition epidemiology have substantially contributed toward the evidence used in guiding dietary recommendations for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, metabolic disorders, some types of cancer, and other morbidities. In this Special Issue, we would like to bring readers closer to the state-of-the-art in the field by gathering papers covering different aspects of nutrition epidemiology from population-based observational studies. Topics of the submitted articles may, but not necessarily, include eating habits of various populations, especially of those not well-studied, such as in Africa, Oceania, South Americas, immigrants, minorities, as well as a variety of associations between nutrients/foods/food patterns and chronic diseases, like cardiovascular, diabetes, obesity, cancer, etc., and gene-nutrient and epigenome-nutrient interactions related to human health at all ages.

The ability to exploit the potential of wild relatives carrying beneficial traits is a major goal in breeding programs. However, it relies on the possibility of the chromosomes from the crop and wild species in interspecific crosses to recognize, associate, and undergo crossover formation during meiosis, the cellular process responsible for producing gametes with half the genetic content of their parent cells. Unfortunately, in most cases, a barrier exists preventing successful hybridization between the wild and crop chromosomes. Understanding the mechanisms controlling chromosome associations during meiosis are of great interest in plant breeding and will allow chromosome manipulation to introduce genetic variability from related species into a crop. In addition to interspecific hybrids, other materials, such as natural and synthetic polyploids and introgression lines derived from allopolyploids, among others, are powerful tools in the framework of plant breeding. For example, an extra pair of alien chromosomes in the full genome complement of a crop species has been frequently used as a first step to access genetic variation from the secondary gene pool in breeding programs. In addition, such introgression lines are also pivotal in the study of interspecific genetic interactions, in the chromosomal location of genetic markers, and in the study of chromosome structure and behavior in somatic and meiotic cells. Contained in this Special Issue are accounts of original research, including new tools to identify chromosome introgressions and the development and characterization of introgression lines and interspecific hybrids carrying desirable agronomic traits for plant breeding purposes. Also included are reviews about the chromosome engineering of tropical cash crops and the effect of chromosome structure on chromosome associations and recombination during meiosis to allow chromosome manipulation in the framework of plant breeding.

This Special Issue is a collection of research articles focused on the production and role of nitric oxide in plants. Nitric oxide is a crucial molecule used in the orchestration of cellular events in animals and plants. With a mixture of primary research papers and review articles written by some of the top researchers in the field, this work encompasses many aspects of this important and growing area of biochemistry.