Cover: The characteristic morphology of poly(vinyl chloride) PVC particles, as measured through bulk density and cold plasticizer absorption at a plant site, can be monitored and controlled with the help of near‐infrared measurements and advanced control procedures. Further details can be found in the Special Series Full Paper by J. M. de Faria Jr., F. Machado, E. L. Lima, and J. C. Pinto* .

Species vary in their vulnerability to extinction according to their biology, ecology, environmental factors and threats to which they are exposed. Diet is an important ecological trait that affects many aspects of a species' biology, including its vulnerability to extinction. Despite the importance of diet as a species' trait, its influence on extinction risk has only been studied in a coarse way, in part due to a lack of detailed diet data covering a large breadth of species or geographic areas. We examined the association between diet and extinction risk in primates, using a high-resolution dataset covering all major primate lineages and habitats on a global scale. The resolution of the dataset allowed us to calculate multiple biologically informative metrics for diet composition and diversity, allowing us to tease apart what aspects of diet were most important for predicting the risk of extinction, whilst accounting for phylogeny, body mass and geographic range size. Our results showed that both diet disparity and diet diversity predict primate extinction risk, showing that primates that are able to consume more types of items, and items that are more disparate from one another, are less prone to extinction. Furthermore, we found that although closely related species tend to have similar dietary diversity and disparity, these metrics vary widely amongst primate families. Primates with a high diet diversity and disparity may be able to cope better with fluctuations in food availability than species with homogeneous diet items, through a portfolio effect. Understanding the degree of dietary specialization of the species may help guide new studies relating to extinction risk and threats and be useful in future species assessments.

A modification of the conventional batch organosolv process is proposed in a way where the solid biomass remains inside a basket, physically separated from the liquid phase, with the vapor promoting the fractionation of the biomass and the extracted compounds and fragments being washed down to the liquid phase. The modified organosolv process applied to sugarcane bagasse (SB‐M) delivers a rich cellulosic solid phase that after enzymatic hydrolysis leads to a hydrolyzed with approximately 100 g L−1 of glucose. At the same enzymatic hydrolysis conditions, the conventional organosolv process (SB‐C) delivers a hydrolyzed with 80 g L−1 of glucose, while the autohydrolysis process (SB‐A) leads to 55 g L−1 of glucose. These different results are related to the cellulose content: SB‐M (70%), SB‐C (57%), e SB‐A (44%), as well the reduced lignin content in the SB‐M. The novelty of this study is the confirmation that it is possible to degrade lignin from sugarcane bagasse and simultaneously remove its fragments from the cellulose fibers in a batch reactor containing an internal basket. This study describes a simple and rapid protocol for the isolation of the main components of lignocellulosic biomass (cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin), which may lead to the study of new catalysts for the chemical transformation of these components separately or simultaneously to the step of pretreatment.

Crosslinking is a valuable route to creating new polymeric materials and normally involves introduction of a cross linker or some form of secondary processing. Here we report the discovery and...