In 2016, the LIGO and Virgo Collaborations made headlines when they announced the detection of gravitational waves—a century after Albert Einstein first predicted their existence with his general theory of relativity. With unprecedented perspective as physicists at the forefront of this discovery, Mario Díaz, Gabriela González, and Jorge Pullin provide a comprehensive and accessible account…
Planet Earth, it turns out, may not be the best of all possible worlds—and lately humanity has been carelessly depleting resources, decimating species, and degrading everything needed for life. Meanwhile, human ingenuity has opened up a vista of habitable worlds well beyond our wildest dreams of outposts on Mars. Worlds without End is an expertly guided tour of this thrilling frontier in astr…
According to existing histories, theory drove chemistry's remarkable nineteenth-century development. In Molecular World, Catherine M. Jackson shows instead how novel experimental approaches combined with what she calls “laboratory reasoning” enabled chemists to bridge wet chemistry and abstract concepts and, in so doing, create the molecular world. Jackson introduces a series of practice-ba…
Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by plastics: perhaps you have a book in one hand and your phone—made of various metals, plastics, and glass—in the other, or you are reading this on your polyurethane mattress after having flipped on a plastic light switch. In this Essential Knowledge series volume, Imari Walker-Franklin and Jenna Jambeck provide a deep exploration of the entire life of…
A student-oriented introduction to understanding mechanisms at the atomistic level controlling macroscopic materials phenomena through molecular dynamics simulations. Machine-learning-based computation in materials innovation, performance optimization, and sustainability offers exciting opportunities at the mesoscale research frontier. Molecular Mechanisms in Materials presents research find…
This SpringerBrief deals with the control and optimization problem in hybrid electric vehicles. Given that there are two (or more) energy sources (i.e., battery and fuel) in hybrid vehicles, it shows the reader how to implement an energy-management strategy that decides how much of the vehicle’s power is provided by each source instant by instant. Hybrid Electric Vehicles: •introduces…
agile software development; lean development; scrum; project management; software development
Umberto Eco's wise and witty guide to researching and writing a thesis, published in English for the first time. By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his stude…
Experts consider how the lessons of World War I can help prevent U.S.–China conflict. A century ago, Europe's diplomats mismanaged the crisis triggered by the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the continent plunged into World War I, which killed millions, toppled dynasties, and destroyed empires. Today, as the hundredth anniversary of the Great War prompts renewed debate ab…