When someone mentions the word “robot�, what comes to mind? Many people think of mechanical characters often seen in science fiction films. But look around and you’ll notice that our world is full of robots. From medical devices people use to help them walk to probes that explore the oceans and outer space, robots are all around us. In this non-fiction graphic novel, readers can join Max Axiom and the Society of Super Scientists as they take a closer look at the many kinds of robots and how they make our lives better every day.

Robyn Ray is a young ice hockey player with lots of speed and one big problem - she can’t seem to score a goal. Can her formerly famous ice hockey star grandpa help her build the skills she needs to score? And will her team come together when it matters most? Combining exciting sports stories and a diiverse cast of characters with a dynamic graphic novel format, this fast-paced tale of sportsmanship and teamwork comes to life in a full-colour graphic novel. Supportive back matter, including comprehension questions, writing prompts and non-fiction sports info, helps young readers and sports enthusiasts step up their game.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon. For the next three years, several other missions to the moon helped scientists learn more about space travel. However, nobody has been to the moon since 1972. Today, NASA is planning to go back to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. In this non-fiction graphic novel, young readers can tag along with Max Axiom and the Society of Super Scientists to discover how NASA plans to finally return to the moon and establish a permanent presence on Earth’s closest neighbour.

When Mariana and her new friend, Selena, try to play some basketball at a local court, they're challenged to a game by two older girls. If Mariana and Selena win, they get to use the court. But if the older girls win, they get Selena's special autographed shirt. Unfortunately, things go badly and the younger girls lose the bet-and the shirt. However, they soon come up with a plan. Although some of Mariana's skills are lacking, she's great at shooting hoops. Will the friends succeed in their hoops hustle to get back Selena's special shirt?

Star quarterback Alex has always played football with his best friend, Oscar. But when Oscar suddenly quits the team to join the school play, Alex feels blindsided and betrayed. Now pressure is mounting on and off the field. Can the two boys ever recover from their friendship fumble? Young readers will love the exciting American football story and the electrifying full-colour comic format in this Sport Stories Graphic Novel.

Countless animals around the world are in danger of dying out! But why are species becoming extinct, and what happens when we lose them? In this non-fiction graphic novel, Max Axiom and the Society of Super Scientists are on a mission to find out. Using their superpowers and super-smarts, the team will break down this urgent issue into an exciting, fact-filled adventure so young readers can learn about the causes and effects of animal extinction and endangerment and discover steps we can all take to save Earth's wildlife.

A major flaw in semi-Riemannian geometry is a shortage of suitable types of maps between semi-Riemannian manifolds that will compare their geometric properties. Here, a class of such maps called semi-Riemannian maps is introduced. The main purpose of this book is to present results in semi-Riemannian geometry obtained by the existence of such a map between semi-Riemannian manifolds, as well as to encourage the reader to explore these maps. The first three chapters are devoted to the development of fundamental concepts and formulas in semi-Riemannian geometry which are used throughout the work. In Chapters 4 and 5 semi-Riemannian maps and such maps with respect to a semi-Riemannian foliation are studied. Chapter 6 studies the maps from a semi-Riemannian manifold to 1-dimensional semi- Euclidean space. In Chapter 7 some splitting theorems are obtained by using the existence of a semi-Riemannian map. Audience: This volume will be of interest to mathematicians and physicists whose work involves differential geometry, global analysis, or relativity and gravitation.

Trees are being cut down around the world. But why are rainforests being cleared, and what happens if they disappear? In this non-fiction graphic novel, Max Axiom and the Society of Super Scientists are on a mission to find out! Using their superpowers and super-smarts, the team will break down this complex environmental issue into an exciting, fact-filled adventure so young readers can learn about the causes and effects of deforestation and discover steps we can all take to protect these fragile ecosystems.

Bianca is thrilled when her parents announce that her grandfather is coming to live with them. Bianca and Abuelo share a love of football, and she can't wait to share her love of drumming with her grandfather too. But when Abuelo arrives, he has his own ideas about how Bianca should practise and play. Those ideas translate into trouble on the field. Can Bianca find the beat in her feet before it costs her team the tournament?

This book reviews the state of the art in the use of organic materals as physical, chemical and biomedical sensors in a variety of application settings. Topics covered include organic semiconductors for chemical and physical sensing; conducting polymers in sensor applications; chemically functionalized organic semiconductors for highly selective sensing; composite organic-inorganic sensors; artificial skin applications; organic thin film transistor strain gauges for biomedical applications; OTFT infrared sensors for touchless human-machine interaction; smart fabric sensors and e-textile technologie; image capture with organic sensors; organic gas sensors and electronic noses; electrolyte gated organic transistors for bio-chemical sensing; ion-selective organic electrochemical transistors; DNA biosensors; metabolic organic sensors; and conductive polymer based sensors for biomedical applications.

Con algunos relatos diferentes entre si, un misterioso hombre trata de influenciar el estado de animo de dos viajeros a bordo de un barco que navega con rumbo a un pais desconocido y maravilloso, en el cual, solo existen la alegria y la felicidad. Durante la travesia, ese hombre, que se autonombra como un narrador de historias, en cada relato que les cuenta, hace que la pareja vaya cambiando el modo de percibir las cosas acerca de diferentes hechos ocurridos en sus vidas. Casi al final del viaje -que es completamente surrealista- los viajeros deben decidir por si mismos si lo terminan, o regresan a su lugar de origen a continuar con sus vidas actuales, vacias de cosas buenas y llenas de una cruel desesperanza; a tratar de sobrevivir en un lugar muy triste, donde no le importan a nadie y que se encuentra dominado por la maldad en todos su rincones.

Pharmaceutical and fine chemical products are typically synthesised batchwise which is an anomaly since batch processes have a series of practical and economical disadvantages. On the contrary, flow continuous processes present a series of advantages leading to new ways to synthesise chemical products. Flow processes - * enable control reaction parameters more precisely (temperature, residence time, amount of reagents and solvent etc.), leading to better reproducibility, safer and more reliable processes * can be performed more advantageously using immobilized reagents or catalysts * improve the selectivity and productivity of the process and possibly even the stability of the catalyst * offer opportunities for heat exchange and energy conservation as well as an easy separation and recycling of the reactants and products by adequate process design * achieve multistep syntheses by assembling a line of reactors with minimum or no purification in between two reaction steps * can be assured by facile automation * scale-up can be easily conducted by number-up With all the new research activity in manufacturing chemical products, this comprehensive book is very timely, as it summarises the latest trends in organic synthesis. It gives an insight into flow continuous processes, outlining the basic concepts and explaining the terminology of, and systems approach to, process design dealing with both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis and mini- or micro-reactors. The book contains case studies, extensive bibliographies and reference lists in each chapter to enable the reader to grasp the contents and to go on to more detailed texts on specific subjects if desired. The book is written by both organic chemists and engineers giving a multidisciplinary vision of the new tools and methodologies in this field. It is essential reading for organic chemists (in industry or academia) working alongside chemical engineers or who want to undertake chemical engineering projects. It will also be of interest for chemical engineers to see how basic engineering concepts are applied in modern organic chemistry.

This volume contains research and expository papers on recent advances in foliations and Riemannian geometry. Some of the topics covered in this volume include: topology, geometry, dynamics and analysis of foliations, curvature, submanifold theory, Lie groups and harmonic maps.Among the contributions, readers may find an extensive survey on characteristic classes of Riemannian foliations offering also new results, an article showing the uniform simplicity of certain diffeomorphism groups, an exposition of convergences of contact structures to foliations from the point of view of Thurston's and Thurston-Bennequin's inequalities, a discussion about Fatou-Julia decompositions for foliations and a description of singular Riemannian foliations on spaces without conjugate points.Papers on submanifold theory focus on the existence of graphs with prescribed mean curvature and mean curvature flow for spacelike graphs, isometric and conformal deformations and detailed surveys on totally geodesic submanifolds in symmetric spaces, cohomogeneity one actions on hyperbolic spaces and rigidity of geodesic spheres in space forms. Geometric realizability of curvature tensors and curvature operators are also treated in this volume with special attention to the affine and the pseudo-Riemannian settings. Also, some contributions on biharmonic maps and submanifolds enrich the scope of this volume in providing an overview of different topics of current interest in differential geometry.

Pseudo-Riemannian geometry is, to a large extent, the study of the Levi-Civita connection, which is the unique torsion-free connection compatible with the metric structure. There are, however, other affine connections which arise in different contexts, such as conformal geometry, contact structures, Weyl structures, and almost Hermitian geometry. In this book, we reverse this point of view and instead associate an auxiliary pseudo-Riemannian structure of neutral signature to certain affine connections and use this correspondence to study both geometries. We examine Walker structures, Riemannian extensions, and Kahler--Weyl geometry from this viewpoint. This book is intended to be accessible to mathematicians who are not expert in the subject and to students with a basic grounding in differential geometry. Consequently, the first chapter contains a comprehensive introduction to the basic results and definitions we shall need---proofs are included of many of these results to make it as self-contained as possible. Para-complex geometry plays an important role throughout the book and consequently is treated carefully in various chapters, as is the representation theory underlying various results. It is a feature of this book that, rather than as regarding para-complex geometry as an adjunct to complex geometry, instead, we shall often introduce the para-complex concepts first and only later pass to the complex setting. The second and third chapters are devoted to the study of various kinds of Riemannian extensions that associate to an affine structure on a manifold a corresponding metric of neutral signature on its cotangent bundle. These play a role in various questions involving the spectral geometry of the curvature operator and homogeneous connections on surfaces. The fourth chapter deals with Kahler--Weyl geometry, which lies, in a certain sense, midway between affine geometry and Kahler geometry. Another feature of the book is that we have tried wherever possible to find the original references in the subject for possible historical interest. Thus, we have cited the seminal papers of Levi-Civita, Ricci, Schouten, and Weyl, to name but a few exemplars. We have also given different proofs of various results than those that are given in the literature, to take advantage of the unified treatment of the area given herein.

A major flaw in semi-Riemannian geometry is a shortage of suitable types of maps between semi-Riemannian manifolds that will compare their geometric properties. Here, a class of such maps called semi-Riemannian maps is introduced. The main purpose of this book is to present results in semi-Riemannian geometry obtained by the existence of such a map between semi-Riemannian manifolds, as well as to encourage the reader to explore these maps. The first three chapters are devoted to the development of fundamental concepts and formulas in semi-Riemannian geometry which are used throughout the work. In Chapters 4 and 5 semi-Riemannian maps and such maps with respect to a semi-Riemannian foliation are studied. Chapter 6 studies the maps from a semi-Riemannian manifold to 1-dimensional semi- Euclidean space. In Chapter 7 some splitting theorems are obtained by using the existence of a semi-Riemannian map. Audience: This volume will be of interest to mathematicians and physicists whose work involves differential geometry, global analysis, or relativity and gravitation.

This book, which focuses on the study of curvature, is an introduction to various aspects of pseudo-Riemannian geometry. We shall use Walker manifolds (pseudo-Riemannian manifolds which admit a non-trivial parallel null plane field) to exemplify some of the main differences between the geometry of Riemannian manifolds and the geometry of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds and thereby illustrate phenomena in pseudo-Riemannian geometry that are quite different from those which occur in Riemannian geometry, i.e. for indefinite as opposed to positive definite metrics. Indefinite metrics are important in many diverse physical contexts: classical cosmological models (general relativity) and string theory to name but two. Walker manifolds appear naturally in numerous physical settings and provide examples of extremal mathematical situations as will be discussed presently. To describe the geometry of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold, one must first understand the curvature of the manifold. We shall analyze a wide variety of curvature properties and we shall derive both geometrical and topological results. Special attention will be paid to manifolds of dimension 3 as these are quite tractable. We then pass to the 4 dimensional setting as a gateway to higher dimensions. Since the book is aimed at a very general audience (and in particular to an advanced undergraduate or to a beginning graduate student), no more than a basic course in differential geometry is required in the way of background. To keep our treatment as self-contained as possible, we shall begin with two elementary chapters that provide an introduction to basic aspects of pseudo-Riemannian geometry before beginning on our study of Walker geometry. An extensive bibliography is provided for further reading. Math subject classifications : Primary: 53B20 -- (PACS: 02.40.Hw) Secondary: 32Q15, 51F25, 51P05, 53B30, 53C50, 53C80, 58A30, 83F05, 85A04 Table of Contents: Basic Algebraic Notions / Basic Geometrical Notions / Walker Structures / Three-Dimensional Lorentzian Walker Manifolds / Four-Dimensional Walker Manifolds / The Spectral Geometry of the Curvature Tensor / Hermitian Geometry / Special Walker Manifolds

The subject of this book is Osserman semi-Riemannian manifolds, and in particular, the Osserman conjecture in semi-Riemannian geometry. The treatment is pitched at the intermediate graduate level and requires some intermediate knowledge of differential geometry. The notation is mostly coordinate-free and the terminology is that of modern differential geometry. Known results toward the complete proof of Riemannian Osserman conjecture are given and the Osserman conjecture in Lorentzian geometry is proved completely. Counterexamples to the Osserman conjuncture in generic semi-Riemannian signature are provided and properties of semi-Riemannian Osserman manifolds are investigated.