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 <...>

Исследования Геологического Комитета в Крымском горном кряже доставили немало новых материалов, как для понимания морфологии, так и для тектоники и стратиграфии этих гор. В частности это касается и той песчаноглинистой толщи, которая слагает нижнюю часть склона Южного берега, а также значительныя площади на северном склоне кряжа. Эта толща является то более глинистой, и тогда почти черного цвета, с отдельными известковыми и сферосидеритовыми стяжениями и с пропластами плотных, более или менее железистых песчаников и вулканических туфов, то более песчаной и тогда более светлых цветов, обычно сильно слюдистой и с массой плохо сохраненныхъ растительных остатков; <...>

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’.

The essential difference in the formation between conjugate brittle shear fractures and ductile shear zones is that the intersection angle of conjugate faults in the contractional quadrants in the former is acute (usually w60
) and obtuse (usually 110
) in the latter. The Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is an experimentally validated empirical relationship, which structural geologists use to interpret the stress directions based on the orientation of the brittle shear fractures. However, a simple application of this criterion assuming that the principal stresses are vertical or horizontal throughout the crust fails to explain crustal scale low-angle normal faults, high-angle reverse faults and certain types of conjugate strike-slip faults that have intersection angles in the compressional quadrants greater than 90
.