Your browser does not fully support modern features. Please upgrade for a smoother experience.
Subject:
All Disciplines Arts & Humanities Biology & Life Sciences Business & Economics Chemistry & Materials Science Computer Science & Mathematics Engineering Environmental & Earth Sciences Medicine & Pharmacology Physical Sciences Public Health & Healthcare Social Sciences
Sort by:
Most Viewed Latest Alphabetical (A-Z) Alphabetical (Z-A)
Filter:
All Topic Review Biography Peer Reviewed Entry Video Entry
Topic Review
Mekong
The Mekong, or Mekong River, is a trans-boundary river in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is the world's twelfth longest river and the sixth longest in Asia. Its estimated length is 4,909 km (3,050 mi), and it drains an area of 795,000 km2 (307,000 sq mi), discharging 475 km3 (114 cu mi) of water annually. From the Tibetan Plateau the river runs through China , Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The extreme seasonal variations in flow and the presence of rapids and waterfalls in the Mekong make navigation difficult. Even so, the river is a major trade route between western China and Southeast Asia.
  • 4.5K
  • 25 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Widow
A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and a widower is a man whose spouse has died. The treatment of widows and widowers around the world varies.
  • 4.5K
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Biogas
Biogas refers to a mixture of different gases produced by the breakdown of organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Biogas can be produced from raw materials such as agricultural waste, manure, municipal waste, plant material, sewage, green waste or food waste. Biogas is a renewable energy source. Biogas can be produced by anaerobic digestion with methanogen or anaerobic organisms, which digest material inside a closed system, or fermentation of biodegradable materials. This closed system is called an anaerobic digester, biodigester or a bioreactor. Biogas is primarily methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) and may have small amounts of hydrogen sulphide (H2S), moisture and siloxanes. The gases methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide (CO) can be combusted or oxidized with oxygen. This energy release allows biogas to be used as a fuel; it can be used for any heating purpose, such as cooking. It can also be used in a gas engine to convert the energy in the gas into electricity and heat. Biogas can be compressed, the same way as natural gas is compressed to CNG, and used to power motor vehicles. In the United Kingdom , for example, biogas is estimated to have the potential to replace around 17% of vehicle fuel. It qualifies for renewable energy subsidies in some parts of the world. Biogas can be cleaned and upgraded to natural gas standards, when it becomes bio-methane. Biogas is considered to be a renewable resource because its production-and-use cycle is continuous, and it generates no net carbon dioxide. As the organic material grows, it is converted and used. It then regrows in a continually repeating cycle. From a carbon perspective, as much carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere in the growth of the primary bio-resource as is released, when the material is ultimately converted to energy.
  • 4.5K
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Building Domain-Specific Search Engines
With advances in machine learning, knowledge discovery systems have become very complicated to set up, requiring extensive tuning and programming effort. Democratizing such technology so that non-technical domain experts can avail themselves of these advances in an interactive and personalized way is an important problem. myDIG is a highly modular, open source pipeline-construction system that is specifically geared towards investigative users (e.g., law enforcement) with no programming abilities. The myDIG system allows users both to build a knowledge graph of entities, relationships, and attributes for illicit domains from a raw HTML corpus and also to set up a personalized search interface for analyzing the structured knowledge. Both qualitative and quantitative data from five case studies involving investigative experts from illicit domains, such as securities fraud and illegal firearms sales, have been used to illustrate the potential of myDIG.
  • 4.5K
  • 10 Feb 2021
Topic Review
Catalysts for Synthesis of Ethylene-Propylene-Diene Rubbers
Ethylene-propylene-diene rubbers (EPDM) are one of the most important polyolefin materials widely commercialized and used in various industries in recent years. The production of EPDM is based solely on catalytic coordination polymerization processes. The development of new catalysts and processes for the synthesis of EPDM has expanded the range of products and their manufacturing in terms of energy efficiency, processability, and environmental safety.
  • 4.5K
  • 13 Sep 2022
Topic Review
Intermarium
Intermarium (Polish: Międzymorze, Polish pronunciation: [mʲɛnd͡zɨˈmɔʐɛ]) was a geopolitical project conceived by politicians in successor states of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in several iterations, some of which anticipated the inclusion as well of other, neighboring states. The proposed multinational polity would have extended across territories lying between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas, hence the name meaning "Between-Seas". Prospectively a federation of Central and Eastern European countries, the post-World War I Intermarium plan pursued by Polish leader and former political prisoner of the Russian Empire, Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), sought to recruit to the proposed federation the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland , Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The Polish name Międzymorze (from między, "between"; and morze, "sea"), meaning "Between-Seas", was rendered into Latin as "Intermarium." The proposed federation was meant to emulate the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, that, from the end of the 16th century to the end of the 18th, had united the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Intermarium complemented Piłsudski's other geopolitical vision, Prometheism, whose goal was the dismemberment of the Russian Empire and that Empire's divestment of its territorial acquisitions. Intermarium was, however, perceived by some Lithuanians as a threat to their newly established independence, and by some Ukrainians as a threat to their aspirations for independence, and while France backed the proposal, it was opposed by Russia and by most other Western powers. Within two decades of the failure of Piłsudski's grand scheme, all the countries that he had viewed as candidates for membership in the Intermarium federation had fallen to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, except for Finland (which suffered some territorial losses in the 1939–40 Winter War with the Soviet Union).
  • 4.5K
  • 19 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Lipids in Food Flavor Generation
Lipids in food are a source of essential fatty acids and also play a crucial role in flavor and off-flavor development. Lipids contribute to food flavor generation due to their degradation to volatile compounds during food processing, heating/cooking, and storage and/or interactions with other constituents developed from the Maillard reaction and Strecker degradation, among others. The degradation of lipids mainly occurs via autoxidation, photooxidation, and enzymatic oxidation, which produce a myriad of volatile compounds. The oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids generates hydroperoxides that then further break down to odor-active volatile secondary lipid oxidation products including aldehydes, alcohols, and ketones.
  • 4.5K
  • 15 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Cook Stove
A biomass cook stove is heated by burning wood, charcoal, animal dung or crop residue. Cook stoves are commonly used for cooking and heating food in rural households. Nearly half of the world's population, approximately 3 billion people, use solid fuels such as coal, wood, animal dung, and crop residues for their domestic energy needs. Among those who use indoor cooking stoves, the poorest families living in rural areas most frequently use solid fuels, where it continues to be relied on by up to 90% of households. Households in developing countries consume significantly less energy than those in developed countries; however, over 50% of the energy is for cooking food. The average rural family spends 20% or more of its income purchasing wood or charcoal for cooking. The urban poor also frequently spend a significant portion of their income on the purchase of wood or charcoal. Deforestation and erosion often result from harvesting wood for cooking fuel. The main goal of most improved cooking stoves is to reduce the pressure placed on local forests by reducing the amount of wood the stoves consume, and to reduce the negative health impacts associated with exposure to toxic smoke from traditional stoves.
  • 4.5K
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Bismuth-213
In contrast to external high energy photon or proton therapy, targeted radionuclide therapy (TRNT) is a systemic cancer treatment allowing targeted irradiation of a primary tumor and all its metastases, resulting in less collateral damage to normal tissues. The α-emitting radionuclide bismuth-213 (213Bi) has interesting properties and can be considered as a magic bullet for TRNT. 
  • 4.5K
  • 11 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Spirulina for Skin Care
Spirulina stands out as a sustainable bioactive microalga with health-promoting properties, and an important active ingredient of natural cosmetics products. 
  • 4.5K
  • 05 Feb 2021
Topic Review
Nuclear Symmetry Energy
Nuclear symmetry energy is a measure of the energy cost to make nuclear systems more neutron rich. It depends on the density of the system. Information about the density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy has broad ramifications on the mechanisms of supernova explosions, properties of neutron stars and gravitational waves from their mergers. It is also important for understanding properties of nuclei as well as the dynamics and products of their collisions in laboratory experiments. 
  • 4.5K
  • 03 Aug 2021
Topic Review
Polyenes
Polyenes were, after griseofulvin, the first fungal-specific antibiotics on the market and ever since, more than 200 polyene antifungals have been discovered, of which amphotericin B, nystatin and natamycin are most commonly used in antifungal therapy .
  • 4.5K
  • 12 Jan 2021
Topic Review
Modified Starch-Based Adhesives
Consumer trends towards environmentally friendly products are driving plastics industries to investigate more benign alternatives to petroleum-based polymers. In the case of adhesives, one possibility to achieve sustainable production is to use non-toxic, low-cost starches as biodegradable raw materials for adhesive production. While native starch contains only hydroxyl groups and has limited scope, chemically modified starch shows superior water resistance properties for adhesive applications. Esterified starches, starches with ester substituents, can be feasibly produced and utilized to prepare bio-based adhesives with improved water resistance. Syntheses of esterified starch materials can involve esterification, transesterification, alkylation, acetylation, succinylation, or enzymatic reactions.
  • 4.5K
  • 31 May 2022
Topic Review
Human Factors and Road Traffic Safety
Human factors play a huge role in road traffic safety. Research has found that a huge proportion of traffic crashes occur due to some form of human error. Improving road user behavior has been the major strategy that has been emphasized for improving road traffic safety. Meanwhile, despite the training efforts, and testing for drivers, the global status of road traffic safety is alarming.
  • 4.5K
  • 02 Feb 2024
Topic Review
Bitumen Aging and Rejuvenation Chemistry
Bitumen aging and rejuvenation include a series of chemical transformations that the material undergoes and that results in the variation of its physical characteristics.
  • 4.5K
  • 30 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Classification of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
Classification of Indigenous peoples of the Americas is based upon cultural regions, geography, and linguistics. Anthropologists have named various cultural regions, with fluid boundaries, that are generally agreed upon with some variation. These cultural regions are broadly based upon the locations of Indigenous peoples of the Americas from early European and African contact beginning in the late 15th century. When Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed by nation-states, they retain their original geographic classification. Some groups span multiple cultural regions.
  • 4.5K
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Sustainable Agriculture and Biodiversity Conservation in Japan
Japan aims to be carbon-neutral by 2050 by targeting various sectors including agriculture. One of the main strategies in this sector to mitigate climate change effects is environmental conservation agriculture (ECA); however, ECA utilization remains low in most of Japan’s prefectures to this date. Japan has been active in promoting biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture, which is why it currently has a total of 11 Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) designated by FAO. Japan has been proactive in preserving endangered species, such as butterflies vascular plants, and birds
  • 4.5K
  • 19 May 2022
Topic Review Peer Reviewed
Tsunami Alert Efficiency
“Tsunami Alert Efficiency” is the rapid, accurate and reliable conduct of tsunami warning messaging, from the detection of potential tsunamigenic earthquakes to dissemination to all people under threat, and the successful survival of every person at risk on the basis of prior awareness and preparedness.
  • 4.5K
  • 13 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Abuse of Power
Abuse of power or abuse of authority, in the form of "malfeasance in office" or "official abuse of power", is the commission of an unlawful act, done in an official capacity, which affects the performance of official duties. Malfeasance in office is often a just cause for removal of an elected official by statute or recall election. Officials who utilize abuse of power are often those who exploit the ability to use corruption in their advantage. In the United States, abuse of power has been cited in the impeachment of at least five federal officials. Two of these (Judge George English and President Richard Nixon) resigned before their trial in the Senate could take place, and two others were acquitted by the Senate. The two Senate impeachment trials of President Donald Trump concluded with the president being found not guilty both times. At the state level, Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was impeached and unanimously removed from office by the Illinois Senate in 2009 for offenses including abuse of power.
  • 4.5K
  • 16 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Storm Botnet
The Storm botnet or Storm worm botnet (also known as Dorf botnet and Ecard malware) was a remotely controlled network of "zombie" computers (or "botnet") that had been linked by the Storm Worm, a Trojan horse spread through e-mail spam. At its height in September 2007, the Storm botnet was running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems, and accounted for 8% of all malware on Microsoft Windows computers. It was first identified around January 2007, having been distributed by email with subjects such as "230 dead as storm batters Europe," giving it its well-known name. The botnet began to decline in late 2007, and by mid-2008 had been reduced to infecting about 85,000 computers, far less than it had infected a year earlier. As of December 2012, the original creators of Storm have not been found. The Storm botnet has displayed defensive behaviors that indicated that its controllers were actively protecting the botnet against attempts at tracking and disabling it, by specifically attacking the online operations of some security vendors and researchers who had attempted to investigate it. Security expert Joe Stewart revealed that in late 2007, the operators of the botnet began to further decentralize their operations, in possible plans to sell portions of the Storm botnet to other operators. It was reportedly powerful enough to force entire countries off the Internet, and was estimated to be capable of executing more instructions per second than some of the world's top supercomputers. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation considered the botnet a major risk to increased bank fraud, identity theft, and other cybercrimes.
  • 4.5K
  • 11 Oct 2022
  • Page
  • of
  • 2794
Featured Entry Collections
>>

Featured Reprints

>>
Encyclopedia of Digital Society, Industry 5.0 and Smart City
Encyclopedia of Engineering
Encyclopedia of Social Sciences
Encyclopedia of Medieval Royal Iconography
Academic Video Service
Feedback

Quick Survey

Encyclopedia MDPI is conducting a targeted survey to identify the specific barriers hindering efficient research. We invite you to spend 3 minutes defining the priorities for our next generation of structured knowledge tools.
Take Survey