This book is about raising finance for the international petroleum industry, an industry that represents one of the most important sectors in the modern world’s economy. The activities of the petroleum industry span the globe and many of its products have become essential for modern society. At its core, the industry is about providing energy in the form of fuels, especially for transportation and electrical power generation. This is achieved by extracting and transporting raw materials from underground reservoirs, processing these materials into fuels and then delivering the final products to end-consumers in all parts of the world. This industry is, however, about more than just fuels. The hydrocarbon molecules that the industry extracts from the earth are also used to produce a wide range of other important materials. The petrochemicals industry produces the vast majority of synthetic materials including: plastics, polymers, synthetic rubbers, detergents, solvents and so on. The refining industry produces waxes, lubricants and bitumens. More specialist petroleum processes produce fertilisers, pharmaceuticals and other essential chemicals <...>

On the occasion of the 65th birthday of K Alex Muller (KAM), the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Ruschlikon, with the help of J. Georg Bednorz, offered a compilation of almost all the publications he had authored or co-authored. Those two volumes encompass thewritings until 1992. They are very useful to access KAM's earlier work, with the more than 300 papers arranged in chronological order. When KAM turned seventy, Prof. KK Phua, chairman of World Scientific, suggested to collect relevant original work in a volume to be published by this well-established house. After some reflection, Muller thought this might be a reasonable undertaking, and selected, from the then more than 400 original publications, those he considered the relevant ones. The result is this book with its eleven chapters, arranged in topological rather than chronological order. In each chapter the pertinent publications in one specific area of investigations are grouped together. Therefore it should be easy for the reader to find a paper of interest to him or her. To bring this work up to date, it also includes KAM's articles on the topics in this book published after 1992 and publications by Tom Kool, the second author, who worked in the field of oxide perovskites as well and kept helping to realize and edit the present volume <...>

Pterosaurs (meaning ‘winged lizard’) were the first vertebrates to fly (figure 1) and are therefore often referred to as ‘flying reptiles’. However, like the dinosaurs, they are only remotely related to modern reptiles. For the same reason, it is not correct to refer to pterosaurs as ‘flying dinosaurs’.

Volcanic eruptions are spectacular natural events that have piqued man's curiosity since prehistoric times. On the one hand they can be of great benefit to man, but on the other can cause great harm and thereby provide a major impetus to their study. Broader aspects make use of volcanoes as windows into the interior of the earth. Magma, molten rock, provides one of the major clues to the earth's origin and to the evolution of its mantle and crust. Our planet's hydrosphere and atmosphere - and thus the origin and evolution of life - owe their origin to degassing of the earth, a process largely accomplished by volcanic eruption. Periods of especially intense volcanic activity can affect climate and thus the world's flora and fauna. Volcanic rocks are the source material from which many sedimentary and metamorphic rocks are derived.