A comprehensive look at the latest advances in soft material gradients Tremendous progress has been made in the field of surface-bound soft material gradients in recent years, with intriguing new areas of investigation opening up and advances in bioanalytics changing the way high-throughput screening methods are used in the design and discovery of catalysts and new materials. This volume provides the first complete, up-to-date summary of the progress in this field, showing readers how to harness the powerful properties of soft matter gradients in the design and development of modern functional materials. Contributed chapters from experts in diverse fields help bridge areas of materials science, chemistry, and biomaterials, covering fabrication techniques, gradients in self-assembled monolayers, polymer gradients, dynamic gradient structures, structure and assembly, mechanical properties, sensors, biomaterial applications, protein adsorption, and organization of cells on gradient surfaces. Readers will learn how to implement the techniques described in the book in their own work, while improving efficacy and lowering research and production costs. Soft Matter Gradient Surfaces is an invaluable resource for chemists, physicists, biologists, and engineers, and anyone who would like to take advantage of these unique soft matter building blocks.

This resource contains antisemitic and racist content.

This volume is a selection of invaluable papers by P-G de Gennes — 1991 Nobel Prize winner in Physics — which have had a long-lasting impact on our understanding of condensed matter. Important ideas on polymers, liquid crystals and interfaces are described. The author has added some afterthoughts to the main papers (explaining their successes or weaknesses), and some current views on each special problem. The text is simple and easy to read.

The essays in this collection explore the idea that discursive norms—the norms governing our thought and talk—are profoundly social. Not only do these norms govern and structure our social interactions, but they are sustained by a variety of social and institutional structures. The chapters are divided into three thematic sections. The first offers historical perspectives on discursive norms, including a chapter by Robert Brandom on the way Hegel transformed Kant’s normativist approach to representation by adding both a social and a historicist dimension to it. Section II features four chapters that examine the sociality of normativity from within a broadly naturalistic framework. The third and final section focuses on the social dimension of linguistic phenomena such as online speech acts, oppressive speech, and assertions. The Social Institution of Discursive Norms will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.

This is a monograph written for the young and advanced researcher who is entering the field of wet granular matter, keen to understand the basic physical principles governing this state of soft matter. It treats wet granulates as a ternary system consisting of the grains, a primary, and a secondary fluid. After generally addressing wetting phenomena and outlining the basic facts on dry granular systems, a chapter on basic mechanisms and their effects is dedicated to every region of the ternary phase diagram. Effects of grain shape and roughness are considered as well. Rather than addressing engineering aspects like existing books on this topic do, this book aims to provide a generalized framework suitable for those who want to understand these systems on a more fundamental basis. It spans a wide scope of questions, ranging from possible general principles behind the emergence of structure and pattern, to the interpretation of geological outcrop features we encounter in nature.