This book discusses the water and carbon cycle system in the permafrost region of eastern Siberia, Providing vitalin sights into how climate change has affected the permafrost environment in recent decades. It analyzes the relationships between precipitation and evapotranspiration, gross primary production and runoff in the permafrost regions, which differ from those intropical and temperate forests.

This book provides an overview of mitigation strategies and positive health effects of Maillard Reaction products in the contexts of food processing and storage. The effects of Maillard Reactions can vary considerably: while on the one hand certain sensorial alterations and influences on color, flavor and odor may be desirable, Maillard Reactions can also result in potentially harmful and toxic products (e.g. furfurals, furosines, or acrylamide).

This book mainly focuses on key aspects of biomembranes that have emerged over the past 15 years. It covers static and dynamic descriptions, as well as modeling for membrane organization and shape at the local and global (at the cell level) scale. It also discusses several new developments in non-equilibrium aspects that have not yet been covered elsewhere.

This book explains the operating principles of atomic force microscopy with the aim of enabling the reader to operate a scanning probe microscope successfully and understand the data obtained with the microscope. This enhanced second edition to "Scanning Probe Microscopy" (Springer, 2015) represents a substantial extension and revision to the part on atomic force microscopy of the previous book.

This book provides a unique review of various aspects of metallic contamination in Si and Ge-based semiconductors. It discusses all of the important metals including their origin during crystal and/or device manufacturing, their fundamental properties, their characterization techniques and their impact on electrical devices’ performance. Several control and possible gettering approaches are addressed.

This book is devoted to CO2 capture and utilization (CCU) from a green, biotechnological and economic perspective, and presents the potential of, and the bottlenecks and breakthroughs in converting a stable molecule such as CO2 into specialty chemicals and materials or energy-rich compounds.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of thermodynamics. It is divided into four parts, the first of which equips readers with a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles of thermodynamics of equilibrium states and of their evolution. The second part applies these principles to a series of generalized situations, presenting applications that are of interest both in their own right and in terms of demonstrating how thermodynamics, as a theory of principle, relates to different fields.

Agriculture is currently facing multi-faceted threats in the form of unpredictable weather variability, frequent droughts and scarcity of irrigation water, together with the degradation of soil resources and declining environmental health. These stresses result in the modification of plant physiology to impart greater resilience to changing abiotic and biotic environments, but only at the cost of declining plant productivity. In light of these facts, assessing the status of natural resource bases, and understanding the mechanisms of soil-plant-environment interactions so as to devise adaptation and mitigation approaches, represent great and imminent challenges for all of us. In this context, it is essential to understand the potential applications of modern tools, existing coping mechanisms and their integration, as this will allow us to develop suitable advanced mitigation strategies.

This thesis reports the first measurements of the ground state binding energies of ultracold CsYb molecules and the scattering lengths of the Cs+Yb system. CsYb molecules in the rovibrational ground state possess both electric and magnetic dipole moments which opens up many exciting research directions in ultracold chemistry and quantum many-body physics.

The purpose of this book is to discuss, at the graduate level, the methods of performance prediction for chemical rocket propulsion. A pedagogical presentation of such methods has been unavailable thus far and this text, based upon lectures, fills this gap. The first part contains the energy-minimization to calculate the propellant-combustion composition and the subsequent computation of rocket performance.

Cotton fiber is the most important natural fiber used in the textile industry. The physical structure and chemical compositions of cotton fibers have been extensively studied. Newer high speed spinning instruments are being deployed around the world that demand longer, stronger and finer fibers.

This text comprehensively covers novel, innovative technologies used in the food and beverage industries in order to provide safe and healthy foods for consumers. The research provided in these chapters aims to show that the traditional pasteurization and commercial sterilization of foods result in unacceptable quality and nutrient retention, creating an important need for alternative methods used to minimize undesirable reactions such as thermal decomposition or degradation.

A new experimental method – the "Stiffnessometer", is developed to measure elementary properties of a superconductor, including the superconducting stiffness and the critical current. This technique has many advantages over existing methods, such as: the ability to measure these properties while minimally disturbing the system; the ability to measure large penetration depths (comparable to sample size), as necessary when approaching the critical temperature; and the ability to measure critical currents without attaching contacts and heating the sample.