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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 applications such as astrophysics and inertial confinement fusion, there are many three-dimensional cylindrical-symmetric multi-material problems which are usually simulated by Lagrangian schemes in the two-dimensional cylindrical coordinates. For this type of simulation, a critical issue for the schemes is to keep spherical symmetry in the cylindrical coordinate system if the original physical problem has this symmetry. In the past decades, several Lagrangian schemes with such symmetry property have been developed, but all of them are only first order accurate. In this paper, we develop a second order cell-centered Lagrangian scheme for solving compressible Euler equations in cylindrical coordinates, based on the control volume discretizations, which is designed to have uniformly second order accuracy and capability to preserve one-dimensional spherical symmetry in a two-dimensional cylindrical geometry when computed on an equal-angle-zoned initial grid. The scheme maintains several good properties such as conservation for mass, momentum and total energy, and the geometric conservation law. Several two-dimensional numerical examples in cylindrical coordinates are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the scheme in terms of accuracy, symmetry, non-oscillation and robustness. The advantage of higher order accuracy is demonstrated in these examples.

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Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, K, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the mutation rate, u, at which they arise in individuals: K = u. This identity enables genetic sequence data to be used as a “molecular clock” to estimate the timing of evolutionary events. While the molecular clock is known to be perturbed by selection, it is thought that K = u holds very generally for neutral evolution. Here we show that asymmetric spatial population structure can alter the molecular clock rate for neutral mutations, leading to either K<u or K>u. Our results apply to a general class of haploid, asexually reproducing, spatially structured populations. Deviations from K = u occur because mutations arise unequally at different sites and have different probabilities of fixation depending on where they arise. If birth rates are uniform across sites, then K
u. In general, K can take any value between 0 and Nu. Our model can be applied to a variety of population structures. In one example, we investigate the accumulation of genetic mutations in the small intestine. In another application, we analyze over 900 Twitter networks to study the effect of network topology on the fixation of neutral innovations in social evolution.