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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 entropy is one of the fundamental states of a fluid and, in the viscous case, the equation that it satisfies is highly singular in the region close to the vacuum. In spite of its importance in the gas dynamics, the mathematical analyses on the behavior of the entropy near the vacuum region, were rarely carried out; in particular, in the presence of vacuum, either at the far field or at some isolated interior points, it was unknown whether the entropy remains its boundedness. The results obtained in this paper indicate that the ideal gases retain their uniform boundedness of the entropy, locally or globally in time, if the vacuum occurs at the far field only and the density decays slowly enough at the far field. Precisely, we consider the Cauchy problem to the one-dimensional full compressible Navier-Stokes equations without heat conduction, and establish the local and global existence and uniqueness of entropy-bounded solutions, in the presence of vacuum at the far field only. It is also shown that, different from the case that with compactly supported initial density, the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, with slowly decaying initial density, can propagate the regularities in inhomogeneous Sobolev spaces.

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.

In this survey, we discuss some recent results on free boundary minimal surfaces in the Euclidean unit-ball. The subject has been a very active field of research in the past few years due to the seminal work of Fraser and Schoen on the extremal Steklov eigenvalue problem. We review several different techniques of constructing examples of embedded free boundary minimal surfaces in the unit ball. Next, we discuss some uniqueness results for free boundary minimal disks and the conjecture about the uniqueness of critical catenoid. We also discuss several Morse index estimates for free boundary minimal surfaces. Moreover, we describe estimates for the first Steklov eigenvalue on such free boundary minimal surfaces and various smooth compactness results. Finally, we mention some sharp area bounds for free boundary minimal submanifolds and related questions.