Article on switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) possessing a divergent family of cinnamoyl CoA reductases with distinct biochemical properties.

This article discusses experimental quenching of harmonic stimuli.

To investigate the possibility of using HOM signals induced in SC cavities as beam and cavity diagnostics, narrow band (20 MHz) data was recorded around the strong TE111-6(6{pi}/9-like) dipole modes (1.7 GHz) in the 40 L-band (1.3 GHz) cavities at the DESY TTF facility. The analyses of these data have so far focused on using a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) technique to correlate the signals with each other and data from conventional BPMs to show the dipole signals provide an alternate means of measuring the beam trajectory. However, these analyses do not extract the modal information (i.e., frequencies and Q's of the nearly degenerate horizontal and vertical modes). In this paper, we described a method to fit the signal frequency spectrum to obtain this information, and then use the resulting mode amplitudes and phases together with conventional BPM data to determine the mode polarizations and relative centers and tilts. Compared with the SVD analysis, this method is more physical, and can also be used to obtain the beam position and trajectory angle.

The authors present improved measurements of the branching fraction {Beta}, the longitudinal polarization fraction f{sub L}, and the direct CP asymmetry A{sub CP} in the B meson decay channel B{sup +} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup 0}. The data sample was collected with the BABAR detector at SLAC. The results are {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup 0}) = (23.7 {+-} 1.4 {+-} 1.4) x 10{sup -6}, f{sub L} = 0.950 {+-} 0.015 {+-} 0.006, and A{sub CP} = -0.054 {+-} 0.055 {+-} 0.010, where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. Based on these results, they perform an isospin analysis and determine the CKM weak phase angle {alpha} to be (92.4{sub -6.5}{sup +6.0}){sup 0}.

Francisella tularensis, the causative agent of the zoonotic disease tularemia, has recently gained increased attention due to the emergence of tularemia in geographical areas where the disease has been previously unknown, and the organism's potential as a bioterrorism agent. Although F. tularensis has an extremely broad host range, the bacterial reservoir in nature has not been conclusively identified. In this study, the ability of virulent F. tularensis strains to survive and replicate in the amoeba Acanthamoeba castellanii was explored. We observe that A. castellanii trophozoites rapidly encyst in response to F. tularensis infection and that this rapid encystment phenotype (REP) is caused by factor(s) secreted by amoebae and/or F. tularensis into the co-culture media. Further, our results indicate that in contrast to LVS, virulent strains of F. tularensis can survive in A. castellanii cysts for at least 3 weeks post infection and that induction of rapid amoeba encystment is essential for survival. In addition, our data indicate that pathogenic F. tularensis strains block lysosomal fusion in A. castellanii. Taken together, these data suggest that the interactions between F. tularensis strains and amoeba may play a role in the environmental persistence of F. tularensis.

Crystallisation of lower-rim tetra-O-alkylated p-carboxylatocalix[4]arenes from pyridine results in the formation of both bi-layer and pillar type supramolecular motifs. Full alkylation at the calixarene lower rim has significant influence over the supramolecular self-assembly motif, including preclusion of pyridine guest molecules from the calixarene cavity in the solid state.

The 2009 Gordon Research Conference on Radiation and Climate will present cutting-edge research on the outstanding issues in global climate change with focus on the radiative forcing and sensitivity of the climate system and associated physical processes. The Conference will feature a wide range of topics, including grand challenges in radiation and climate, radiative forcing, climate feedbacks, cloud processes in climate system, hydrological cycle in changing climate, absorbing aerosols and Asian monsoon, recent climate changes, and geo-engineering. The invited speakers will present the recent most important advances and future challenges in these areas. The Conference will bring together a collection of leading investigators who are at the forefront of their field, and will provide opportunities for scientists especially junior scientists and graduate students to present their work in poster format and exchange ideas with leaders in the field. The collegial atmosphere of this Conference, with programmed discussion sessions as well as opportunities for informal gatherings in the afternoons and evenings, provides an avenue for scientists from different disciplines to brainstorm and promotes cross-disciplinary collaborations in the various research areas represented.

Tetrapyrroles are strongly pigmented heterocyclic molecules that play key roles in the harvesting of light and in its efficient conversion into chemical energy by photosynthetic organisms, including agronomically important plant species. This grant provided financial support for the International Conference on Tetrapyrrole Photoreceptors of Photosynthetic Organisms (ICTPPO 2009), the ninth in the series of ad hoc biennial conferences focused on the structure, function and biotechnological applications of tetrapyrrole photoreceptors, held at Asilomar Conference Center, Monterey CA from July 26 to July 31, 2009. The goal of this meeting was to bring together leading experts in the field of tetrapyrrole photoreceptors and from associated fields with new investigators, to provide critical analyses of the current state of their fields, the challenges and opportunities therein and their most recent unpublished discoveries to stimulate new approaches to address key issues of agricultural and energy significance. Among the 80 participants included 40 PIs (including one Nobelist in chemistry, two members of the US National Academy of Science, and a recent inductee to the Royal Society), 8 senior scientists, 1 DOE program manager, 12 postdoctoral fellows and 20 graduate students representing 13 countries. One third of the formal lecture program was reserved for discussion, and …

The capture of solar energy by photosynthesis has had a most profound influence on the development and sustenance of life on earth. It is the engine that has driven the proliferation of life and, as the source of both energy and oxygen, has had a major hand in shaping the forms that life has taken. Both ancient and present day photosynthetic carbon fixation is intimately tied to issues of immediate human concern, global energy and global warming. Decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels by tapping photosynthesis in a more direct way is an attractive goal for sustainable energy. Meeting this challenge means understanding photosynthetic energy conversion at a molecular level, a task requiring perspectives ranging through all disciplines of science. Researchers in photosynthesis have a strong history of working across conventional boundaries and engaging in multidisciplinary collaborations. The Gordon conference in photosynthesis has been a key focal point for the dissemination of new results and the establishment of powerful research collaborations. In this spirit the 2009 Gordon conference on biophysical aspects of photosynthesis will bring together top international researchers from diverse and complementary disciplines, all working towards understanding how photosynthesis converts light into the stable chemical energy that powers so …

The original specific aims of the grant where cut back considerably as the study section reduced both the time and the budget for the project. The objective of the grant was to show that fluorine-18 fluoride could be prepared completely anhydrous and thus substantially more reactive than conventionally dried fluoride using the method of Sun and DiMagno. This method involved using conventionally dried fluoride to prepare an aromatic fluoride in which the aromatic ring is substituted with electron withdrawing groups. The aryl fluoride is then dried and purified and the fluoride is displaced with an anhydrous nucleophile. Using fluorine-19 and macroscopic scale reactions the reactions work well and give anhydrous fluoride salts that are both more reactive and more selective in their reactions than conventionally dried fluoride. The original substrate chosen for the reaction was bromopentacyanobenzene (1). This compound proved to be easy to make but very hard to purify. As an alternative hexabromobenzene, which is commercially available in high purity, was tried. This reacted cleanly with conventionally dried F-18 fluoride in acetonitrile to give [{sup 18}F]-fluoropentabromobenzene (2), which could be dried by passage of the solution over alumina, which also removed any unreacted fluoride. The fluorine-18 fluoride could be …

Two of the major barriers to the expansion of worldwide adoption of nuclear power are related to proliferation potential of the nuclear fuel cycle and issues associated with the final disposal of spent fuel. The Radkowsky Thorium Fuel (RTF) concept proposed by Professor A. Radkowsky offers a partial solution to these problems. The main idea of the concept is the utilization of the seed-blanket unit (SBU) fuel assembly geometry which is a direct replacement for a 'conventional' assembly in either a Russian pressurized water reactor (VVER-1000) or a Western pressurized water reactor (PWR). The seed-blanket fuel assembly consists of a fissile (U) zone, known as seed, and a fertile (Th) zone known as blanket. The separation of fissile and fertile allows separate fuel management schemes for the thorium part of the fuel (a subcritical 'blanket') and the 'driving' part of the core (a supercritical 'seed'). The design objective for the blanket is an efficient generation and in-situ fissioning of the U233 isotope, while the design objective for the seed is to supply neutrons to the blanket in a most economic way, i.e. with minimal investment of natural uranium. The introduction of thorium as a fertile component in the nuclear fuel …

Hydrogen oxidation on platinum is shown to be a surface catalytic chemical reaction that generates a steady state flux of hot (>1 eV) conduction electrons. These hot electrons are detected as a steady-state chemicurrent across Pt/TiO{sub 2} Schottky diodes whose Pt surface is exposed to hydrogen and oxygen. Kinetic studies establish that the chemicurrent is proportional to turnover frequency for temperatures ranging from 298 to 373 K for P{sub H2} between 1 and 8 Torr and P{sub O2} at 760 Torr. Both chemicurrent and turnover frequency exhibit a first order dependence on P{sub H2}.

The last few years have seen significant progress in constructing the atomic models required for non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) simulations. Along with this has come an increased understanding of the requirements for accurately modeling the ionization balance, energy content and radiative properties of different elements for a wide range of densities and temperatures. Much of this progress is the result of a series of workshops dedicated to comparing the results from different codes and computational approaches applied to a series of test problems. The results of these workshops emphasized the importance of atomic model completeness, especially in doubly excited states and autoionization transitions, to calculating ionization balance, and the importance of accurate, detailed atomic data to producing reliable spectra. We describe a simple screened-hydrogenic model that calculates NLTE ionization balance with surprising accuracy, at a low enough computational cost for routine use in radiation-hydrodynamics codes. The model incorporates term splitting, {Delta}n = 0 transitions, and approximate UTA widths for spectral calculations, with results comparable to those of much more detailed codes. Simulations done with this model have been increasingly successful at matching experimental data for laser-driven systems and hohlraums. Accurate and efficient atomic models are just one requirement for integrated …

The accuracy of numerical predictions for gas/liquid two-phase flows using Computational Multiphase Fluid Dynamics (CMFD) methods strongly depends on the formulation of models governing the interaction between the continuous liquid field and bubbles of different sizes. The purpose of this paper is to develop, test and validate a multifield model of adiabatic gas/liquid flows at intermediate gas concentrations (e.g., churn-turbulent flow regime), in which multiple-size bubbles are divided into a specified number of groups, each representing a prescribed range of sizes. The proposed modeling concept uses transport equations for the continuous liquid field and for each bubble field. The overall model has been implemented in the NPHASE-CMFD computer code. The results of NPHASE-CMFD simulations have been validated against the experimental data from the TOPFLOW test facility. Also, a parametric analysis on the effect of various modeling assumptions has been performed.

Presents analysis, discussions, and resulting requirements for plug-in hybrid electric vehicle batteries adopted by the US Advanced Battery Consortium.

CdS/CdTe cells on CTO/ZTO TCO show greater intial performance than SnO2-gased substrates due to superior optical and electrical properties of the oxide layers and more rigorous CdCl2 processing. Performance unfiormity was a problem.

In July 2008, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative and the IRT 2000 research reactor in Sofia, Bulgaria, operated by the Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy (INRNE), safely shipped 6.4 kilograms of Russian origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to the Russian Federation. The shipment, which resulted in the removal of all HEU from Bulgaria, was conducted by truck, barge, and rail modes of transport across two transit countries before reaching the final destination at the Production Association Mayak facility in Chelyabinsk, Russia. This paper describes the work, equipment, organizations, and approvals that were required to complete the spent fuel shipment and provides lessons learned that might assist other research reactor operators with their own spent nuclear fuel shipments.

A recently proposed hyperelastic model for granular materials, called "granular elasticity", identifies a yield angle as a result of thermodynamic instability. GE gives yield angles that are smaller than those found in real materials; a generalization of the theory is considered here that includes dependence on the third strain invariant. This generalization proves unsuccessful, as it gives smaller, not larger, yield angles. Fully convex hyperelastic models are identified as a point for future investigation.

{sm_bullet} Deterministic 'One Off' analyses as basis for evaluating sensitivity and uncertainty relative to reference case {sm_bullet} Spatial coverage identical to reference case {sm_bullet} Two types of analysis assumptions - Minimax parameter values around reference case conditions - 'What If' cases that change reference case condition and associated parameter values {sm_bullet} No conclusions about likelihood of estimated result other than' qualitative expectation that actual outcome should tend toward reference case estimate

We present the history and analysis of different wake field effects throughout the operational life of the PEP-II SLAC B-factory. Although the impedance of the high and low energy rings is small, the intense high current beams generated a lot of power. The effects from these wake fields are: heating and damage of vacuum beam chamber elements like RF seals, vacuum valves , shielded bellows, BPM buttons and ceramic tiles; vacuum spikes, vacuum instabilities and high detector background; beam longitudinal and transverse instabilities. We also discuss the methods used to eliminate these effects. Results of this analysis and the PEP-II experience may be very useful in the design of new storage rings and light sources.

Gene families are growing rapidly, but standard methods for inferring phylogenies do not scale to alignments with over 10,000 sequences. We present FastTree, a method for constructing large phylogenies and for estimating their reliability. Instead of storing a distance matrix, FastTree stores sequence profiles of internal nodes in the tree. FastTree uses these profiles to implement neighbor-joining and uses heuristics to quickly identify candidate joins. FastTree then uses nearest-neighbor interchanges to reduce the length of the tree. For an alignment with N sequences, L sites, and a different characters, a distance matrix requires O(N^2) space and O(N^2 L) time, but FastTree requires just O( NLa + N sqrt(N) ) memory and O( N sqrt(N) log(N) L a ) time. To estimate the tree's reliability, FastTree uses local bootstrapping, which gives another 100-fold speedup over a distance matrix. For example, FastTree computed a tree and support values for 158,022 distinct 16S ribosomal RNAs in 17 hours and 2.4 gigabytes of memory. Just computing pairwise Jukes-Cantor distances and storing them, without inferring a tree or bootstrapping, would require 17 hours and 50 gigabytes of memory. In simulations, FastTree was slightly more accurate than neighbor joining, BIONJ, or FastME; on genuine alignments, FastTree's …

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) hosted a Workshop on Enhanced Recruiting for International Safeguards October 22 and 23, 2008. The workshop was sponsored by DOE/NA-243 under the Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI). Placing well-qualified Americans in sufficient number and in key safeguards positions within the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Department of Safeguards is an important U.S. non-proliferation objective. The goal of the NGSI Workshop on Enhanced Recruiting for International Safeguards was to improve U.S. efforts to recruit U.S. citizens for IAEA positions in the Department of Safeguards. The participants considered the specific challenges of recruiting professional staff, safeguards inspectors, and managers. BNL’s International Safeguards Project Office invited participants from the U.S. Department of Energy, the IAEA, U.S. national laboratories, private industry, academia, and professional societies who are either experts in international safeguards or who understand the challenges of recruiting for technical positions. A final report for the workshop will be finalized and distributed in early 2009. The main finding of the workshop was the need for an integrated recruitment plan to take into account pools of potential candidates, various government and private agency stakeholders, the needs of the IAEA, and the NGSI human capital development plan. There were numerous findings …

For a number of years, the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) has been preparing for the entry into force of the U.S. Additional Protocol (AP). These preparations included attending training, participating in tabletop exercises, preparing draft declarations, developing INL-specific guidance documents, preparing for and hosting a mock complementary access visit, and preparing declarations for official submittal. All of these activities, the training materials, and software developed by other U.S. DOE national laboratories (PNNL, ORNL, LANL, and BNL) were very helpful in preparing for the entry into force of the AP. As with any endeavor of this size and complexity, however, there are always instances where even the best preparations and advanced planning do not anticipate every challenge. As the DOE's lead nuclear energy research and development facility, the INL faced many unique challenges. The majority of research conducted at the INL is nuclear fuel cycle related, most of which is not protected by the National Security Exclusion. This paper describes the lessons learned from the INL’s experience of preparing for the entry into force of the AP, specifically how translating and implementing general principles into actual activities proved to be one of many challenges, and provides general suggestions on how to …

Fields induced by a beam and penetrated outside the beam pipe can be used for a beam diagnostic. Wires placed in longitudinal slots in the outside wall of the beam pipe can work as a beam pickup. This has very small beam-coupling impedance and avoids complications of having a feed-through. The signal can be reasonably high at low frequencies. We calculate the beam-coupling impedance due to a long longitudinal slot in the resistive wall and the signal induced in a wire placed in such a slot and shielded by a thin screen from the beam. We present a field waveform at the outer side of a beam pipe, obtained as a result of calculations and measurements. Such kind of diagnostic can be used in storage rings, synchrotron light sources, and free electron lasers, like LINAC coherent light source.