Books published by Mdpi AG

Concerns relating to energy supply and climate change have driven renewable energy targets around the world. Marine renewable energy could make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and mitigating the consequences of climate change, while providing a high-technology industry. The conversion of wave and tidal energy into electricity has many advantages. Individual tidal and wave energy devices have been installed and proven, with commercial arrays planned throughout the world. The wave and tidal energy industry has developed rapidly in the past few years; therefore, it seems timely to review current research and map future challenges. Methods to improve understanding of the resource and interactions (between energy extraction, the resource and the environment) are considered, such as resource characterisation (including electricity output), design considerations (e.g., extreme and fatigue loadings) and environmental impacts, at all timescales (ranging from turbulence to decadal) and all spatial scales (from device and array scales to shelf sea scales).

Today, there is a great deal of attention focused on sustainable growth worldwide. The increase in efficiency in the use of energy may even, in this historical moment, bring greater benefit than the use of renewable energies. Electricity appears to be the most sustainable of energies and the most promising hope for a planet capable of growing without compromising its own health and that of its inhabitants. Power electronics and electrical drives are the key technologies that will allow energy savings through the reduction of energy losses in many applications. This Special Issue has collected several scientific contributions related to energy efficiency in electrical equipment. Some articles are dedicated to the use and optimization of permanent magnet motors, which allow obtaining the highest level of efficiency. Most of the contributions describe the energy improvements that can be achieved with power electronics and the use of suitable control techniques. Last but not least, some articles describe interesting solutions for hybrid vehicles, which were created mainly to save energy in the smartest way possible.

Open data and policy implications coming from data-aware planning entail collection and pre- and postprocessing as operations of primary interest. Before these steps, making data available to people and their decision-makers is a crucial point. Referring to the relationship between data and energy, public administrations, governments, and research bodies are promoting the construction of reliable and robust datasets to pursue policies coherent with the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as to allow citizens to make informed choices. Energy engineers and planners must provide the simplest and most robust tools to collect, process, and analyze data in order to offer solid data-based evidence for future projections in building, district, and regional systems planning. This Special Issue aims at providing the state-of-the-art on open-energy data analytics; its availability in the different contexts, i.e., country peculiarities; and its availability at different scales, i.e., building, district, and regional for data-aware planning and policy-making. For all the aforementioned reasons, we encourage researchers to share their original works on the field of open data and energy analytics. Topics of primary interest include but are not limited to the following: 1.Open data and energy sustainability; 2.Open data science and energy planning; 3.Open science and open governance for sustainable development goals; 4.Key performance indicators of data-aware energy modelling, planning, and policy; 5.Energy, water, and sustainability database for building, district, and regional systems; 6.Best practices and case studies.

Many biodegradation pathways, both aerobic and anaerobic, have already been characterised, and the phylogenetic relationships among catabolic genes within them have been studied. However, new biodegradation activities and their coding genes are continuously being reported, including those involved in the catabolism of emerging contaminants and those generally regarded as non-biodegradable. Gene regulation is also an important issue for the efficient biodegradation of contaminants. Specific induction by the substrate and over-imposed global regulatory networks adjust the expression of the biodegradation genes to meet bacterial physiological needs. New biodegradation pathways can be assembled in a particular strain or in a bacterial consortium by recruiting biodegradation genes from different origins through horizontal gene transfer. The abundance and diversity of biodegradation genes, analysed by either genomic or metagenomic approaches, constitute valuable indicators of the biodegradation potential of a particular environmental niche. This knowledge paves the way to systems metabolic engineering approaches to valorise biowaste for the production of value-added products.

The new frontier of pharmaceutical sciences is gene therapy, which is the use of molecules able to interact directly with the expression of the genetic material of the patient as well as of the disease-causing guest (bacteria, virus, parasites, and tumor cells). Among the molecules of interest for gene therapy, a relevant role is played by small interfering RNA (siRNA) molecules able to interfere with the expression of genes of interest for some diseases. However, siRNA molecules, even if they are powerful as drugs, are difficult to deliver since they are sensitive to enzymes present in plasma and they are large and negatively charged, so are difficult to administer into the cell nuclei, since the cell walls are scarcely permeable to large molecules and are also negatively charged. Therefore, the focus of research on siRNA-based therapies is their delivery, which can be performed by chemical modification, association with aptamers or polycations, or embedding them into properly designed liposomes. This book is centered on the more recent development in siRNA delivery techniques toward the clinical applications of this potent class of drugs.

Grains are fundamental in the daily diet of many people worldwide. They are used for the production of popular foods, such as bread, bakery products, breakfast cereals, pasta, couscous, bulgur, snacks, etc. Botanically, they are the seeds of plants-mainly cereals, pseudocereals and legumes. They contribute macronutrients to the human diet, mainly carbohydrates, but also proteins and lipids, and micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals. They are also an important source of dietary fibre and bioactives, particularly wholegrains, which are important for the manufacture of high-value foods with enhanced health benefits. They can be used for the production of gluten-containing but also gluten-free products. A key objective of the food industry in producing grain-based foods is to manufacture safe, attractive products with enhanced nutritional value, to respond to consumer expectations. This book, Nutritional Value of Grain-Based Foods, contributes to existing knowledge on important ingredients such as fat substitutes and on the technological quality and nutritional role of grains and grain-based foods, such as bread, muffins and muesli bars, both gluten-containing and gluten-free.

Cake products with highly acceptable flavor and mouthfeel are not always successful in the marketplace. Sales of identical cake products sold in two different bakery shops often differ. Patrons'' choices of specific cake items differ depending on menu designs at restaurants. Such examples suggest that consumer behavior related to eating, preparing, or purchasing foods and beverages is typically complex, dynamic, and sensitive to environmental cues surrounding them. The nine original research articles and two systematic review articles addressed in this book provide recent informative and insightful findings on how sensory cues related to eating/drinking environmental contexts can serve as "sensory nudges" that induce healthy eating and drinking along with consumer satisfaction.

The dynamic development of global industry and growing demand for new material technologies generate constantly increasing problems regarding premature material degradation and the requirement to determine corrosion mechanisms and to develop new protection/evaluation approaches. Corrosion resistance depends on numerous determinants, such as material structure, chemistry, and complex environmental factors. It is highly challenging to obtain consensus between high corrosion resistance and an economic approach. On the other hand, inadequate levels of corrosion control create serious hazards to life and the environment. This Special Issue, "Recent Advances in Corrosion Science", brings together fourteen articles and one review, providing a snapshot of the recent activity and development in this field. The book contains studies related to the development of new corrosion-resistant alloys and the determination of microstructure-dependent properties; it also provides an insight into recent approaches towards anticorrosion technologies, such as corrosion inhibitors and composite and metal protective coatings.

Plasmonics and metamaterials are growing fields that consistently produce new technologies for controlling electromagnetic waves. Many important advances in both fundamental knowledge and practical applications have been achieved in conjunction with a wide range of materials, structures and wavelengths, from the ultraviolet to the microwave regions of the spectrum. In addition to this remarkable progress across many different fields, much of this research shares many of the same underlying principles, and therefore, significant synergy is expected. This Special Issue introduces the recent advances in plasmonics and metamaterials and discusses various applications, while addressing a wide range of topics, in order to explore the new horizons emerging for such research.