The Contour Tree of a scalar field is the graph obtained by contracting all the connected components of the level sets of the field into points. This is a powerful abstraction for representing the structure of the field with explicit description of the topological changes of its level sets. It has proven effective as a data-structure for fast extraction of isosurfaces and its application has been advocated as a user interface component guiding interactive data exploration sessions. We propose a new metaphor for visualizing the Contour Tree borrowed from the classical design of a mechanical orrery reproducing a hierarchy of orbits of the planets around the sun or moons around a planet. In the toporrery the hierarchy of stars, planets and moons is replaced with a hierarchy of maxima, minima and saddles that can be interactively filtered, both uniformly and adaptively, by importance with respect to a given metric.

In recent years subdivision methods have been successfully applied to the multi-resolution representation and compression of surface meshes. Unfortunately their use in the volumetric case has remained impractical because of the use of tensor-product generalizations that induce an excessive growth of the mesh size before sufficient number is preformed. This technical sketch presents a new subdivision technique that refines volumetric (and higher-dimensional) meshes at the same rate of surface meshes. The scheme builds adaptive refinements of a mesh without using special decompositions of the cells connecting different levels of resolution. Lower dimensional ''sharp'' features are also handled directly in a natural way. The averaging rules allow to reproduce the same smoothness of the two best known previous tensor product refinement methods.

The conclusions of the presentation are: (1) Confirmed Isomorphism; (2) Reproduced Sigmoidal Relationship Between Melting Temperature and Composition; (3) Tg Increased with Increasing 9T Content; (4) Thermal Stability Increased with Increasing 9T Content; (5) Crystallization Rate Increased Dramatically at 9T Contents Above 50 Mole %; and (6) Copolymers Possessing a 9T Content Exceeding 50 Mole % 9T Possess Very Desirable Thermal Properties That Rival Nylon 6,6.

The nuclear fuel cycle generates a considerable amount of radioactive waste, which often includes nuclear fission products, such as strontium-90 ({sup 90}Sr) and cesium-137 ({sup 137}Cs), and actinides such as uranium (U) and plutonium (Pu). When released into the environment, large quantities of these radionuclides can present considerable problems to man and biota due to their radioactive nature and, in some cases as with the actinides, their chemical toxicity. Radionuclides are expected to decay at a known rate. Yet, research has shown the rate of elimination from an ecosystem to differ from the decay rate due to physical, chemical and biological processes that remove the contaminant or reduce its biological availability. Knowledge regarding the rate by which a contaminant is eliminated from an ecosystem (ecological half-life) is important for evaluating the duration and potential severity of risk. To better understand a contaminants impact on an environment, consideration should be given to plants. As primary producers, they represent an important mode of contamination transfer from sediments and soils into the food chain. Contaminants that are chemically and/or physically sequestered in a media are less likely to be bio-available to plants and therefore an ecosystem.

The National Ignition Campaign (NIC) uses non-igniting 'THD' capsules to study and optimize the hydrodynamic assembly of the fuel without burn. These capsules are designed to simultaneously reduce DT neutron yield and to maintain hydrodynamic similarity with the DT ignition capsule. We will discuss nominal THD performance and the associated experimental observables. We will show the results of large ensembles of numerical simulations of THD and DT implosions and their simulated diagnostic outputs. These simulations cover a broad range of both nominal and off nominal implosions. We will focus on the development of an experimental implosion performance metric called the experimental ignition threshold factor (ITFX). We will discuss the relationship between ITFX and other integrated performance metrics, including the ignition threshold factor (ITF), the generalized Lawson criterion (GLC), and the hot spot pressure (HSP). We will then consider the experimental results of the recent NIC THD campaign. We will show that we can observe the key quantities for producing a measured ITFX and for inferring the other performance metrics. We will discuss trends in the experimental data, improvement in ITFX, and briefly the upcoming tuning campaign aimed at taking the next steps in performance improvement on the path to ignition …

In this present work, the affects of different transition metal halides (TiCl{sub 3}, VCl{sub 3}, ScCl{sub 3} and NiCl{sub 2}) on the sorption properties of the 1:1 molar ratio of LiNH{sub 2} to MgH{sub 2} are investigated. The modified mixtures were found to contain LiNH{sub 2}, MgH{sub 2} and LiCl. TGA results showed that the hydrogen desorption temperature was reduced with the modifier addition in this order: TiCl{sub 3}>ScCl{sub 3}>VCl{sub 3}>NiCl{sub 2}. Ammonia release was not significantly reduced resulting in a weight loss greater than the theoretical hydrogen storage capacity of the material. The isothermal sorption kinetics of the modified systems showed little improvement after the first dehydrogenation cycle over the unmodified system but showed drastic improvement in rehydrogenation cycles. XRD and Raman spectroscopy identified the cycled material to be composed of LiH, MgH{sub 2}, Mg(NH{sub 2}){sub 2} and Mg{sub 3}N{sub 2}.

Molecular surface computations are often necessary in order to perform synthetic drug design. A critical step in this process is the computation and update of an exact boundary representation for the molecular surface (e.g. the Lee-Richards surface). In this paper they introduce efficient techniques for computing a molecular surface boundary representation as a set of NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines) patches. This representation introduces for molecules the same geometric data structure used in the solid modeling community and enables immediate access to a wide range of modeling operations and techniques. Furthermore, this allows the use of any general solid modeling or visualization system as a molecular modeling interface. However, using such a representation in a molecular modeling environment raises several efficiency and update constraints, especially in a dynamic setting. For example, changes in the probe radius result in both geometric and topological changes to the set of patches. The techniques provide the option of trading accuracy of the representation for the efficiency of the computation, while still tracking the changes in the set of patches. In particular, they discuss two main classes of dynamic updates: one that keeps the topology of the molecular configuration fixed, and a more complicated case where …

The diffusivity (D) in alloy systems at low temperatures is determined using composition-modulated structures. An artificial concentration wave is produced by alternating a deposition of the alloy elements. A quantification of the interdiffusivity coefficient is determined by analyzing the decay of the composition fluctuation, that is, the static concentration wave using Khachaturyan's microscopic theory of diffusion. As it's customary to assume that there is a linear relationship between ln D and T over a wide range of temperature (T), the bulk diffusion coefficient represents the long wavelength approximation of the interdiffusivity. The dependency of interdiffusivity on structure is found in general expressions that account for the specific periodicity and growth orientation of the multilayer structure. The kinetics are quantified by analysis of changes in the composition fluctuation with time at temperature through x-ray scattering measurements. In addition to the examination of single-phase crystalline systems as Cu-Ni and Cr-Ti, the theory is now developed to assess diffusion in two-phase layered systems. Specifically, as in Ni-(Cr,Mo) where a face-centered cubic/body centered cubic combination form a pseudo-epitaxial multilayer.

An updated, self-consistent point design for a heavy ion fusion (HIF) power plant based on an induction linac driver, indirect-drive targets, and a thick liquid wall chamber has been completed. Conservative parameters were selected to allow each design area to meet its functional requirements in a robust manner, and thus this design is referred to as the Robust Point Design (RPD-2002). This paper provides a top-level summary of the major characteristics and design parameters for the target, driver, final focus magnet layout and shielding, chamber, beam propagation to the target, and overall power plant.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), operating at green (2{omega}) light, has the potential to drive ignition targets with significantly more energy than the 1.8 MJ it will produce with its baseline, blue (3{omega}) operations. This results in a greatly increased 'target design space', providing a number of exciting opportunities for fusion research. These include the prospect of ignition experiments with capsules absorbing energies in the vicinity of 1 MJ. This significant increase in capsule absorbed energy over the original designs at {approx}150 kJ could allow high-gain, high yield experiments on NIF. This paper reports the progress made exploring 2{omega} for NIF ignition, including potential 2{omega} laser performance, 2{omega} ignition target designs and 2{omega} Laser Plasma Interaction (LPI) studies.

This was a meeting between two large groups of researchers: astrophysicists and space physicists, on the one hand, and laboratory plasma physicists, on the other. The meeting has clearly demonstrated a growing mutual interest of these two groups: presenters of one group tried to make their talks understandable to another group, discussions were very lively, and a number of points for further joint effort have been identified. This was a timely meeting in view of the explosion of observational data from new space and ground based instruments. New phenomena have been observed and/or understood more clearly, including gamma ray burst sources, the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background, high magnetic field pulsars or magnetars, solar acoustic spectroscopy, ultra luminous star burst galaxies, and many others.

Multiresolution methods are a common technique used for dealing with large-scale data and representing it at multiple levels of detail. The authors present a multiresolution hierarchy construction based on n{radical}2 subdivision, which has all the advantages of a regular data organization scheme while reducing the drawback of coarse granularity. The n{radical}2-subdivision scheme only doubles the number of vertices in each subdivision step regardless of dimension n. They describe the construction of 2D, 3D, and 4D hierarchies representing surfaces, volume data, and time-varying volume data, respectively. The 4D approach supports spatial and temporal scalability. For high-quality data approximation on each level of detail, they use downsampling filters based on n-variate B-spline wavelets. They present a B-spline wavelet lifting scheme for n{radical}2-subdivision steps to obtain small or narrow filters. Narrow filters support adaptive refinement and out-of-core data exploration techniques.

The formation of Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) sets the stage for the formation of protostellar systems by the gravitational collapse of dense regions within the GMC that fragment into smaller core components that in turn condense into stars. Developing a comprehensive theory of star formation remains one of the most elusive, and most important, goals of theoretical astrophysics. Inherent in the difficulty in attaining this goal is that the gravitational collapse depends critically upon initial conditions within the cores which only recently have been known with sufficient accuracy to permit a realistic theoretical attack on the problem. Observations of stars in the vicinity of the Sun show that binary systems are prevalent and appear to be a general outcome of the collapse and fragmentation process. Despite years of progress, theoretical studies have still not determined why binary stars occur with such frequency, or indeed, even what processes determine the transition from single stars to binaries and thence to multiple stellar systems. One of the major goals of this research is to understand the nature of the formation of binary and multiple stellar systems with typical low mass stars 0.2 to 3 M{sub {circle_dot}} and the physical properties of these systems. …

The purpose of this document is to provide a suggested approach, based on input from pediatric stakeholders, to communicating pediatric-related information on pandemic influenza at the community level in a step-by-step manner.

The authors present a measurement of the branching fractions of the 22 decay channels of the B{sup 0} and B{sup +} mesons to {bar D}{sup (*)}D{sup (*)}K, where the D{sup (*)} and {bar D}{sup (*)} mesons are fully reconstructed. Summing the 10 neutral modes and the 12 charged modes, the branching fractions are found to be {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {bar D}{sup (*)}D{sup (*)}K) = (3.68 {+-} 0.10 {+-} 0.24)% and {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {bar D}{sup (*)}D{sup (*)}K) = (4.05 {+-} 0.11 {+-} 0.28)%, where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second systematic. The results are based on 429 fb{sup -1} of data containing 471 x 10{sup 6} B{bar B} pairs collected at the {Upsilon}(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Using ambient pressure X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (AP-XPS), we were able to observe the process of oxidation of tantalum with different morphological parameters. Being able to trace surface evolution during oxidation, we evaluated activation energy of oxidation under the influence of strain and grain boundaries. It was found that the metal oxidized through three different stages and there was a transition stage where the phase transformation from suboxides to the equilibrium state of pentoxide. The applied stress and surface defects reduced the activation energy oxidation.

Article reviews opportunities for novel brain-behavior characterizations. Emphasis is placed on the increasing concern of neuropsychology with these topics and the need for development in these areas to maintain relevance as a scientific discipline and advance scientific developments.

This article presents a composite review involving some of the current and best treatments for colonic anastomotic leakage that are available in order to better understand the steps taken to treat this complication.

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The downhole flowmeter logging system for high temperature geothermal wells developed at Wairakei, New Zealand, is proving to be an invaluable tool for use during workovers to repair or reinstate problem wells. This contribution describes a straightforward example of identifying breaks in plain casing near the top of a productive well.

We study the structure of the energy spectra along with the character of the states participating in optical transitions in colloidal CdS quantum dots (QDs) using the ab initio accuracy charge patching method combined with the folded spectrum calculations of electronic structure of thousand-atom nanostructures. In particular, attention is paid to the nature of the large resonant Stokes shift observed in CdS quantum dots. We find that the top of the valence band state is bright, in contrast with the results of numerous k {center_dot} p calculations, and determine the limits of applicability of the k {center_dot} p approach. The calculated electron-hole exchange splitting suggests the spin-forbidden valence state may explain the nature of the ''dark exciton'' in CdS quantum dots.

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We-have developed an apparatus with a capability for evaluating geopressured brine injectability at elevated pressures and temperatures. The apparatus utilizes membrane filters as injection zone reservoir analogs and permits injectability tests to be performed in accordance with Barkman and Davidson Methdology. A field evaluation of geopressured brine injectability was completed during September 22-25, 1980 at the DOE, Brazoria test site in Texas. Membrane filters, with pore sizes of 0.4-{micro}m and 10.0-{micro}m, were used as the basis for obtaining suspended solids data and for developing performance-life estimates of typical spent brine injection wells. Field measurements were made at 130{degree}C and line pressures up to 3800 psig. Scale inhibited (phosphonate-polyacrylate threshold-type, carbonate scale inhibitor), prefiltered-scale-inhibited, and raw (untreated) brine were evaluated. Test results indicated raw brine was highly injectable, while scale-inhibited brine had extremely low quality. The poor injectability of scale-inhibited brine resulted from partial precipitation of the scale inhibitor.

It would be impressive to raise the wellhead pressure of a hot-water geothermal borehole to the maximum sustainable by flow and from this deduce the supply water temperature, rate of discharge, dryness fraction and density of the wellhead fluid. All this data can, in fact, be obtained from the reading of the pressure gauge installed below the wellhead control valve so long as the flow condition is that given above. The tentative results can be valuable for untested wells drilled in isolated areas; and for monitoring production wells as it permits estimates to be made of changing subterranean conditions.