Biweekly, comprehensive compilation of decisions, reports, public notices, and other documents of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

The purpose of this training is to familiarize participants with reliable online environmental health and toxicology information, from the National Library of Medicine and other reliable sources. Skills and knowledge acquired in this training class will enable participants to access, utilize, and refer others to environmental health and toxicology information.

This chapter will address some of the many issues associated with the identification of signatures based on genomic DNA/RNA, which can be used to identify and characterize pathogens for biodefense and microbial forensic goals. For the purposes of this chapter, we define a signature as one or more strings of contiguous genomic DNA or RNA bases that are sufficient to identify a pathogenic target of interest at the desired resolution and which could be instantiated with particular detection chemistry on a particular platform. The target may be a whole organism, an individual functional mechanism (e.g., a toxin gene), or simply a nucleic acid indicative of the organism. The desired resolution will vary with each program's goals but could easily range from family to genus to species to strain to isolate. The resolution may not be taxonomically based but rather pan-mechanistic in nature: detecting virulence or antibiotic-resistance genes shared by multiple microbes. Entire industries exist around different detection chemistries and instrument platforms for identification of pathogens, and we will only briefly mention a few of the techniques that we have used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to support our biosecurity-related work since 2000. Most nucleic acid based detection chemistries involve …

We develop conservation laws for coupled hydro-mechanical processes in unsaturated porous media using three-phase continuum mixture theory. From the first law of thermodynamics, we identify energy-conjugate variables for constitutive modeling at macroscopic scale. Energy conjugate expressions identified relate a certain measure of effective stress to the deformation of the solid matrix, the degree of saturation to the matrix suction, the pressure in each constituent phase to the corresponding intrinsic volume change of this phase, and the seepage forces to the corresponding pressure gradients. We then develop strong and weak forms of boundary-value problems relevant for 3D finite element modeling of coupled hydro-mechanical processes in unsaturated porous media. The paper highlights a 3D numerical example illustrating the advances in the solution of large-scale coupled finite element systems, as well as the challenges in developing more predictive tools satisfying the basic conservation laws and the observed constitutive responses for unsaturated porous materials.