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Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique that can be used for the structural characterization and quantification of a wide range of molecules. The technique is extensively used by chemists for the analysis of small and volatile organic compounds. Mass spectrometry has long been an important technique for the identification of materials ranging from pure compounds to complex mixtures. Mass spectrometry can be used to determine molecular weight of compounds or using different ionization conditions, can provide more structural details through the analysis of fragmentation patterns. This level of detail can be attained for pure compounds and some mixtures. Mass spectrometry can also be combined with separation techniques such as gas chromatography or liquid chromatography to allow more complex mixtures to be examined. These hyphenated techniques provide a range of options for the characterization of complex materials.

Carotenoids are one of the most widespread pigment groups distributed in nature; more than 700 natural carotenoids have been described so far. These pigments are known for versatile roles they play in living organisms; however, their most pivotal function is involvement in scavenging of reactive oxygen species and photoprotection. In the same time, carotenoids as natural pigments with important biological activities, such as antioxidant and provitamin A activity, have a great potential in the food, feed and pharmaceutical industries. They can be either extracted from plants and algae or synthesized by various microorganisms, including bacteria, yeasts, filamentous fungi and microalgae.

This edited volume "Field-Programmable Gate Array" is a collection of reviewed and relevant research chapters, offering a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the field of semiconductors. The book comprises single chapters authored by various researchers and edited by an expert active in the aerospace engineering systems research area. All chapters are complete within themselves but united under a common research study topic. This publication aims at providing a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors and open new possible research paths for further novel developments.

The purpose of this book is to offer innovative applications of the distillation process. The book is divided in two main sections, one containing chapters that deal with process design and calculations, and the other, chapters that discuss distillation applications. Moreover, the chapters involve wide applications as in fruit spirits production, in organic liquid compounds produced by oil and fats cracking, energy evaluation in distillation processes, and applicability of solar membrane distillation. I believe that this book will provide new ideas and possibilities of the development of innovative research lines for the readers.

In the present volume, we collected state-of-the-art chapters on diagnosis, treatment, and social implications. The first section describes diagnostic processes. It describes a reevaluation of projective techniques, a new clinical tool in psychotraumatology, the foundations of the framing technique, and an overview on integrative approaches. The second section focuses on new developments in the field with special emphasis on culture-specific contexts. From parenting of adolescents in India to the influence of poverty on mental health issues in Mexico, as well as the use of marijuana and Internet addiction, some of the most important fields are highlighted. The third section concentrates on therapy. It shows how to react to bullying and reviews the use of antidepressants in children and adolescents.

This book contains recent advances about CD and NCGS written in eight chapters and is divided in three sections. In the first section, the main hallmarks of both diseases are described, together with the current diagnostic criteria of CD and its influence on the response to the vaccination against hepatitis B virus infection. The second section is dedicated to the description of several techniques for gluten determination in foods and if its consumption is good for nonceliac people. Finally, the third section contains complementary information related to the description and application of novel endoscopic techniques for confirming the diagnosis of CD. Another topic describes the growing consumption of gluten-free products and the adherence to this type of diet.

Evapotranspiration is the largest outgoing water flux from the Earth's surface; its accurate quantification is critical for the crop development in conditions of the climate changes from recent decades, and it can contribute to a greater understanding of a range of agricultural ecosystem processes. To evaluate the hydric requirements of the crops, it was agreed that they should be reported to a maximum global evapotranspiration called potential evapotranspiration. To estimate this variable, a variety of methods were developed, each with its benefits as well as trade-offs. Their use, however, is laborious due to their complexity and of the large number of parameters required. In this book, specialists' concerns worldwide to develop simple but reliable methodologies - with less data requirement - which will give accurate and appropriate results - are presented. In addition, a study of the physics of the moisture evaporation process from porous media to elucidate what are the mechanisms of moisture migration from granular biopesticides is presented in the last chapter.

In 1959, Atalla and Kahng at Bell Labs produced the first successful field-effect transistor (FET), which had been long anticipated by other researchers by overcoming the "surface states" that blocked electric fields from penetrating into the semiconductor material. Very quickly, they became the fundamental basis of digital electronic circuits. Up to this point, there are more than 20 different types of field-effect transistors that are incorporated in various applications found in everyday's life. Based on this fact, this book was designed to overview some of the concepts regarding FETs that are currently used as well as some concepts that are still being developed.

Properties and Uses of Microemulsions is intended to provide the reader with some important applications and features of these systems. The intricate composition of microemulsions has made them applicable in many areas such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, food, agriculture, oil recovery, chemical synthesis of nanoparticles, and catalysts. An introductory chapter starts off with the description of these applications followed by methods of characterization. Thereafter, a few practical applications of microemulsions focusing on drug delivery, oil recovery, and formation of nanocatalysts are described followed by the third section discussing the theoretical and physical parameters predicting microemulsion properties. The use of spin-polarized paramagnetic probes, bending energetics, and study of self-propelled motion are some of the physical parameters employed to characterize the microemulsions.

Peripheral nerve injuries are a high-incidence clinical problem that greatly affects patients' quality of life. Despite continuous refinement of microsurgery techniques, peripheral nerve repair still stands as one of the most challenging tasks in neurosurgery, as functional neuromuscular recovery is rarely satisfactory in these patients. Therefore, the improvement of surgical techniques and the clinical application of innovative therapies have been intensively studied worldwide. Direct nerve repair with epineural end-to-end sutures is still the gold standard treatment for severe neurotmesis injuries but only in cases where well-vascularized tension-free coaptation can be achieved. When peripheral nerve injury originates a significant gap between the nerve stumps, nerve grafts are required, with several associated disadvantages. Therefore, the development of scaffolds by tissue engineering can provide efficient treatment alternatives to stimulate optimum clinical outcome. Nerve conduit tailoring involves reaching ideal wall pores, using electrospinning techniques in their fabrication, surface coating with extracellular matrix materials, and adding of growth factors or cell-based therapies, among other possibilities. Also, intraluminal cues are employed such as the filling with hydrogels, inner surface modification, topographical design, and the introduction of neurotrophic factors, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and other pharmacological agents. A comprehensive state of the art of surgical techniques, tissue-engineered nerve graft scaffolds, and their application in nerve regeneration, the advances in peripheral nerve repair and future perspectives will be discussed, including surgeons' and researchers' own large experience in this field of knowledge.

The cytoskeleton is a highly dynamic intracellular platform constituted by a three-dimensional network of proteins responsible for key cellular roles as structure and shape, cell growth and development, and offering to the cell with "motility" that being the ability of the entire cell to move and for material to be moved within the cell in a regulated fashion (vesicle trafficking). The present edition of Cytoskeleton provides new insights into the structure-functional features, dynamics, and cytoskeleton's relationship to diseases. The authors' contribution in this book will be of substantial importance to a wide audience such as clinicians, researches, educators, and students interested in getting updated knowledge about molecular basis of cytoskeleton, such as regulation of cell vital processes by actin-binding proteins as cell morphogenesis, motility, their implications in cell signaling, as well as strategies for clinical trial and alternative therapies based in multitargeting molecules to tackle diseases, that is, cancer.

A significant body of knowledge is the basis for a holistic, caring and scientific evidence-based nursing education in practice for professional development. Quality teaching leads to good learning and both aspects are two of the main issues of quality assurance in nursing education today. To begin with, not all nursing students have the same levels of motivation or learning abilities. It is with cognisance of providing quality care for patients that the role of the nurse educator has to be to enhance nursing students' learning using scientific evidence based teaching. Research around teaching and learning processes is an important part of the delivery of quality education, which in turn impacts on students' learning results and experiences, thereby, ensuring holistic biopsychosocial care to patients. The main aim of teaching and learning in nursing, at all levels, is to enhance the nurses' contribution to assist the individuals, families and communities in promoting and preserving health, well-being and to efficiently respond to illnesses. We hope that this book can be used as a resource to increase the body of knowledge in teaching and learning in nursing, thereby enhancing the role and contribution of health care professionals to clinical practice.

The book gives the reader an overview on electrical properties and applications such as converter transformer, transistor, and energy storage. Besides, this book also presents some recent researches on typical polymer material such as silicon rubber and LDPE, which may provide some clues of advanced polymer properties for both engineers and researches.The author has been a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University, China, since 2002. He has been active in polymer insulation research since the 1990s. He is a member of IEEJ, senior member of CSEE, member at several WG in CIGRE, and associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation.

The book on Physico-Chemical Treatment of Wastewater and Resource Recovery provides an efficient and low-cost solution for remediation of wastewater. This book focuses on physico-chemical treatment via advanced oxidation process, adsorption, its management and recovery of valuable chemicals. It discusses treatment and recovery process for the range of pollutants including BTX, PCB, PCDDs, proteins, phenols, antibiotics, complex organic compounds and metals. The occurrence of persistent pollutants poses deleterious effects on human and environmental health. Simple solutions for recovery of valuable chemicals and water during physico-chemical treatment of wastewater are discussed extensively. This book provides necessary knowledge and experimental studies on emerging physico-chemical processes for reducing water pollution and resource recovery.

Spatial processing and smart antenna beam formation are considered as completely essential approaches to be employed for forthcoming progress in the standards and implementation of the wireless communication systems. The book aims, besides introducing up-to-date contributions that are not readily available in the related literature, to present and demonstrate the recent research ideas in the field of antenna array design and beam-forming algorithms in a synthetic, coherent, and unified manner for the interested researchers. The presented topics range from relatively straightforward mathematical analysis and derivations to simulation and empirical results. The book is designed to serve as an informative reference for the researcher involved in the analysis of the spatial signal processing techniques for smart antenna systems. The book will help the readers, in particular wireless communication researchers, to have wider futuristic and innovative visions for the advances in the field.

Soybean is one of the organisms largely contributing to our life. Therefore, it is important to know soybean from various aspects. The knowledge and soybean itself will be greatly useful, if they are soundly used. The chapters constituting this book present reviews and researches especially concerning the basis of yield, biomass, and productivity in soybean. Yield, biomass, and productivity in plants are some of the bases for maintaining or improving our ecosystem which includes our life and surrounding environments. Therefore, this book is expected to be useful for many people. Of course, more researches and investigations are important to further gain the knowledge concerning the basis of yield, biomass, and productivity and make them useful for our ecosystem.

Wave Propagation Concepts for Near-Future Telecommunication Systems is an edited book discussing recent researches for the development of innovative telecommunication systems, with particular focus on the propagation aspects and radiating systems design. It is divided into two sections: Section 1, devoted to the illustration of advanced results in terms of microwave propagation at high operating frequencies, and Section 2, illustrating new electromagnetic concepts and applications.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of two or more wireless devices with the capability to communicate with each other without the aid of any centralized administrator. Ad hoc networks have no fixed routers, these nodes can be connected dynamically in an arbitrary manner. MANETs, due to their operational characteristics, the dynamics of their changes and the precariousness of their resources, offer huge challenges due to the architecture and service nature in the next generation of mobile communications. MANETs play an important role in the future of next-generation networks. This special collection identifies and studies the most important concerns in MANETs, and includes contributions from researchers, academics, etc.

This book brings together leading researchers in the field of international development to examine issues relating to food security, health, rural development, human development, and institutional strengthening in developing countries. Based on empirical research, the book discusses a variety of topics including nutrition-sensitive agricultural development in South Africa, household food security in Tanzania, medical research in Egypt, child mortality in Christian and Islamic countries, spot improvement of rural roads in Asia and Africa, resilience in natural disaster, the relationship between foreign aid and human development in Africa, and finally developing competencies for rural development project management through the creation of local action groups in Argentina. The book is insightful and serves as an important reference material on international development.

Presenting contributions from renowned experts in the field, this book covers research and development in fundamental areas of heat exchangers, which include: design and theoretical development, experiments, numerical modeling and simulations. This book is intended to be a useful reference source and guide to researchers, postgraduate students, and engineers in the fields of heat exchangers, cooling, and thermal management.

The genus Salmonella comprises an important number of bacterial species able to colonize and infect numerous animal species and humans. Although more than a hundred years passed since its discovery, Salmonella still represents a redoubtable and successful microorganism, difficult to deal with. Whether we discuss about typhoid fever or food poisoning, the public health and financial consequences are practically incalculable. The costs attributable to Salmonella contamination of meat, eggs, and vegetables are also very high worldwide. Antimicrobial resistance in Salmonella isolates is an emerging threat not only in humans, and special measures should be addressed to this global problem. The book Current Topics in Salmonella and Salmonellosis contains a series of reviews about all-important issues concerning these subjects. It comprises 14 chapters grouped in 4 sections emphasizing new insights into pathogenesis, bacterial detection and antibiotic resistance, infections in animals, risk factors, and control strategies. The new genomic data and the exhaustive presentation of molecular pathogenesis bring novelty to the book and can help to improve our knowledge about Salmonella-induced diseases.

Liver cancers result in considerable amount of financial and social burden. On the other hand, researches and clinical studies related to liver cancers continue to advance at a rapid pace. The chapters in this book provide state-of-the-art reviews on the current knowledge and advances in research and management of liver cancers. It includes the most recent advances in that field, particularly, hepatocarcinogenesis and the potential role of intestinal microbiota, nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, cancer stem cells, aldehyde dehydrogenase-1, and hepatitis B virus. This book also discusses the methods of diagnosis of HCC, the minimally invasive therapies for liver cancers, living donor liver transplantation for HCC, surgical management of liver metastases from colorectal cancers, and assessment and optimization for the future liver remnant.

The book presents the fundamentals and the role of powder metallurgy in contemporary technologies and the state of the art of classical powder metallurgy technologies and a general description of new variants and special and hybrid technologies used in powder metallurgy. The next part includes over a dozen case studies provided in the following chapters, comprehensively describing authors' accomplishments of numerous teams from different countries across the world in advanced research areas relating to powder metallurgy and to special and hybrid technologies. The detailed information, largely deriving from own and original research and R

In Designing Strategies for Cleft Lip and Palate Care it was aimed to link the epidemiology from different areas in the world with the interspecialty surgical care and the future genetic research projects. The objective is to concisely discuss the methodology of interspecialty care and stimulate future ideas for prophylactically managing or preventing such deformities. I am confident that one day the surgical interventions that bombard the patients from the day of newborn delivery and throughout the years of youth should be significantly decreased based on the genetic prophylactic intervention, probably.

Nowadays, nanomaterials are attracting huge attentions not only from a basic research point of view but also for their potential applications. Since finding the structure-property-processing relationships can open new windows in the application of materials, the material characterizations play a crucial role in the research and development of materials science. The increasing demand for energy with the necessity to find alternative renewable and sustainable energy sources leads to the rapid growth in attention to energy materials. In this book, the results of some outstanding researches on synchrotron-based characterization of nanostructured materials related to energy applications are presented.

Protein aggregation causes malfunction in several biochemical processes. Genetic and spontaneous formations of these transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are fatal to humans and animals. Conformational change of normal form of the protein to misfolded form causes its accumulation. The misfolded infectious protein agent forms the pathogenesis of the disease. This book presents pathology of the disease along with current knowledge of the structure-activity mechanism in the first two sections. Dyshomeostasis of metals is implicated in the pathogenesis of prions, and this influence is discussed further to understand the prion mechanism. Genetic resistance and immunobiology of the disease are elaborated in the following section. Finally, a computational study on the dynamics of the prion propagation provides a structural basis of the mechanism.

This book is the second in a series of two, featuring the Adiposity - Omics and Molecular Understanding, serving as an introduction to modern views on how the adipocytes are reciprocally interacting with organ systems in order to explain the biology of the body's fat cells and how they are integrated with other organ systems, like muscle cells and the liver, in order to control the lipid metabolism in our bodies, to finally preserve a positive balance between white and brown/beige adipocyte tissues (WAT and BAT). The understanding of the "omics" of obesity will therefore enable clinicians and researchers to better pursue the untoward incidents of metabolic deviations from a defined and health-bringing homeostasis, with fully responding WAT and BAT, being able to preserve a healthy balance between fat-producing and fat-metabolizing tissues for the benefit of the host, and thus longevity (optimal health with healthy, well-functioning organ systems) throughout a lifetime.

Patient-centered medicine is not an illness-centered, a physician-centered, or a hospital-centered medicine approach. In this book, it is aimed at presenting an approach to patient-centered medicine from the beginning of life to the end of life. As indicated by W. Osler, "It is much more important to know what sort of a patient has a disease than what sort of a disease a patient has." In our day, if the physicians and healthcare professionals could consider more than the diseased organ and provide healthcare by comforting the patients by respecting their values, beliefs, needs, and preferences; informing them and their relatives at every stage; and comforting the patients physically by controlling the pain and relieving their worries and fears, patients obeying the rules of physicians would become patients with high adaptation and participation to the treatment.

This book provides an overview of the current knowledge of herbivory. This book contains chapters from a wide variety of topics that fall into the following broad sections: (I) "Plant Defense Mechanisms and Herbivore Adaptations," (II) "Herbivory and Food Processing of Grazing Animals," and (III) "Herbivory Effects on Plant Communities." More specifically, the contributions of this book, written by experts in their respective fields, focus on topics including the chemical plant defense against herbivores as well as herbivore adaptions to plant cyanide defenses, the utilization of biomarkers to study grazing behavior of ruminants, modeling for describing ruminant herbivory, as well as improving grain processing to improve dairy cow performance. Contributions on positive indirect interactions in marine herbivores and algae are included, as is one focusing on herbivory by lizards. These chapters represent recent contributions showing the diversity of ongoing research in this field of study. This book targets a wide audience of general biologists as well as botanists, ecologists, and zoologists including both teachers and students in gaining a better appreciation of this rapidly growing field.

The word melanin refers to dark natural pigments produced by the oxidative degradation of tyrosine, catalyzed by tyrosinase, and polymerized into insoluble granular substance. The main function of melanin is to protect from harmful agents, primarily UV radiation, but also from oxidation, heavy metals, etc. In this volume, chapters deal with production of melanin in human oral mucosa (Liviu et al.), the regulation of melanin action (Cecile et al.), production and potential technological application of fungal melanins (Pombiero-Sponchiado et al.) and an innovative method for measuring melanin in various samples (Zdybel et al.). In conclusion, this volume presents various biological and industrial aspects of melanin production, uses and analysis.