Bücher veröffentlicht von Mdpi AG

When the domestic government, the private sector, and people in various professional fields talk about long-term care issues, they all focus on creating a warm and home-like care institution. However, we actively emphasize the importance of community-based long-term care. For "aging in place", the development of domestic non-institutional care is still in its infancy, and some long-term care needs must still be met through institutional care, and the facilitation of the extension or outreach of community-based care and respite service platforms for the development of community-based long-term care still rely on institutional care. The history of the development of long-term care in Taiwan is much shorter than that of Japan, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Despite years of hard work and rapid development, the long-term care resources needed to establish a complete system in terms of universalization, fairness, accessibility, and selectivity are not available. In the future, based on the soundness of institutional care, it hoped that outreach will move toward the goals of community care and aging in place. We hope the studies in this Special Issue will help further develop clinical medicine for healthcare and stainability.

The stratospheric ozone is important for the protection of the biosphere from the dangerous ultraviolet radiation of the sun, forms the temperature and dynamical structure of the stratosphere, and, therefore, has a direct influence on the general circulation and the surface climate. The tropospheric ozone can damage the biosphere, impact human health, and plays a role as a powerful greenhouse gas. That is why the understanding of the past and future evolution of the ozone in different atmospheric layers, as well as its influence on surface UV radiation doses, and human health is important. The problems of preventing further destruction of the ozone layer, the restoration of the ozone shield in the future, and air quality remain important for society. The interest in these problems was recently enhanced by the unexpected discovery of a negative ozone trend in the lower stratosphere and the appearance of a large ozone hole over the Arctic in spring 2020. This book includes papers describing several aspects of the ozone layer''s state and evolution based on the recent experimental, statistical, and modeling works. The book will be useful for readers, scientists, and students interested in environmental science.

Given that the threat of water shortage is expanding across the globe, the evolution of advanced technologies that enable water purification and, thus, water re-use in an energy and resource efficient manner are of great importance. In this regard, nanomaterials have been playing a crucial role and offering new opportunities for the construction of permeable and selective membranes and adsorbents. Such features are of paramount importance, particularly given the limited available energy resources. In this book, several recent studies are introduced that deal with water treatment via nanomaterial-based technologies. Such state-of-the-art technologies have employed nanomaterials that are made of polymer, composite, ceramic, and carbon, etc., and are shaped in various dimensionalities and forms such as particle (0D), fiber (1D), and film (2D-3D). The nanostructured membranes and adsorbents as well as photocatalytic nanosystems capable of active photodecomposition of organic pollutants, e.g., dyes, are the main focal points of discussion.

Each year, disasters such as storms, floods, fires, volcanoes, earthquakes, and epidemics cause thousands of casualties and tremendous damage to property around the world, displacing tens of thousands of people from their homes and destroying their livelihoods. The majority of these casualties and property loss could be prevented if better information were available regarding the onset and course of such disasters. Several remote sensing technologies, such as meteorological and Earth observation satellites, communication satellites, and satellite-based positioning, supported by geoinformation technologies, offer the potential to contribute to improved prediction and monitoring of potential hazards, risk mitigation, and disaster management which, in turn, would lead to sharp reductions in losses to life and property. This book explores most of the scientific issues related to spatially supported disaster management and its integration with geographical information system technologies in different disaster examples and scales. Dealing with disasters over space and time represents a long-lasting theme, now approached by means of innovative techniques and modelling approaches. Several priorities for actions are outlined toward preventing new and reduce existing disaster risks, including understanding disaster risk, strengthening disaster risk governance for management of disaster risk, investing in disaster reduction for resilience, and enhancing disaster preparedness for effective response. This book presents ideas to address the challenges facing different components of spatial patterns related to ecological processes, and the published articles extended versions of selected presentations from the Gi4DM Conference in 2019 in Prague.

The impacts of climate change on water resource management, as well as increasingly severe natural disasters over the last decades, have caught global attention. Reliable and accurate hydrological forecasts are essential for efficient water resource management and the mitigation of natural disasters. While the notorious nonlinear hydrological processes make accurate forecasts a very challenging task, it requires advanced techniques to build accurate forecast models and reliable management systems. One of the newest techniques for modeling complex systems is artificial intelligence (AI). AI can replicate the way humans learn and has great capability to efficiently extract crucial information from large amounts of data to solve complex problems. The fourteen research papers published in this Special Issue contribute significantly to the uncertainty assessment of operational hydrologic forecasting under changing environmental conditions and the promotion of water resources management by using the latest advanced techniques, such as AI techniques. The fourteen contributions across four major research areas: (1) machine learning approaches to hydrologic forecasting; (2) uncertainty analysis and assessment on hydrological modeling under changing environments; (3) AI techniques for optimizing multi-objective reservoir operation; (4) adaption strategies of extreme hydrological events for hazard mitigation. The papers published in this issue will not only advance water sciences but also help policymakers to achieve more sustainable and effective water resource management.

This Special Issue outlines the role of geoheritage and geotourism as potential touristic resources of a region. The term "geoheritage" refers to a particular type of natural resources represented by sites of special geological significance, rarity or beauty that are representative of a region and of its geological history, events, and processes. These sites are also known as "geosites" and, as well as archaeological, architectonic, and historical sites, can be considered as part of the cultural estate of a country. "Geotourism" is an emerging type of sustainable tourism, which concentrates on geosites, focusing on visitor knowledge, environmental education, and amusement. Geotourism may be very useful for geological sciences divulgation and may provide additional opportunities for the development of rural areas, generally not included among the main touristic attractions. The collected papers focused on these main topics with different methods and approaches and can be grouped as follows: i) papers dealing with geosite promotion and valorization in protected areas; ii) papers dealing with geosite promotion and valorization in non-protected areas; iii) papers dealing with geosite promotion by exhibition, remote sensing analysis, and apps; iv) papers investigating geotourism and geoheritage from tourists'' perspectives.

In the field of Analytical Chemistry and, in particular, whenever a quali-quantitative analysis is required, until a few years ago, reference was made exclusively to instrumental methods (more or less hyphenated) which, once validated, were able to provide the answers to the questions present, even if only in a limited way to analytical targets. Nowadays, the landscape has become considerably complicated (natural adulterants, assessment of geographical origin, sophistication, need for non-destructive analysis, search for often unknown compounds), and new procedures for processing data have greatly increased the potential of analyses that are conducted (even routinely) in the laboratory. In this scenario, chemometrics is master, able to manage and process a huge amount of information based both on data relating only to the analytes of interest, but also by applying "general" procedures to process raw untargeted analysis data. It is within this strand of analysis that many of the works reported in this Special Issue fall. In the succession of works in this printed version, the criterion that guided us was to highlight how-starting exclusively from chromatographic techniques (HPLC and GC) with conventional detectors and moving to exclusively spectroscopic techniques (MS, FT-IR and Raman)-it is possible arrive at extremely powerful coupled techniques and procedures (HPLC and FT-IR) able to meet research needs. Finally, at the end of the printed volume, there are two reviews that surveying the state of the art regarding the assessment of authenticity through qualitative analyses and the application of chemometrics in the pharmaceutical field in the study of forced drug degradation products. From the succession of works (and, above all, from the various application fields) it can immediately be seen how the application of chemometrics and its procedures to both raw and processed data is a powerful means of obtaining robust, reproducible, and predictive information. In this manner, it is possible to create models able to explain and respond to the original problem in a much more detailed way. , and Honghe through Fourier transform mid infrared (FT-MIR) spectra combined with partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA), random forest (RF), and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) methods. Melucci and collaborators apply chemometric approaches to non-destructive analysis of ATR-FT-IR for the determination of biosilica content. This value was directly evaluated in sediment samples, without any chemical alteration, using attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy, and the quantification was performed by combining the multivariate standard addition method (MSAM) with the net analyte signal (NAS) procedure to solve the strong matrix effect of sediment samples. Still in the food and food supplements field, Anguebes-Franseschi and collaborators report an article where 10 chemometric models based on Raman spectroscopy were applied to predict the physicochemical properties of honey produced in the state of Campeche, Mexico.

"Smart Sensing Technologies for Agriculture" is a Special Issue of Sensors that includes 14 research papers on diverse topics about the measurement of physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of soil, plants, and animals related to modern farming practices.

Arterial hypertension affects about 1 billion people worldwide and it is the strongest modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease and related disability. Since the initial discovery of rare monogenic disorders with large effects, the role of genomics has evolved into large genome-wide association studies detecting common variants with a modest effect size. Similarly, pharmacogenomics has emerged as a new tool for understanding variability in drug response, to maximize efficacy and reduce toxicity. This book presents the most recent advances in the field of genetics and genomics of arterial hypertension and their potential impact on clinical management. The book is a useful tool for clinicians but also to the research community and those who want to be updated in the field.

Nutraceuticals are a challenge for the future of prevention and therapy in healthcare. The possibility to prevent and/or support pharmacological therapy, which is nowadays mainly based on pharmaceuticals, can be a powerful tool to face pathological, chronic, long-term diseases in subjects who do not qualify for a pharmacological therapy. Nutraceuticals are obtained from vegetal or animal origin foods, and prospective research on these products will clarify their role, safety and efficacy by substantiating their role with clinical data. An effort to clarify their mechanism of action will open a door to the next generation of therapeutic agents that do not propose themselves as an alternative to drugs, but, instead, can be helpful to complement a pharmacological therapy, and to prevent the onset of chronical diseases. The market as well as the interest of people in naturally-derived remedies and less synthetic pharmaceuticals is growing, and the attention of the collective public imagination is nowadays more strongly focused on these food-derived products. This Special Issue is dedicated to the role of and perspectives on nutraceuticals in human health, examined from different angles ranging from analytical aspects to clinical trials, and from efficacy studies to beneficial effects on health conditions.

Disordered proteins are relatively recent newcomers in protein science. They were first described in detail by Wright and Dyson, in their J. Mol. Biol. paper in 1999. First, it was generally thought for more than a decade that disordered proteins or disordered parts of proteins have different amino acid compositions than folded proteins, and various prediction methods were developed based on this principle. These methods were suitable for distinguishing between the disordered (unstructured) and structured proteins known at that time. In addition, they could predict the site where a folded protein binds to the disordered part of a protein, shaping the latter into a well-defined 3D structure. Recently, however, evidence has emerged for a new type of disordered protein family whose members can undergo coupled folding and binding without the involvement of any folded proteins. Instead, they interact with each other, stabilizing their structure via "mutual synergistic folding" and, surprisingly, they exhibit the same residue composition as the folded protein. Increasingly more examples have been found where disordered proteins interact with non-protein macromolecules, adding to the already large variety of protein-protein interactions. There is also a very new phenomenon when proteins are involved in phase separation, which can represent a weak but functionally important macromolecular interaction. These phenomena are presented and discussed in the chapters of this book.

The management of cultural heritage and public real-estate assets is one of the most crucial challenges concerning the sustainable use of these resources, involving dynamic methods to stimulate preservation, development, renewal, and transmission to future generations of these essential assets. The contributions presented in this book provide a rich and varied panorama of research experiences and innovative tools, capable of promoting the re-use of cultural heritage in European cities and cultural landscapes, using a circular economy logic as a model of sustainable development. From this point of view, cultural capital becomes the driver of a regeneration process on the local, urban, and metropolitan scales, in which the transversal interconnections between the production cycles of the adaptive re-use of the available heritage, both in the adaptation and in the management phase, configure a circular process of multidimensional production of value. Therefore, future territorial redevelopment projects can base their idea strength on an open system of appropriately selected social attractors, whose enhancement and use have the objective of triggering widespread regeneration effects on the whole territory of influence, receiving inducement and resources to progress.

The world of laser matter interaction has known great and rapid advancements in the last few years, with a considerable increase in the number of both experimental and theoretical studies. The classical paradigm used to describe the dynamics of laser produced plasmas has been challenged by new peculiar phenomena observed experimentally, like plasma particles'' oscillations, plume splitting and self-structuring behavior during the expansion of the ejected particles. The use of multiple complementary techniques has become a requirement nowadays, as different aspects can be showcased by specific experimental approaches. To balance these non-linear effects and still remain tributary to the classical theoretical, views on laser produced plasma dynamics novel theoretical models that cover the two sides of the ablation plasma (differentiability and non-differentiability) still need to be developed. Plasma is a strongly nonlinear dynamic system, with many degrees of freedom and other symmetries, favorable for the development of ordered structures, instabilities and transitions (from ordered to chaotic states). In such contexts, we showcased research based on global and local symmetries, complexity and invariance. This special number highlighted exciting new phenomena related to laser produced plasma dynamics with the implementation of theoretical models, towards understanding the complex reality of laser matter interaction.

The agricultural community is face with the challenge of increasing food production by more than 70% to meet demand from the global population increase by the mid-21st century. Sustainable food production involves the sustained availability of resources, such as water and energy, to agriculture. The key challenges to sustainable food production are population increase, increasing demands for food, climate change, climate variability, and decreasing per capita land and water resources. To discuss more details on (a) the challenges for sustainable food production and (b) mitigation options available, a Special Issue on "Water Management for Sustainable Food Production" was assembled. This Special Issue focused on issues such as irrigation using brackish water, virtual water trade, allocation of water resources, consequences of excess precipitation on crop yields, strategies to increase water productivity, rainwater harvesting, irrigation water management, deficit irrigation, fertilization, environmental and socio-economic impacts, and irrigation water quality. The articles in the Special Issue cover several water-related issues across the U.S., Asia, Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan concerning sustainable food production. The articles in this Special Issue highlight the substantial impacts on agricultural production, water availability, and water quality in the face of increasing demands for food and energy.

Antiviral agents are used for the treatment of viral diseases. Antiviral drugs have been successfully developed and used clinically for a limited number of important human viral diseases notably caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), hepatitis C virus (HCV), hepatitis B virus (HBV), herpes, and influenza viruses. Despite the successes of these antiviral drugs, issues with drug resistance and toxicity remain challenging. These challenges are driving research to identify new drug candidates and to investigate novel drug targets to develop new mechanistic drug classes. Antiviral agents are not available against many viruses that cause human disease and economic burdens; in particular, the development of antiviral agents against emerging, re-emerging, and neglected viruses is increasingly becoming a priority. This book includes six review articles that discuss new antiviral strategies. The reviews either discuss advances relating to a specific virus or new therapeutic targets and approaches. The book includes 15 original research articles reporting new antiviral agents against a variety of clinically and economically important viruses and studies into the prevalence or acquisition of drug resistance. Overall, this book is an exciting collection of new research and ideas relating to the development of antiviral agents.

Improved understanding of the cellular and molecular makeup of tumors in the last 30 years has unraveled a previously unexpected level of heterogeneity among tumor cells as well as within the tumor microenvironment. The concept of tumor heterogeneity underlines the realization that different tumors can display significant differences in their genomic content as well as in their overall behavior. Our capacity to better understand the heterogeneous make up of tumors has very important consequences on our ability to design efficient therapeutic strategies to improve patient survival. This book highlights several aspects of tumor heterogeneity in the context of metastatic development and summarize some of the challenges posed by heterogeneity for tumor diagnostics and therapeutic management of tumors.

With the rapid development of nanotechnology, nanomaterials have been widely applied in many industrial sectors, including medicine, consumer products, and electronics. While such technology has brought benefits and convenience to our daily lives, it may also potentially threaten human health. In some cases, nanomaterials present unexpected risks to both humans and the environment. Assessments of the potential hazards associated with nanotechnology have been emerging, but substantial challenges remain, because the large number of different nanomaterials cannot be effectively evaluated in a timely manner. The development of a good strategy for a nanomaterials hazard assessment not only promotes the more widespread adoption of non-rodent or 3Rs principles, but also makes nanotoxicology testing more ethical, relevant, and cost- and time-efficient. A thorough understanding of the mechanisms by which nanomaterials perturb biological systems is critical for a more comprehensive elucidation of their nanotoxicity, and this will also facilitate the development of prevention and intervention policies against adverse outcomes induced by them. We hope that the articles included in this eBook can provide updated knowledge on nanotoxicology and nanosafety, from the point of view of both toxicology and ecotoxicology.

Due to the increased capabilities of microprocessors and the advent of graphics processing units (GPUs) in recent decades, the use of machine learning methodologies has become popular in many fields of science and technology. This fact, together with the availability of large amounts of information, has meant that machine learning and Big Data have an important presence in the field of Energy. This Special Issue entitled "Predicting the Future-Big Data and Machine Learning" is focused on applications of machine learning methodologies in the field of energy. Topics include but are not limited to the following: big data architectures of power supply systems, energy-saving and efficiency models, environmental effects of energy consumption, prediction of occupational health and safety outcomes in the energy industry, price forecast prediction of raw materials, and energy management of smart buildings.

Farmland abandonment is one of the major land use changes occurring in many rural territories, especially in mountainous regions. Without intervention (passive land management), farmland abandonment leads to an expansion of shrubs and forest on formerly cultivated hillslopes and grazing areas. All these land use changes affect the hydrological and geomorphological dynamics of slopes and channels, having important implications for water resources and soil conservation. However, the heterogeneity of abandoned scenarios complicates the assessment of farmland abandonment on water resources and soil conservation. In this Special Issue, we will publish papers that examine the hydrological and geomorphological consequences of farmland abandonment in one (or several) of these abandoned scenarios. Our final purpose is to help water and land managers to select the most sustainable strategy (in terms of water resources and soil conservation) for the land management of marginal rural areas.

Changing the temperature of a substance can stimulate dramatic changes of its state. These changes can be intermolecular (physical) and intramolecular (chemical) in nature. Physical changes occur without breaking intramolecular bonds, and lead to transitions between the four major phases: gas, liquid, crystal, and glass. Chemical changes are associated with chemical reactions that originate from breaking intramolecular bonds. Phase transitions as well as chemical reactions occur at finite rates. Measuring the rates of processes is the realm of kinetics. The kinetics of thermally stimulated processes is routinely measured using thermal analysis techniques such as differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). Knowing the process rates and their dependence on temperature is of vital importance for understanding the behavior of materials exposed to variations in temperature. In recent years, thermal analysis kinetics has made significant progress by developing computational tools for reliable kinetic analysis. It has also expanded its traditional application area to newly developed nano- and biomaterials. This Special Issue is a series of papers that reflect recent developments in the field and highlight the essential role of thermal analysis kinetics in understanding the processes responsible for the thermal behavior of various materials.

Mast cells, which play critical roles in IgE-mediated immediate allergic responses, have recently been found to be involved in much broader immune responses, a fascinating process of which is partly depicted in this volume.

Advances in technology have produced a range of on-body sensors and smartwatches that can be used to monitor a wearer''s health with the objective to keep the user healthy. However, the real potential of such devices not only lies in monitoring but also in interactive communication with expert-system-based cloud services to offer personalized and real-time healthcare advice that will enable the user to manage their health and, over time, to reduce expensive hospital admissions. To meet this goal, the research challenges for the next generation of wearable healthcare devices include the need to offer a wide range of sensing, computing, communication, and human-computer interaction methods, all within a tiny device with limited resources and electrical power. This Special Issue presents a collection of six papers on a wide range of research developments that highlight the specific challenges in creating the next generation of low-power wearable healthcare sensors.

Childhood is a crucial period for establishing lifelong healthy nutritional habits. The environment has an important influence on children''s dietary intake. This book focuses on the influence of environmental factors on the dietary intake of children and adolescents (0-18 years of age) within various settings including home, early care and education, school, college, holiday clubs, neighborhoods, and supermarkets. The reported studies examine a variety of factors within these settings, including the influence of cooking and parenting, teacher style, resources and barriers within various settings, marketing, and many other factors. The dietary intake behaviors examined include snacking, fruit and vegetable intake, beverage intake, and also nutrition in general. In addition, several papers focus on problems caused by inadequate nutrition, such as hunger and obesity. This work underlines the importance of the environment in influencing children''s and adolescents'' dietary intake. In addition, the papers identified some crucial barriers and facilitators for the implementation of environmental changes to enable a healthy diet for young children. Therefore, it provides some important directions for both future research and practice.

The book presents a collection of 10 articles published in a Special Issue entitled "Oral Inflammations and Systemic Diseases" in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067) in the section "Molecular Pathology, Diagnostics, and Therapeutics". The oral inflammations that are covered in this issue consist of dental caries, periodontitis, and gingivitis, with a preponderance of periodontitis. Periodontitis is clearly a bacterial disease; however, it is not an infectious disease in the classical sense because it results from complex interactions between the commensal microbiota, host susceptibility and environmental factors such as diet and smoking. The human mouth contains one of the most diverse microbiomes in the human body, comprising viruses, fungi, protozoa, archaea and bacteria. The peer-reviewed articles of the book consist of original and review papers focused on the question of how exposure of the mouth to specific oral microbiota impacts systemic diseases, such as neuroinflammation, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and arthritis.

The articles presented in this Special Issue cover different aspects of the urban planning process, such as simulation, optimization or decision-making. The authors highlighted the importance of performing an integrated design of the district, considering different sectors, different energy vectors and different operation modes. In order to better integrate renewable and residual energy sources (R┬▓ES), careful design of systems and storage solutions should be performed. Different storage solutions were tested, ranging from large-scale thermal energy storage to vehicle batteries or the thermal mass of buildings. Van der Heijde et al. (2019) proposed a two-layer design optimization algorithm to design a district heating network with solar thermal collectors, seasonal thermal energy storage and excess heat injection. Pajot et al. (2019) also performed an optimization of the sizing and control of energy systems in a district equipped with heat pumps, with thermal energy storage or thermal mass utilization. A hybrid distribution system, coupling the thermal and electrical networks, was proposed by Widl et al. (2019). Arnaudo et al. (2019) used the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) concept to decrease the overloading of the electrical distribution network during heat pump operation. Finally, Kazmi et al. (2019) proposed an integrated decision-making planning approach for a better integration of R┬▓ES in the distribution network. The complexity of urban planning leads to the development of new tools and methodologies. Until now, operation was poorly integrated in the design phase. New urban building energy modeling tools were proposed by the different authors. These tools are either based on co-simulations or integrated solutions to be able to capture the fine dynamics of a district. The difficulty of generating the input data for the models was also discussed. Regarding the methodology, most articles proposed a two-stage optimization procedure to optimize both the operational and design aspects. Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) and genetic algorithms were often used to find optimal solutions.

Christian ethics is a wide and varied field; so diverse are the methods and approaches, theological perspectives and starting points, and scopes of inquiry and purposes-dare we even call it a discipline?-that the field is rarely considered as a whole. Christian ethics includes historical, descriptive, critical, constructive, and applied projects on countless topics. Lending creative energy to this field of study are a range of partner disciplines, including, most prominently, theology, philosophy, and sociology, each containing multiple schools themselves. To envision the entire field of Christian ethics is a difficult task; to reenvision the entire field may perhaps be impossible for one person. Thus, this publication includes original research by multiple scholars, each offering a distinct perspective from their primary partner discipline. Chapters include Roman Catholic and Protestant voices from Europe, Asia, and North America. In aggregate, these writings contribute to a composite reenvisioning of Christian ethics, refracting our collective vision through the prisms of diverse academic and methodological perspectives in this vast field of inquiry, study, and practice.

This eBook is a volume based on the "Eye Movements and Visual Cognition" Special Issue published in the journal Vision by MDPI and edited by Raymond Klein and Simon Liversedge. The eBook comprises 19 high-quality chapters that are original and topical works by leading academic figures in the field of human vision and visual cognition. In putting together the book, we aimed to provide an informative body of work to stimulate and foster useful intellectual exchange between individuals working on basic theoretical issues as well as on more applied aspects of vision and cognitive science. From the outset, we sought papers that provide concise and astute reviews of topics within this broad field. The present volume includes reviews that are narrative (critiquing and summarizing research on a topic), tutorial (with a focus on methods and findings), empirical (e.g., meta-analytic), and theoretically synthetic. The eBook also features chapters with new empirical content that resolves an undecided issue stemming from an evaluation of the literature. Finally, where possible, we also selected papers that bridge theoretical and applied issues and provide insight into behavior and its neural substrate. All chapters were subject to peer review and went through several rounds of revision prior to acceptance.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the toxinological literature consisted largely of pharmacological and functional characterizations of crude venoms and venom constituents, often constituents that could not be identified unambiguously. The advent of amino acid composition analysis in the 1950s enabled the first forays into physical characterizations of purified toxins, though these remained few in number until the 1970s. Then, the tryptic and chymotryptic cleavage of venom proteins coupled with manual Edman degradation began to provide the first complete sequences, particularly of three-finger toxins. Polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and improved resins for liquid chromatography permitted improved purification and better gross structural characterization of venom components. The early 1980s witnessed the advent of automated Edman degradation, and entire sequences of longer proteins began to be reported in the literature. Then, the molecular biology revolution enabled the generation of cDNA sequences of more and larger proteins, followed by mass-spectrometry-based proteomics and quantitative high-throughput DNA sequencing and genomics. Today, we face an unprecedented situation in which our capacity to generate sequence/structural data has completely overwhelmed our capacity to functionally characterize venom constituents. This Special Issue of Toxins includes 11 publications addressing the discovery and functional characterization of novel venom constituents of vertebrate and invertebrate venoms.

In recent years, microfluidic devices with a large surface-to-volume ratio have witnessed rapid development, allowing them to be successfully utilized in many engineering applications. A smart control process has been proposed for many years, while many new innovations and enabling technologies have been developed for smart flow control, especially concerning "smart flow control" at the microscale. This Special Issue aims to highlight the current research trends related to this topic, presenting a collection of 33 papers from leading scholars in this field. Among these include studies and demonstrations of flow characteristics in pumps or valves as well as dynamic performance in roiling mill systems or jet systems to the optimal design of special components in smart control systems.

In recent years, microfluidic devices with a large surface-to-volume ratio have witnessed rapid development, allowing them to be successfully utilized in many engineering applications. A smart control process has been proposed for many years, while many new innovations and enabling technologies have been developed for smart flow control, especially concerning "smart flow control" at the microscale. This Special Issue aims to highlight the current research trends related to this topic, presenting a collection of 33 papers from leading scholars in this field. Among these include studies and demonstrations of flow characteristics in pumps or valves as well as dynamic performance in roiling mill systems or jet systems to the optimal design of special components in smart control systems.