Article documents the life of Jack Montgomery and recalls his service with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division in World War II, where he received the Medal of Honor for his actions during the war.

Psychrophilic archaea are abundant and perform critical roles throughout the Earth's expansive cold biosphere. Here we report the first complete genome sequence for a psychrophilic methanogenic archaeon, Methanococcoides burtonii. The genome sequence was manually annotated including the use of a five tiered Evidence Rating system that ranked annotations from Evidence Rating (ER) 1 (gene product experimentally characterized from the parent organism) to ER5 (hypothetical gene product) to provide a rapid means of assessing the certainty of gene function predictions. The genome is characterized by a higher level of aberrant sequence composition (51%) than any other archaeon. In comparison to hyper/thermophilic archaea which are subject to selection of synonymous codon usage, M. burtonii has evolved cold adaptation through a genomic capacity to accommodate highly skewed amino acid content, while retaining codon usage in common with its mesophilic Methanosarcina cousins. Polysaccharide biosynthesis genes comprise at least 3.3% of protein coding genes in the genome, and Cell wall/membrane/envelope biogenesis COG genes are over-represented. Likewise, signal transduction (COG category T) genes are over-represented and M. burtonii has a high 'IQ' (a measure of adaptive potential) compared to many methanogens. Numerous genes in these two over-represented COG categories appear to have been acquired from {var_epsilon}- …

The U.S. Department of Energy's Million Solar Roofs Initiative (MSR) is a unique public-private partnership aimed at overcoming market barriers for photovoltaics (PV), solar water heating, transpired solar collectors, solar space heating and cooling, and pool heating. This report contains annual progress reports from 866 partners across the United States.