A gel is a state of matter that consists of a three-dimensional cross-linked polymer network and a large amount of solvent. Because of their structural characteristics, gels play important roles in science and technology. The science of gels has attracted much attention since the discovery of the volume phase transition by Professor Toyoichi Tanala at MIT in 1978. MDPI planned to publish a Special Issue in Gels to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this discovery, which received submissions of 13 original papers and one review from various areas of science. We believe that readers will find this Special Issue informative as to the recent advancements of gel research and the broad background of gel science.

A gel is a state of matter that consists of a three-dimensional cross-linked polymer network and a large amount of solvent. Because of their structural characteristics, gels play important roles in science and technology. The science of gels has attracted much attention since the discovery of the volume phase transition by Professor Toyoichi Tanala at MIT in 1978. MDPI planned to publish a Special Issue in Gels to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this discovery, which received submissions of 13 original papers and one review from various areas of science. We believe that readers will find this Special Issue informative as to the recent advancements of gel research and the broad background of gel science.

A gel is a state of matter that consists of a three-dimensional cross-linked polymer network and a large amount of solvent. Because of their structural characteristics, gels play important roles in science and technology. The science of gels has attracted much attention since the discovery of the volume phase transition by Professor Toyoichi Tanala at MIT in 1978. MDPI planned to publish a Special Issue in Gels to celebrate the 40th anniversary of this discovery, which received submissions of 13 original papers and one review from various areas of science. We believe that readers will find this Special Issue informative as to the recent advancements of gel research and the broad background of gel science.

Toyoichi Tanaka's pioneering work in biophysics made major contributions to the science of gels and polymers. His research centered on the physics of gels, their fundamental structures and characteristics, their dynamics, and their roles in living organisms. This volume collects twenty-five major research papers originally published in Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, and other leading journals between 1973 and 2000. The English texts are supplemented with Japanese summaries and critiques written by a group of Dr. Tanaka's colleagues and students.

?? Giant molecules are important in our everyday life. But, as pointed out by the authors, they are also associated with a culture. What Bach did with the harpsichord, Kuhn and Flory did with polymers. We owe a lot of thanks to those who now make this music accessible ??Pierre-Gilles de GennesNobel Prize laureate in Physics(Foreword for the 1st Edition, March 1996)This book describes the basic facts, concepts and ideas of polymer physics in simple, yet scientifically accurate, terms. In both scientific and historic contexts, the book shows how the subject of polymers is fascinating, as it is behind most of the wonders of living cell machinery as well as most of the newly developed materials. No mathematics is used in the book beyond modest high school algebra and a bit of freshman calculus, yet very sophisticated concepts are introduced and explained, ranging from scaling and reptations to protein folding and evolution. The new edition includes an extended section on polymer preparation methods, discusses knots formed by molecular filaments, and presents new and updated materials on such contemporary topics as single molecule experiments with DNA or polymer properties of proteins and their roles in biological evolution.

This volume contains a series of papers originally presented at the Symposium on Polymer Gels organized and sponsored by the Research Group on Polymer Gels,The Society of Polymer Science of Japan and co-sponsored by the Science and Technology Agency (ST A) and MIT!, Japan. The Symposium took place at Tsukuba Science City on 18th and 19th September, 1989. Recognized experts in their fields were invited to speak and there was a strong attendance from government, academic and industrial research centers. The purpose of the Symposium was to review the state of the art and to present and discuss recent progress in the understanding of the behavioral properties of polymer gels and their application to biomedical, environmental and robotic fields. Most of the papers and related discussions concentrated on the swelling behavior of hydrogels and chemomechanical systems, both artificial and naturally occurring, in which external stimuli of a physical or chemical nature control energy transformation or signal transduction. The recent great interest in chemomechanical systems based on polymer gels has stimulated considerable effort towards the development of new sensors and actuators, controllable membrane separation processes, and delivery systems in which the functions of sensing, processing and actuation are all built into the polymeric network device. Artificial chemomechanical systems, through the use of environmentally sensitive polymer gels, are emerging as interesting materials for mimicking basic processes previously only confined to the biological world, and commercially viable applications are also foreseen in the not-too-distant future.

In the twenty years since their inception, modern dynamic light-scattering techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, and their applications have grown exceedingly diverse. Applications of the techniques to problems in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and fluid mechanics have prolifer ated. It is probably no longer possible for one or two authors to write a monograph to cover in depth the advances in scattering techniques and the main areas in which they have made a major impact. This volume, which we expect to be the first of aseries, presents reviews of selected specialized areas by renowned experts. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive; it emphasizes a body of related applications to polymeric, biological, and colloidal systems, and to critical phenomena. The well-known monographs on dynamic light scattering by Berne and Pecora and by Chu were published almost ten years ago. They provided comprehensive treatments of the general principles of dynamic light scat tering and gave introductions to a wide variety of applications, but natu rally they could not treat the new applications and advances in older ones that have arisen in the last decade. The new applications include studies of interacting particles in solution (Chapter 4); scaling approaches to the dynamics of polymers, including polymers in semidilute solution (Chapter 5); the use of both Fabry-Perot interferometry and photon correlation spectroscopy to study bulk polymers (Chapter 6); studies of micelIes and microemulsions (Chapter 8); studies of polymer gels (Chapter 9).