The use oflubricants began in ancient times and has developed into a major international business through the need to lubricate machines of increasing complexity. The impetus for lubricant development has arisen from need, so lubricatingpractice has precededan understandingofthescientificprinciples. This is not surprising as the scientific basis of the technology is, by nature, highly complex and interdisciplinary. However, we believe that the under standing of lubricant phenomena will continue to be developed at a mol ecular level to meet future challenges. These challenges will include the control of emissions from internal combustion engines, the reduction of friction and wear in machinery, and continuing improvements to lubricant performanceand life-time. More recently, there has been an increased understanding ofthe chemical aspects of lubrication, which has complemented the knowledge and under standing gained through studies dealing with physics and engineering. This book aims to bring together this chemical information and present it in a practical way. It is written by chemists who are authorities in the various specialisations within the lubricating industry, and is intended to be of interest to chemists who may already be working in the lubricating industry or in academia, and who are seeking a chemist's view of lubrication. It will also be of benefit to engineers and technologists familiar with the industry who requirea more fundamental understanding oflubricants.

This book presents recent state of advances in mechatronics presented on the 7th International Conference Mechatronics 2007, hosted at the Faculty of Mechatronics, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. The selected papers give an overview of the state-of-the-art and present new research results and prospects of the future development in this interdisciplinary field of mechatronic systems.

An annotated bibliography.

Reproduction of the original.

For twenty years now, Frederick Busch has been a relentless chronicler of the human heart. Except for an occasional foray abroad, he has tended to set his fiction in a physical territory--the Northeast, upstate New York especially--which he has given literary shape. With the capaciousness of a Dickens and the control of a Hemingway, Busch's novels have come in steady counterpoint, raising and answering by turns insistent questions that worry even the plainest of domestic lives. In this his fifth book of stories, the Absent Friends of the title are the lost characters the author has so compassionately detailed, who long to recover their absent selves. But they are also, as Richard Bausch comments in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "friends we have failed, or who have failed us; it is the emotional cost of that estrangement that interests Frederick Busch."