A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) serves almost half of all infants and about one-quarter of all children between one and four years of age in the United States. The WIC program faces the following challenges: (1) coordinating its nutrition services with health and welfare programs undergoing considerable change, (2) responding to health and demographic changes in the low-income population, (3) recruiting and keeping a skilled staff, (4) improving the use of information technology to enhance service delivery and program management, (5) assessing the effect of nutrition services, and (6) meeting increased program requirements without a corresponding increase in funding. This report identifies 16 approaches to address these challenges. Each of the approaches has advantages and disadvantages that policymakers should consider."

Trade ministers from 142 member countries of the World Trade Organizations met in Doha, Qatar, issuing a ministerial declaration, along with two statements on developing country concerns.

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Hyper-thermal species have been used to produce carbon-based films with mechanical and tribological properties that have greatly expanded the applications of amorphous carbon coatings. Tetragonally bonded amorphous carbon films have properties that approach that of diamond in several ways. The major drawback, namely intrinsic stresses, preventing the production of thick ta-C films has been overcome by heat treating these films, and presently several micrometer-thick films of ta-C are regularly produced. Yet another area where superhard coatings are of great interest is for wear applications at elevated temperatures, namely around 500 degrees C and above. Such temperatures may be environment temperatures, or localized (flash) temperatures resulting for instance from wear. For this applications, doping the ta-C with elements that are covalently bonded to C (such as Si and B) offers a promising alternative. In this article, I will discuss some treatments that have allowed expanding the applications of pure ta-C, and the incorporation of Si and B on ta-C films. Film properties are presented and discussed.

In 1992 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced ENERGY STAR (registered trademark) a voluntary labeling program designed to identify and promote energy-efficient products, in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Since then, the EPA, now in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has expanded the program to cover nearly the entire buildings sector, spanning new homes, commercial buildings, residential heating and cooling equipment, major appliances, office equipment, commercial and residential lighting, and home electronics. This paper is based on our experience since 1993 in providing technical support to the ENERGY STAR program. We provide a snapshot of the ENERGY STAR program in the year 2000, including a general overview of the program, its accomplishments, and the possibilities for future development.

If a contact interaction type correction to a Standard Model process is observed, studying its detailed properties can provide information on the fundamental physics responsible for it. Assuming that such a correction has been observed in lepton pair production at a 500 GeV-1 TeV linear collider, we consider a few possible models that could explain it, such as theories with large and TeV-scale extra dimensions and models with lepton compositeness. We show that using the measured cross-sections and angular distributions, these models can be distinguished with a high degree of confidence.

The Department of Energy's Office of Advanced Automotive Technologies has been supporting the development of fuel-flexible fuel processors at Argonne National Laboratory. These fuel processors will enable fuel cell vehicles to operate on fuels available through the existing infrastructure. The constraints of on-board space and weight require that these fuel processors be designed to be compact and lightweight, while meeting the performance targets for efficiency and gas quality needed for the fuel cell. This paper discusses the performance of a prototype fuel processor that has been designed and fabricated to operate with liquid fuels, such as gasoline, ethanol, methanol, etc. Rated for a capacity of 10 kWe (one-fifth of that needed for a car), the prototype fuel processor integrates the unit operations (vaporization, heat exchange, etc.) and processes (reforming, water-gas shift, preferential oxidation reactions, etc.) necessary to produce the hydrogen-rich gas (reformate) that will fuel the polymer electrolyte fuel cell stacks. The fuel processor work is being complemented by analytical and fundamental research. With the ultimate objective of meeting on-board fuel processor goals, these studies include: modeling fuel cell systems to identify design and operating features; evaluating alternative fuel processing options; and developing appropriate catalysts and materials. Issues and outstanding …

Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) is a scalable technology, for ultrashort pulse amplification. Its major advantages include design simplicity, broad bandwidth, tunability, low B-integral, high contrast, and high beam quality. OPCPA is suitable both for scaling to high peak power as well as high average power. We describe the amplification of stretched 100 fs oscillator pulses in a three-stage OPCPA system pumped by a commercial, single-longitudinal-mode, Q-switched Nd:YAG laser. The stretched pulses were centered around 1054 nm with a FWHM bandwidth of 16.5 nm and had an energy of 0.5 nJ. Using our OPCPA system, we obtained an amplified pulse energy of up to 31 mJ at a 10 Hz repetition rate. The overall conversion efficiency from pump to signal is 6%, which is the highest efficiency obtained With a commercial tabletop pump laser to date. The overall conversion efficiency is limited due to the finite temporal overlap of the seed (3 ns) with respect to the duration of the pump (8.5 ns). Within the temporal window of the seed pulse the pump to signal conversion efficiency exceeds 20%. Recompression of the amplified signal was demonstrated to 310 fs, limited by the aberrations initially present in the low energy …

B-roll video footage from the KXAS-TV/NBC 5 television station in Fort Worth, Texas, covering a news story.

A series of laboratory experiments, including the measurement of electrical properties and permeability, were performed on carefully characterized sand-clay mixtures. Different mixtures and configurations of quartz sand and 0 to 10% Na-montmorillonite clay were investigated using solutions of NaCl, CaCl{sub 2}, and deionized water. Samples containing 10% distributed clay were also studied using fluids containing 20 and 500 ppm trichloroethylene (TCE). Electrical properties were measured at frequencies between 10{sup 6} and 10{sup -2} Hz using the four-electrode method and Ag-AgCl inner electrodes on saturated samples at room temperature and 412 kPa confining pressure, corresponding to a soil depth of 15 to 20 m. Our results show that the addition of TCE has a small effect on electrical resistivity, with resistivity increasing with the addition of TCE. The influence of TCE on the electrical properties was most prominent in plots of loss tangent as a function of frequency. A loss tangent peak occurred at {approx}200 Hz. The height of the peak and the peak frequency both decrease with the addition of TCE. Further experiments were performed on samples containing a distinct clay layer parallel to current flow. Electrical properties were measured on water saturated samples and as a mixture of ethanol …

Spatially Resolved X-Ray Diffraction (SRXRD) was used to investigate phase transformations that occur in the heat affected zone (HAZ) of gas tungsten arc (GTA) welds in AISI 1005 carbon-manganese steel. In situ SRXRD experiments performed at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) probed the phases present in the HAZ during welding, and these real-time observations of the HAZ phases were used to construct a map of the phase transformations occurring in the HAZ. This map identified 5 principal phase regions between the liquid weld pool and the unaffected base metal for the carbon-manganese steel studied in this investigation. Regions of annealing, recrystallization, partial transformation and complete transformation to {alpha}-Fe, {gamma}-Fe, and {delta}-Fe phases were identified using SRXRD, and the experimental results were combined with a heat flow model of the weld to investigate transformation kinetics under both positive and negative temperature gradients in the HAZ. From the resulting phase transformation map, the kinetics of phase transformations that occur under the highly non-isothermal heating and cooling cycles produced during welding of steels can now be better understood and modeled.

Video footage from the NBC 5 television station in Fort Worth, Texas, to accompany a news story. This story aired at 5 P.M.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Innovative program to explore the viability of using Cavity Ringdown Spectroscopy (CRDS) for trace analysis and monitoring of remediation processes for hazardous and radioactive wastes. Cavity ringdown spectroscopy is a measurement of the rate of absorption of a sample within a closed optical cavity rather than the standard measurement of the avsorved signal strength over a given sample path. It is a technique capable of providing ultra-sensitive absorption measurements in hostile environments using commercially available easy-to-use pulsed lasers. The inherent high sensitivity stems from both the long effective sample pathlengths possible and the relaxed constraints on the accuracy of the measurement of the cavity decay time.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Emory, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Student newspaper from St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas that includes news and information of interest to the college community along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

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The optical spectroscopy of VO{sub 2} nanocrystals in planar and fiber-waveguide geometries shows a size- and doping-dependent structural semiconductor-to-metal phase transition and a shape-dependent surface plasmon resonance, with unusual linear and nonlinear applications possibilities.

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NREL conducted economic analysis examining two process designs for producing hydrogen from thermocatalytic decomposition based on research by Dr. Nazim Muradov of FSEC.

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