Books published by Mdpi AG

Five papers were selected for this Special Issue, with three relating to solar energy applications in houses, smart cities, and microgrids; one studying the relationship between the smart city model and the concept of energy sustainability; and one addressing the following two topics: the lack of effectiveness of detection algorithms based on the voltage/frequency displacement concept under voltage-controlled inverters and the applicability limits of others based on the impedance measurement (IM).

Two review papers, eight research articles, and one brief report were published in this Special Issue. They showed the rich resources that are present within the genomes of marine microorganisms and discussed the use of recently developed tools and technologies to exploit this genetic richness. Examples include the rational supply of precursors according to the relevant biosynthetic pathway and stress driven discovery together with the use of histone deacetylase inhibitors to facilitate the discovery of new bioactive molecules with potential biopharmaceutical applications. We believe that the content of this Special Issue reflects the current state-of-the-art research in this area and highlights the interesting strategies that are being employed to uncover increasing numbers of exciting novel compounds for drug discovery from marine genetic resources.

Cell-free synthetic biology is in the spotlight as a powerful and rapid approach to characterize and engineer natural biological systems. The open nature of cell-free platforms brings an unprecedented level of control and freedom for design compared to in vivo systems. This versatile engineering toolkit is used for debugging biological networks, constructing artificial cells, screening protein library, prototyping genetic circuits, developing new drugs, producing metabolites, and synthesizing complex proteins including therapeutic proteins, toxic proteins, and novel proteins containing non-standard (unnatural) amino acids. The book consists of a series of reviews, protocols, benchmarks, and research articles describing the current development and applications of cell-free synthetic biology in diverse areas.

This book brings together the latest research results of air quality assessment standards and sustainable development in developing countries. The content is full and the discussion is vivid. These articles are suitable for students and researchers at all levels seeking to understand the status of air pollution, governance standards, and governance effects in developing countries.

This book is a compilation of 10 recently published academic articles addressing sustainable residential landscape design and planning across geographies, scales, and perspectives: from American rain garden design to South Korean urban forestry; from Mexican community open space design to Australian neighborhood park planning; and from Chinese urban design to Bolivian land-use change. This volume brings together authors from a growing community of landscape sustainability scholars of landscape architecture and architecture; planning and construction; ecology and horticulture; agricultural and environmental sciences; and health, exercise, and nutrition. In summary, these papers address facets of a fundamental challenge for the 21st century: the design and planning of sustainable and resilient human settlements.

The use of renewable energy is an effective solution for the prevention of global warming. On the other hand, environmental plasmas are one of powerful means to solve global environmental problems on nitrogen oxides, (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), particulate matter (PM), volatile organic compounds (VOC), and carbon dioxides (CO2) in the atmosphere. By combining both technologies, we can develop an extremely effective environmental improvement technology. Based on this background, a Special Issue of the journal Energies on plasma processes for renewable energy technologies is planned. On the issue, we focus on environment plasma technologies that can effectively utilize renewable electric energy sources, such as photovoltaic power generation, biofuel power generation, wind turbine power generation, etc. However, any latest research results on plasma environmental improvement processes are welcome for submission. We are looking, among others, for papers on the following technical subjects in which either plasma can use renewable energy sources or can be used for renewable energy technologies: Plasma decomposition technology of harmful gases, such as the plasma denitrification method;Plasma removal technology of harmful particles, such as electrostatic precipitation;Plasma decomposition technology of harmful substances in liquid, such as gas–liquid interfacial plasma;Plasma-enhanced flow induction and heat transfer enhancement technologies, such as ionic wind device and plasma actuator;Plasma-enhanced combustion and fuel reforming;Other environment plasma technologies.

Pregnancy is a viewed as a window to future health. With the birth of the developmental origins of human adult disease hypothesis, research and clinical practice has turned its attention to the influence of maternal factors such as health and lifestyle surrounding pregnancy as a means to understand and prevent the inter-generational inheritance of chronic disease susceptibility. Outcomes during pregnancy have long-lasting impacts on both women on children. Moreover, nutrition early in life can influence growth and the establishment of lifelong eating habits and behaviors.This Special Issue on “Nutrition during Pregnancy and Lactation: Implications for Maternal and Infant Health” is intended to highlight new epidemiological, mechanistic and interventional studies that investigate maternal nutrition around the pregnancy period on maternal and infant outcomes. Submissions may include original research, narrative reviews, and systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

In the last few decades, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has distinguished itself as one of the most rapidly advancing spectroscopic techniques. Mainly known as an analytical tool useful for sample characterization and content quantification, NIR spectroscopy is essential in various other fields, e.g. NIR imaging techniques in biophotonics, medical applications or used for characterization of food products. Its contribution in basic science and physical chemistry should be noted as well, e.g. in exploration of the nature of molecular vibrations or intermolecular interactions. One of the current development trends involves the miniaturization and simplification of instrumentation, creating prospects for the spread of NIR spectrometers at a consumer level in the form of smartphone attachments—a breakthrough not yet accomplished by any other analytical technique. A growing diversity in the related methods and applications has led to a dispersion of these contributions among disparate scientific communities. The aim of this Special Issue was to bring together the communities that may perceive NIR spectroscopy from different perspectives. It resulted in 30 contributions presenting the latest advances in the methodologies essential in near-infrared spectroscopy in a variety of applications.

The evolution of knowledge management theory and the special emphasis on human and social capital sets new challenges for knowledge-driven and technology-enabled innovation. Emerging technologies including big data and analytics have significant implications for sustainability, policy making, and competitiveness. This edited volume promotes scientific research into the potential contributions knowledge management can make to the new era of innovation and social inclusive economic growth. We are grateful to all the contributors of this edition for their intellectual work. The organization of the relevant debate is aligned around three pillars: SECTION A. DATA, KNOWLEDGE, HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL FOR INNOVATIONWe elaborate on the new era of knowledge types and the emerging forms of social capital and their impact on technology-driven innovation. Topics include:Social NetworksSmart EducationSocial CapitalCorporate InnovationDisruptive InnovationKnowledge integrationEnhanced Decision-Making. SECTION B. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT & BIG DATA ENABLED INNOVATIONIn this section, knowledge management and big data applications and systems are presented. Selective topic include:Crowdsourcing AnalysisNatural Language ProcessingData GovernanceKnowledge ExtractionOntology Design Semantic ModelingSECTION C. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENTIn the section, the debate on the impact of knowledge management and big data research to sustainability is promoted with integrative discussion of complementary social and technological factors including:Big Social Networks on Sustainable Economic DevelopmentBusiness Intelligence

This book covers applied research on smart energy systems, smart grids, smart energy homes, smart energy products and services, and the advanced applications thereof, in the context of demand response and grid interactions. In particular, this book is focused on interdisciplinary research results that combine technical, social, environmental, and economic aspects of smart energy systems and smart energy products. Moreover, several chapters are based on the evaluation of real life cases, energy pilots, prototypes of smart energy products, and end user surveys and interviews. 

The present Special Issue of Symmetry is devoted to two important areas of global Riemannian geometry, namely submanifold theory and the geometry of Lie groups and homogeneous spaces. Submanifold theory originated from the classical geometry of curves and surfaces. Homogeneous spaces are manifolds that admit a transitive Lie group action, historically related to F. Klein's Erlangen Program and S. Lie's idea to use continuous symmetries in studying differential equations.In this Special Issue, we provide a collection of papers that not only reflect some of the latest advancements in both areas, but also highlight relations between them and the use of common techniques. Applications to other areas of mathematics are also considered.

Blindness and visual impairment impact significantly on an individual’s physical and mental well-being. Loss of vision is a global health problem, with approximately 250 million of the world’s population currently living with vision loss, of which 36 million are classified as blind. Visual impairment is more frequent in the elderly, with cataract and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) accounting for over 50% of cases globally. Oxidative stress has been strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of both conditions, and consequently the role of nutritional factors, in particular carotenoids and micronutrient antioxidants, have been investigated as possible preventative or therapeutic strategies.Dry eye syndrome (DES) is one of the most common ophthalmic conditions in the world. DES occurs where the eye does not produce enough tears and/or the tears evaporate too quicklyleading to discomfort and varying degrees of visual disturbance. There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential for oral or topical supplementation with essential fatty acids (EFAs), specifically omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, as an adjunct to conventional treatments for DES.The objective of this Special Issue on ‘Nutrition and Eye Health’ is to publish papers describing the role of nutrition in maintaining eye health and the use of nutritional interventions to prevent or treat ocular disease. A particular (but not exclusive) emphasis will be on papers (reviews and/or clinical or experimental studies) relating to cataract, AMD and DES.

The bioeconomy initially focused on resource substitution, including the production of biomass from various resources; its conversion, fractionation, and processing by means of biotechnology; and chemistry and process engineering towards the production and marketing of food, feed, fuel, and fibre. Nevertheless, although resource substitution is still considered important, the emphasis has been recently shifted to the biotechnological innovation perspective of the bioeconomy, in terms that ensure environmental sustainability.It is estimated that around one-third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted throughout the world, posing not only a sustainability problem related to food security but also a significant environmental problem. Food waste streams, mainly derived from fruits and vegetables, cereals, oilseeds, meat, dairy, and fish processing, have unavoidably attracted the interest of the scientific community as an abundant reservoir of complex carbohydrates, proteins, lipids, and functional compounds, which can be utilized as raw materials for added-value product formulations.This Special Issue focuses on innovative and emerging food and by-products processing methods for the sustainable transition to a bioeconomy era. Contributions addressing valorisation, the bioprocessing and biorefining of food industry-based streams, the isolation of high-added-value compounds, applications of resulting bio-based chemicals to food products, novel food formulations, economic policies for food waste management, and sustainability or technoeconomic analyses of the proposed processing methods are welcome in this Special Issue.

The results presented in this volume highlight some of the most recent advances in nanoscience and nanotechnology studies, from both the physical and chemical point of view, with an eye also to possible engineering applications.These studies demonstrate directly how effective, and at the same time stimulating is implementing the “cross-fertilization” procedure. Indeed, multidisciplinary research allows one to catch more easily the analogies inherent different areas of science, as well as to take advantage and optimize different methods and techniques, often borrowed from other research areas.In the present Special Issue, we included six published papers. The latter contributions, on the one hand, are developed at the theory level and, on the other hand, show experimental results on the realization and experimental characterization of nanostructured systems, suitable for yielding progress towards the realization of systems and devices, that can ultimately lead to industrial applications. The results show that recent scientific research advances in these areas may provide important steps in the direction of fostering innovation and technological development.

The combination of functional polymers with inorganic nanostructured compounds has become a major area of research and technological development owing to the remarkable properties and multifunctionalities deriving from their nano and hybrid structures. In this context, polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSSs) have increasing importance and a dominant position with respect to the reinforcement of polymeric materials. Although POSSs were first described in 1946 by Scott, these materials, however, have not immediately been successful if we consider that, starting from 1946 and up to 1995, we find in the literature 85 manuscripts regarding POSSs; which means that less than two papers per year were published over 50 years. Since 1995, we observe an exponential growth of scientific manuscripts concerning POSSs. It is changing from an annual average of 20 manuscripts for the period 1995–2000 to an annual average of about 400 manuscripts, with an increase of 2800%. The introduction of POSSs inorganic nanostructures into polymers gives rise to polymer nanostructured materials (PNMs) with interesting mechanical and physical properties, thus representing a radical alternative to the traditional filled polymers or polymer compositions.

Entropies and entropy-like quantities play an increasing role in modern non-linear data analysis. Fields that benefit from this application range from biosignal analysis to econophysics and engineering. This issue is a collection of papers touching on different aspects of entropy measures in data analysis, as well as theoretical and computational analyses.The relevant topics include the difficulty to achieve adequate application of entropy measures and the acceptable parameter choices for those entropy measures, entropy-based coupling, and similarity analysis, along with the utilization of entropy measures as features in automatic learning and classification. Various real data applications are given.

Christianity in China has a history dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), when Allopen—the first Nestorian missionary—arrived there in 635. In the late sixteenth century, Matteo Ricci together with other Jesuit missionaries commenced the Catholic missions to China. Protestant Christianity in China began with Robert Morrison, of London Missionary Society, who first set foot in Canton in 1807. Over the centuries, the Western missionaries and Chinese believers were engaged in the enterprise of the translation, publication, and distribution of a large corpus of Christian literature in Chinese. While the extensive distribution of Chinese publications facilitated the propagation of Christianity, the Christian messages have been subtly re-presented, re-appropriated, and transformed by these works of Chinese Christian literature. This Special Issue entitled “Christian Literature in Chinese Contexts” examines the multifarious dimensions of the production, translation, circulation, and reception of Christian literature (with “Christian” and “literature” in their broadest sense) against the cultural and sociopolitical contexts from the Tang period to modern China. The eight articles in this volume cover a variety of intriguing topics, including the literary/translation endeavors of Western missionaries in Chinese, the indigenous works of the Chinese Christians, the interaction between the Christian and Chinese literary traditions, Chinese reception of the Bible, and numerous other relevant concepts.

This book contains 37 papers by 73 renowned experts from 13 countries around the world, on following topics:neutrosophic set; neutrosophic rings; neutrosophic quadruple rings; idempotents; neutrosophic extended triplet group; hypergroup; semihypergroup; neutrosophic extended triplet group; neutrosophic extended triplet semihypergroup and hypergroup; neutrosophic offset; uninorm; neutrosophic offuninorm and offnorm; neutrosophic offconorm; implicator; prospector; n-person cooperative game; ordinary single-valued neutrosophic (co)topology; ordinary single-valued neutrosophic subspace; α-level; ordinary single-valued neutrosophic neighborhood system; ordinary single-valued neutrosophic base and subbase; fuzzy numbers; neutrosophic numbers; neutrosophic symmetric scenarios; performance indicators; financial assets; neutrosophic extended triplet group; neutrosophic quadruple numbers; refined neutrosophic numbers; refined neutrosophic quadruple numbers; multigranulation neutrosophic rough set; nondual; two universes; multiattribute group decision making; nonstandard analysis; extended nonstandard analysis; monad; binad; left monad closed to the right; right monad closed to the left; pierced binad; unpierced binad; nonstandard neutrosophic mobinad set; neutrosophic topology; nonstandard neutrosophic topology; visual tracking; neutrosophic weight; objectness; weighted multiple instance learning; neutrosophic triangular norms; residuated lattices; representable neutrosophic t-norms; De Morgan neutrosophic triples; neutrosophic residual implications; infinitely ∨-distributive; probabilistic neutrosophic hesitant fuzzy set; decision-making; Choquet integral; e-marketing; Internet of Things; neutrosophic set; multicriteria decision making techniques; uncertainty modeling; neutrosophic goal programming approach; shale gas water management system.

While international efforts in the development of short rotation woody crops (SRWCs) have historically focused on the production of biomass for bioenergy, biofuels, and bioproducts, research and deployment over the past decade has expanded to include broader objectives of achieving multiple ecosystem services. In particular, silvicultural prescriptions developed for SRWCs have been refined to include woody crop production systems for environmental benefits such as carbon sequestration, water quality and quantity, and soil health. In addition, current systems have been expanded beyond traditional fiber production to other environmental technologies that incorporate SRWCs as vital components for phytotechnologies, urban afforestation, ecological restoration, and mine reclamation. In this Special Issue of the journal Forests, we explore the broad range of current research dedicated to our topic: International Short Rotation Woody Crop Production Systems for Ecosystem Services and Phytotechnologies

The development of micro- and nanodevices for blood analysis is an interdisciplinary subject that demands the integration of several research fields, such as biotechnology, medicine, chemistry, informatics, optics, electronics, mechanics, and micro/nanotechnologies.Over the last few decades, there has been a notably fast development in the miniaturization of mechanical microdevices, later known as microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), which combine electrical and mechanical components at a microscale level. The integration of microflow and optical components in MEMS microdevices, as well as the development of micropumps and microvalves, have promoted the interest of several research fields dealing with fluid flow and transport phenomena happening in microscale devices. Microfluidic systems have many advantages over their macroscale counterparts, offering the ability to work with small sample volumes, providing good manipulation and control of samples, decreasing reaction times, and allowing parallel operations in one single step. As a consequence, microdevices offer great potential for the development of portable and point-of-care diagnostic devices, particularly for blood analysis. Moreover, the recent progress in nanotechnology has contributed to its increasing popularity, and has expanded the areas of application of microfluidic devices, including in the manipulation and analysis of flows on the scale of DNA, proteins, and nanoparticles (nanoflows).In this Special Issue, we invited contributions (original research papers, review articles, and brief communications) that focus on the latest advances and challenges in micro- and nanodevices for diagnostics and blood analysis, micro- and nanofluidics, technologies for flow visualization, MEMS, biochips, and lab-on-a-chip devices and their application to research and industry. We hope to provide an opportunity to the engineering and biomedical community to exchange knowledge and information and to bring together researchers who are interested in the general field of MEMS and micro/nanofluidics and, especially, in its applications to biomedical areas.