In the presence of vacuum, the physical entropy for polytropic gases behaves singularly and it is thus a challenge to study its dynamics. It is shown in this paper that the boundedness of the entropy can be propagated up to any finite time provided that the initial vacuum presents only at far fields with sufficiently slow decay of the initial density. More precisely, for the Cauchy problem of the onedimensional heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations, the global well-posedness of strong solutions and uniform boundedness of the corresponding entropy are established, as long as the initial density vanishes only at far fields with a rate no more than $O(\frac{1}{x^2})$. The main tools of proving the uniform boundedness of the entropy are some singularly weighted energy estimates carefully designed for the heat conductive compressible Navier--Stokes equations and an elaborate De Giorgi type iteration technique for some classes of degenerate parabolic equations. The De Giorgi type iterations are carried out to different equations in establishing the lower and upper bounds of the entropy.

We establish global regularity for weak solutions to quasilinear divergence form elliptic and parabolic equations over Lipschitz domains with controlled growth conditions on low order terms. The leading coefficients belong to the class of BMO functions with small mean oscillations with respect to <i>x</i>.

We study regularity criteria for weak solutions of the dissipative quasi-geostrophic equation (with dissipation ()^<i></i>/2, 0 &lt; <i></i> 1). We show in this paper that if , or with is a weak solution of the 2D quasi-geostrophic equation, then <i></i> is a classical solution in . This result improves our previous result in [18].

We establish several gradient estimates for second-order divergence type parabolic and elliptic systems. The coefficients and data are assumed to be Hlder or Dini continuous in the time variable and all but one spatial variable. This type of system arises from the problems of linearly elastic laminates and composite materials. For the proof, we use Campanatos approach in a novel way. Non-divergence type equations under similar conditions are also discussed.

We study a one-dimensional transport equation with nonlocal velocity which was recently considered in the work of Crdoba, Crdoba and Fontelos [A. Crdoba, D. Crdoba, MA Fontelos, Formation of singularities for a transport equation with nonlocal velocity, Ann. of Math.(2) 162 (3)(2005) 13771389]. We show that in the subcritical and critical cases the problem is globally well-posed with arbitrary initial data in H max {3/2 , 0}. While in the supercritical case, the problem is locally well-posed with initial data in H 3/2 , and is globally well-posed under a smallness assumption. Some polynomial-in-time decay estimates are also discussed. These results improve some previous results in [A. Crdoba, D. Crdoba, MA Fontelos, Formation of singularities for a transport equation with nonlocal velocity, Ann. of Math.(2) 162 (3)(2005) 13771389].