In this paper we consider the initial-boundary value problem to the one-dimensional compressible Navier{Stokes equations for ideal gases. Both the viscous and heat conductive coeffcients are assumed to be positive constants, and the initial density is allowed to have vacuum. Global existence and uniqueness of strong solutions is established for any H2 initial data, which generalizes the well-known result of Kazhikhov and Shelukhin [J. Appl. Math. Mech., 41 (1977), pp. 273{282] to the case that with nonnegative initial density. An observation to overcome the diculty caused by the lack of the positive lower bound of the density is that the ratio of the density to its initial value is inversely proportional to the time integral of the upper bound of the temperature along the trajectory.

The paper aims at analytically exhibiting for the first time the fundamental mechanisms underlying the fact that effective biological tissue electrical properties and their frequency dependence reflect the tissue composition and physiology. For doing so, a homogenization theory is derived to describe the effective admittivity of cell suspensions. A new formula is reported for dilute cases that gives the frequency-dependent effective admittivity with re- spect to the membrane polarization. Different microstructures are shown to be distinguish- able via spectroscopic measurements of the overall admittivity using the spectral properties of the membrane polarization. The Debye relaxation times associated with the membrane polarization tensor are shown to be able to give the microscopic structure of the medium. A natural measure of the admittivity anisotropy is introduced and its dependence on the frequency of applied current is derived. A Maxwell-Wagner-Fricke formula is given for concentric circular cells, and the results can be extended to the random cases. A randomly deformed periodic medium is also considered and a new formula is derived for the overall admittivity of a dilute suspension of randomly deformed cells.

A new augmented method is proposed for elliptic interface problems with a piecewise variable coefficient that has a finite jump across a smooth interface. The main motivation is to get not only a second order accurate solution but also a second order accurate gradient from each side of the interface. Key to the new method is introducing the jump in the normal derivative of the solution as an augmented variable and rewriting the interface problem as a new PDE that consists of a leading Laplacian operator plus lower order derivative terms near the interface. In this way, the leading second order derivative jump relations are independent of the jump in the coefficient that appears only in the lower order terms after the scaling. An upwind type discretization is used for the finite difference discretization at the irregular grid points on or near the interface so that the resulting coefficient matrix is an M-matrix. A multigrid solver is used to solve the linear system of equations, and the GMRES iterative method is used to solve the augmented variable. Second order convergence for the solution and the gradient from each side of the interface is proved in this paper. Numerical examples for general elliptic interface problems confirm the theoretical analysis and efficiency of the new method.

We investigate the nonlinear stability of the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves for a one-dimensional (1D) bipolar Vlasov--Poisson--Boltzmann (VPB) system, which can be used to describe the transportation of charged particles under the additional electrostatic potential force. Based on a new micro-macro type of decomposition around the local Maxwellian related to the bipolar VPB system in the previous work [H.-L. Li, Y. Wang, T. Yang, and M.-Y. Zhong, <i>Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal.</i>, 228 (2018), pp. 39--127], we prove that the superposition of a viscous contact wave and two rarefaction waves is time-asymptotically stable to the 1D bipolar VPB system under some smallness conditions on the initial perturbations and wave strength, which implies that this typical superposition wave pattern is nonlinearly stable under the combined effects of the binary collisions, the electrostatic potential

A review is presented of recent results on front propagation in reaction-diffusion-advection equations in homogeneous and heterogeneous media. Formal asymptotic expansions and heuristic ideas are used to motivate the results wherever possible. The fronts include constant-speed monotone traveling fronts in homogeneous media, periodically varying traveling fronts in periodic media, and fluctuating and fractal fronts in random media. These fronts arise in a wide range of applications such as chemical kinetics, combustion, biology, transport in porous media, and industrial deposition processes. Open problems are briefly discussed along the way.