An article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about the upcoming collections and events at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. It is titled Little Journeys and has information about tours and group visits.

A dynamic and reciprocal flow of information between cells and the extracellular matrix contributes significantly to the regulation of form and function in developing systems. Signals generated by the extracellular matrix do not act in isolation. Instead, they are processed within the context of global signalling hierarchies whose constituent inputs and outputs are constantly modulated by all the factors present in the cell's surrounding microenvironment. This is particularly evident in the mammary gland, where the construction and subsequent destruction of such a hierarchy regulates changes in tissue-specific gene expression, morphogenesis and apoptosis during each developmental cycle of pregnancy, lactation and involution.

This paper develops and characterizes mixed direct-iterative methods for boundary integral formulations of continuum dielectric solvation models. We give an example, the Ca{sup ++}{hor_ellipsis}Cl{sup {minus}} pair potential of mean force in aqueous solution, for which a direct solution at thermal accuracy is difficult and, thus for which mixed direct-iterative methods seem necessary to obtain the required high resolution. For the simplest such formulations, Gauss-Seidel iteration diverges in rare cases. This difficulty is analyzed by obtaining the eigenvalues and the spectral radius of the non-symmetric iteration matrix. This establishes that those divergences are due to inaccuracies of the asymptotic approximations used in evaluation of the matrix elements corresponding to accidental close encounters of boundary elements on different atomic spheres. The spectral radii are then greater than one for those diverging cases. This problem is cured by checking for boundary element pairs closer than the typical spatial extent of the boundary elements and for those cases performing an ``in-line`` Monte Carlo integration to evaluate the required matrix elements. These difficulties are not expected and have not been observed for the thoroughly coarsened equations obtained when only a direct solution is sought. Finally, we give an example application of hybrid quantum-classical methods to …

Optical damage that results in large scale fracture has been observed in the large, high-fluence, fused-silica, spatial filter lenses on the Nova and Beamlet lasers. In nearly all cases damage occurs on the vacuum side of the lenses and because the vacuum side of the lens is under tensile stress this damage can lead to catastrophic crack growth if the flaw (damage) size exceeds the critical flaw size for SiO{sub 2}. The damaged 52 cm Nova lenses fracture into two and sometimes three large pieces. Although under full vacuum load at the time they fracture, the Nova lenses do not implode. Rather the authors have observed that the pieces lock together and air slowly leaks into the vacuum spatial filter housing through the lens cracks. The Beamlet lenses have a larger aspect ratio and peak tensile stress than Nova. The peak tensile stress at the center of the output surface of the Beamlet lens is 1,490 psi versus 810 psi for Nova. During a recent Beamlet high energy shot, a damage spot on the lens grew to the critical flaw size and the lens imploded. Post shot data indicate the lens probably fractured into 5 to 7 pieces, however, unlike …

Reflections from lens surfaces create parasitic beams that can damage optics in high-powered laser systems. These parasitic beams are low in energy initially, because of the low reflectivity of antireflection (AR) coated lens surfaces and because they are clipped by spatial filter pinholes, but subsequent amplification can raise them to damage fluence levels. Also, some of the pencil beams in multipass laser systems become pre-pulses at the output by by-pass one of more of the passes, arriving at the output ahead of the main pulse in time. They are insidious because pencil beams that are not initially a problem can become so due to a slow degradation of the AR coatings. Both the Nova and Beamlet laser systems at LLNL have had optics damaged by pencil beams. The best solution for pencil beams is to tip the lenses far enough to eliminate them altogether. This will be the approach taken for the National Ignition Facility (NIF).

We have developed two in-situ HVEM techniques which allow us to begin fundamental investigations into the mechanisms of deformation and fracture in nonstructured materials. A procedure for the observation of tensile deformation and failure in multilayers materials in cross-section is given and also the development of an in-situ HVEM nanoindentor of surfaces and films on surfaces in cross-section.

The proposed National Ignition Facility is a 192 beam Nd:glass laser system capable of driving targets to fusion ignition by the year 2005. A key factor in the flexibility and performance of the laser is a front-end system which provides a precisely formatted beam to each beamline. Each of the injected beams has individually controlled energy, temporal pulseshape, and spatial shape to accommodate beamline-to-beamline variations in gain and saturation. This flexibility also gives target designers the options for precisely controlling the drive to different areas of the target. The design of the Front-End laser is described, and initial results are discussed.

Article describing the preparation and chemical characterization of low molecular weight conjugates that were used as models for an acetal linkage between ADP-ribose and the hydroxyl group of a protein acceptor such as serine, threonine, tyrosine, hydroxyproline, or hydroxylysine residues. The amount of modification was approximately 16 pmol of ADP-ribose per mg of total protein, and proteins modified by acid-labile linkages were detected in all subcellular fractions examined, suggesting that the scope of this modification in vivo is broad.

Programming parallel computers for performance is a difficult task that requires careful attention to both single-node performance and data exchange between processors. This paper discusses some of the sources of poor performance, ways to identify them in an application, and a few ways to address these issues.

The authors consider the problem of using the information from various time series, each one characterizing a different physical quantity, to predict the future state of the system and, based on that information, to detect and classify anomalous events. They stress the application of principal components analysis (PCA) to analyze and combine data from different sensors. They construct both linear and nonlinear predictors. In particular, for linear prediction the authors use the least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm and for nonlinear prediction they use both backpropagation (BP) networks and fuzzy predictors (FP). As an application, they consider the prediction of gamma counts from past values of electron and gamma counts recorded by the instruments of a high altitude satellite.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Technic, Inc. have entered into a CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) with the goal of providing industry with an environmentally benign alternative to the presently used silver cyanide plating process. This project has been in place for about six months and results are quite promising. The main objective, that of deposition of deposits as thick as 125 um (5 mils), has been met. Property data such as stress and hardness have been obtained and the structure of the deposit has been analyzed via metallography and x-ray diffraction. These results will be presented in this paper, along with plans for future work.

Spectrophotometry of elliptical galaxies spanning a large rang in luminosity is analyzed for cosmic variations in color and line strength. The results are used to construct a base sequence spectral energy distribution as a function line strength, color, and velocity dispersion, representing old, red, uniform elliptical galaxy stellar populations. The sequence can be used as the starting point for investigating and modeling the stellar populations of other systems such as dwarf ellipticals, merger remnants, and, eventually, high redshift ellipticals.

AISI 1020 carbon steel was exposed to air at various relative humidities at 65{degrees}C. A ``critical relative humidity`` (CRH) of 75--85% was determined. The CRH is the transitional relative humidity where oxidation/corrosion changes from dry oxidation to aqueous film electrochemical corrosion. Short term testing suggests that aqueous film electrochemical corrosion results in the formation of an inner oxide of Fe{sub 3}O{sub 4}, and an outer oxide of a powdery Fe{sub 2}O{sub 3} and/or Fe{sub 2}O{sub 3}{center_dot}xH{sub 2}O.

LLNL plans to specify optical components for the National Ignition Facility according to ISO 10110, the new international standard for preparation of optics drawings. The standards have been approved by the international optics community and represent a fairly comprehensive language for describing optical components. We will describe our plan for implementation and experience to date in doing so.

In a plasma-electrode Pockels cell (PEPC), plasma discharges serve as transparent electrodes on each side of, an electrooptic crystal such as KDP. These plasmas facilitate rapid and uniform charging and discharging of the crystal. The authors describe PEPC technology deployed on Beamlet and envisioned for the National Ignition Facility. Performance on Beamlet is discussed in detail. They also discuss models which have shed light on PEPC operation. These models describe both the high-voltage sheath that forms near the crystal surface and the characteristics of the bulk plasma column.

The second Keck ten meter telescope (Keck-11) is slated to have an infrared-optimized adaptive optics system in the 1997--1998 time frame. This system will provide diffraction-limited images in the 1--3 micron region and the ability to use a diffraction-limited spectroscopy slit. The AO system is currently in the preliminary design phase and considerable analysis has been performed in order to predict its performance under various seeing conditions. In particular we have investigated the point-spread function, energy through a spectroscopy slit, crowded field contrast, object limiting magnitude, field of view, and sky coverage with natural and laser guide stars.

The Atmospheric Release Advisory Capability (ARAC) provides real-time dose assessments for airborne pollutant releases. ARAC is currently in the process of developing an entirely new suite of models and system infrastructure. Diagnostic and dispersion algorithms are being created in-house and a prognostic model NO-RAPS, imported from the Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, is currently being adapted to ARAC`s needs. Diagnostic models are essential for an emergency response capability since they provide the ability to rapidly assimilate available meteorological data and generate the mass-consistent three-dimensional wind fields required by dispersion models. The resulting wind fields may also serve to initialize and validate prognostic models. In general, the performance of diagnostic models strongly correlates with the density and distribution of measurements in the area of interest and the resolution of the terrain. problem, data can be extracted from user-specified databases within a region defined by a metdata grid. Typically the data collection region will cover a geographic domain significantly larger than the area involved in the dispersion simulation in order to provide the most complete set of meteorological information relevant to the problem. This also permits the user to redefine the problem grid size and location, within limits, without reaccessing the meteorological data …

Timely and repeatable alignment of the 192 beam National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser will require an automatic system. Demanding accuracy requirements must be met with high reliability at low cost while minimizing the turnaround time between shots. We describe an approach for internally self-consistent alignment of the mirrors in the laser chains using a network of local light sources that serve as near field and far field alignment references. It incorporates a minimum number of alignment lasers, handles many beams in parallel, and utilizes simple control algorithms.

It is shown that the usual method for computing the coherence functions (ordinary, partial, and multiple) for a general multiple-input/multiple-output problem can be expressed as a modified form of Cholesky decomposition of the cross spectral density matrix of the inputs and outputs. The modified form of Cholesky decomposition used is G{sub zz} = LCL{prime}, where G is the cross spectral density matrix of inputs and outputs, L is a lower; triangular matrix with ones on the diagonal, and C is a diagonal matrix, and the symbol {prime} denotes the conjugate transpose. If a diagonal element of C is zero, the off diagonal elements in the corresponding column of L are set to zero. It is shown that the results can be equivalently obtained using singular value decomposition (SVD) of G{sub zz}. The formulation as a SVD problem suggests a way to order the inputs when a natural physical order of the inputs is absent.

On the Nova Laser at LLNL, we have recently demonstrated many of the key elements required for assuring that the next proposed laser, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will drive an Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) target to ignition. The target uses the recently declassified indirect drive (sometimes referred to as {open_quotes}radiation drive{close_quotes}) approach which converts laser light to x-rays inside a gold cylinder, which then acts as an x-ray {open_quotes}oven{close_quotes} (called a hohlraum) to drive the fusion capsule in its center. On Nova we`ve demonstrated good understanding of the temperatures reached in hohlraums and of the ways to control the uniformity with which the x-rays drive the spherical fusion capsules. In this lecture we briefly review the fundamentals of ICF, and describe the capsule implosion symmetry advantages of the hohlraum approach. We then concentrate on a quantitative understanding of the scaling of radiation drive with hohlraum size and wall material, and with laser pulse length and power. We demonstrate that coupling efficiency of x-ray drive to the capsule increases as we proceed from Nova to the NIF and eventually to a reactor, thus increasing the gain of the system.