Böcker i De Gruyter STEM-serien

The book about Non-bacterial toxins will cover those toxins that affect food safety and are produced by fungi (mycotoxins), cyanobacteria (cyanotoxins) and marine microalgae (phycotoxins). These three group of toxins affect food safety and drinking water quality at a global scale, and they pose three main challenges for scientists: 1) Climate change is causing a slow but steady change on the chemical profile of each of these groups, causing intoxications in areas that are geographically new to the intoxications map. For this reason, emerging toxins are a new topic that requires an important reallocation of resources to understand the new toxins trends, their toxicology, their analytical control and how to deal with them from a regulatory standpoint. 2) Toxicological science needs to be updated to determine the impact of the toxins in all kind of vectors (more and more are being discovered) and how they disseminate on the food chain. Also, the mode of action of many of this toxins is not understood or even known, and this affects also to the impact of the coexistence of several toxins in the same matrix. 3) Detection and regulation, as this requires the use of advance technology (mass spectrometry, biosensors, multitask screening etc) that is in many cases underdevelopped or not available, especially for many of the new toxins. Climate change, toxicology and detection affect so many areas of science that this book will try to keep the readers updated about the current state of the art.

Industrial Biotechnology summarizes different aspects of plant biotechnology such as using plants as sustainable resources, phytomedical applications, phytoremedation and genetic engineering of plant systems. These topics are discussed from an academic as well industrial perspective and thus highlight recent developments but also practical aspects of modern biotechnology.

The conversion of CO2 to chemicals and consumables is a pioneering approach to utilize undesired CO2 emissions and simultaneously create new products out of sustainable feedstock. Volume 1 gives an introduction to CO2 chemistry, utilisation and sustainability and further discusses its capture and separation. Both volumes are also included in a set ISBN 978-3-11-066549-9.

The last two decades have seen electrospinning of nanofibers performed mainly from solutions of toxic organic solvents. The increase in demand for scaling up electrospinning in recent years therefore requires an environmentally friendly process free of organic solvents. This book addresses techniques for clean and safe electrospinning in the fabrication of green nanofibers and their potential applications.

The study of membranes has become of high importance in the fields of biology, pharmaceutical chemistry and medicine, since much of what happens in a cell or in a virus involves biological membranes. The current book is an excellent introduction to the area, which explains how modern analytical methods can be applied to study biological membranes and membrane proteins and the bioprocesses they are involved to.

Carbon dioxide reduction is a key research challenge in the global mission to reduce CO2 emissions. The process presents a unique challenge in that it can produce several different products, presenting the user with the challenge of selectively and efficiently producing on single useful material. This book presents an introduction to the field, covering the chemical reactions involved, the range of innovative materials and reactor designs most recently developed, and the future targets that need to be met.

The growing interest in replacing petroleum-based products by inexpensive, renewable, natural materials will have a significant impact on sustainability, environment, and the polymer industry. This book provides scientists a useful framework to help take advantage of the latest research conducted in this rapidly advancing field enabling them to develop and commercialize their own products quickly and more successfully.

Flexible and stretchable energy storage devices are increasingly being needed for a wide variety of applications such as wearable electronics, electronic papers, electronic skins, smart clothes, bendable smart phones and implantable medical devices. Wearable Energy Storage Devices discusses flexible and stretchable supercapacitors and batteries, stretchable and self-healing gel electrolytes, and hybrid wearable energy storage-harvesting devices.

The book defines the differences between synthetic and natural superabsorbent polymers. It describes polymerization techniques, processing strategies and the use and importance of smart SAPs. It also includes SAP design to aid in selection of the best SAP for a specific application. The book is an indispensible resource for any academics and industrials interested in SAPs.

The book covers various thermoplastic composites, including continuous and discontinuous fiber thermoplastic composites. It describes processing methods and explains the effect of different processing parameters on the structure and performance of thermoplastic composites. Characterization and mechanics of the composite are also discussed in the book.

The book covers silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, tin and germanium based inorganic polymers. It also includes chapters on organometallic polymers, transition metal based coordination polymers and geopolymers. The book is ideal for students and career starters in the industry.

This textbook illustrates one-component phase diagrams, binary equilibrium phase diagrams and ternary phase diagrams for ceramics, polymers and alloys by presenting case studies on preparation processes, and provides up-to-date information on nano-crystal materials, non-crystal materials and functional materials. As second volume in the set, it is an extension of the first volume on physical aspect of materials.

Machine Learning and Visual Perception provides an up-to-date overview on the topic, including the PAC model, decision tree, Bayesian learning, support vector machines, AdaBoost, compressive sensing and so on.Both classic and novel algorithms are introduced in classifier design, face recognition, deep learning, time series recognition, image classification, and object detection.

As the first comprehensive overview on the green approach to research and industrialization of polymeric materials this textbook describes the development and optimization of bio-based and waste-derived materials. It presents new strategies for the recovery, recycling and reusing of oil-based plastics with a special focus on bio-innovation in the area of organic materials.

Nanoscience and Nanotechnology is an overview of advances into the modeling and characterization of nano-sized materials as well as their use in the areas of catalysis, energy, health, communications, etc. The scientific and safety aspects of nanomaterials are discussed as well as their use in technical applications. Ideal for researchers and students of materials science, chemistry, industrial chemistry, and physics.

Modern membrane science and technology aids engineers in developing and designing more efficient and environmentally-friendly processes. The optimal material and membrane selection as well as applications in the many involved industries are provided. This work is the ideal introduction for engineers working in membrane science and applications (wastewater, desalination, adsorption, and catalysis), process engineers in separation science, biologists and biochemists, environmental scientists, and most of all students. Its multidisciplinary approach also stimulates thinking of hybrid technologies for current and future life-saving applications (artificial organs, drug delivery).

The book introduces fundamental principles, phase structure, mechanism, mechanical properties, and different types of multicomponent polymers. Rheological properties, graft copolymers, block copolymers and interpenetrating polymer networks are discussed in detail as well. With abundant illustrations, it is an essential reference for polymer chemists, material scientists and graduate students.

The amount of new information is constantly increasing, faster than our ability to fully interpret and utilize it to improve human experiences. Addressing this asymmetry requires novel and revolutionary scientific methods and effective human and artificial intelligence interfaces. By lifting the concept of time from a positive real number to a 2D complex time (kime), this book uncovers a connection between artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and quantum mechanics. It proposes a new mathematical foundation for data science based on raising the 4D spacetime to a higher dimension where longitudinal data (e.g., time-series) are represented as manifolds (e.g., kime-surfaces). This new framework enables the development of innovative data science analytical methods for model-based and model-free scientific inference, derived computed phenotyping, and statistical forecasting. The book provides a transdisciplinary bridge and a pragmatic mechanism to translate quantum mechanical principles, such as particles and wavefunctions, into data science concepts, such as datum and inference-functions. It includes many open mathematical problems that still need to be solved, technological challenges that need to be tackled, and computational statistics algorithms that have to be fully developed and validated. Spacekime analytics provide mechanisms to effectively handle, process, and interpret large, heterogeneous, and continuously-tracked digital information from multiple sources. The authors propose computational methods, probability model-based techniques, and analytical strategies to estimate, approximate, or simulate the complex time phases (kime directions). This allows transforming time-varying data, such as time-series observations, into higher-dimensional manifolds representing complex-valued and kime-indexed surfaces (kime-surfaces). The book includes many illustrations of model-based and model-free spacekime analytic techniques applied to economic forecasting, identification of functional brain activation, and high-dimensional cohort phenotyping. Specific case-study examples include unsupervised clustering using the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index (MCSI), model-based inference using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, and model-free inference using the UK Biobank data archive. The material includes mathematical, inferential, computational, and philosophical topics such as Heisenberg uncertainty principle and alternative approaches to large sample theory, where a few spacetime observations can be amplified by a series of derived, estimated, or simulated kime-phases. The authors extend Newton-Leibniz calculus of integration and differentiation to the spacekime manifold and discuss possible solutions to some of the "problems of time". The coverage also includes 5D spacekime formulations of classical 4D spacetime mathematical equations describing natural laws of physics, as well as, statistical articulation of spacekime analytics in a Bayesian inference framework. The steady increase of the volume and complexity of observed and recorded digital information drives the urgent need to develop novel data analytical strategies. Spacekime analytics represents one new data-analytic approach, which provides a mechanism to understand compound phenomena that are observed as multiplex longitudinal processes and computationally tracked by proxy measures. This book may be of interest to academic scholars, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers, biostatisticians, econometricians, and data analysts. Some of the material may also resonate with philosophers, futurists, astrophysicists, space industry technicians, biomedical researchers, health practitioners, and the general public.

The book systematically presents fundamental principles, properties, implementation methodologies, technologies and applications of polymer synthesis. Ring opening metathesis polymerization, click chemistry, macromolecular self-assembly, carbon nanomaterials and their modification with polymers are discussed in detail. With abundant illustrations, it is an essential reference for polymer chemists, material scientists, and graduate students.