This issue of Alternative Fuel News focuses on transit buses and refuse haulers. Many transit agencies and waste management companies are investigating alternatives to traditional diesel buses and refuse haulers.

Perhaps the most important aspect of contemporary condensed matter physics involves understanding strong Coulomb interactions between the large number of electrons in a solid. Electronic correlations lead to the emergence of new system properties, such as metal-insulator transitions, superconductivity, magneto-resistance, Bose-Einstein condensation, the formation of excitonic gases, or the integer and fractional Quantum Hall effects. The discovery of high-Tc superconductivity in particular was a watershed event, leading to dramatic experimental and theoretical advances in the field of correlated-electron systems. Such materials often exhibit competition between the charge, lattice, spin, and orbital degrees of freedom, whose cause-effect relationships are difficult to ascertain. Experimental insight into the properties of solids is traditionally obtained by time-averaged probes, which measure e.g., linear optical spectra, electrical conduction properties, or the occupied band structure in thermal equilibrium. Many novel physical properties arise from excitations out of the ground state into energetically higher states by thermal, optical, or electrical means. This leads to fundamental interactions between the system's constituents, such as electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions, which occur on ultrafast timescales. While these interactions underlie the physical properties of solids, they are often only indirectly inferred from time-averaged measurements. Time-resolved spectroscopy, consequently, is playing an ever increasing role …

This chapter describes ex situ bioremediation of the petroleum portion of radiologically co-contaminated soils using microorganisms isolated from a waste site and innovative bioreactor technology. Microorganisms first isolated and screened in the laboratory for bioremediation of petroleum were eventually used to treat soils in a bioreactor. The bioreactor treated soils contaminated with over 20,000 mg/kg total petroleum hydrocarbon and reduced the levels to less than 100 mg/kg in 22 months. After treatment, the soils were permanently disposed as low-level radiological waste. The petroleum and radiologically contaminated soil (PRCS) bioreactor operated using bioventing to control the supply of oxygen (air) to the soil being treated. The system treated 3.67 tons of PCRS amended with weathered compost, ammonium nitrate, fertilizer, and water. In addition, a consortium of microbes (patent pending) isolated at the Savannah River National Laboratory from a petroleum-contaminated site was added to the PRCS system. During operation, degradation of petroleum waste was accounted for through monitoring of carbon dioxide levels in the system effluent. The project demonstrated that co-contaminated soils could be successfully treated through bioventing and bioaugmentation to remove petroleum contamination to levels below 100 mg/kg while protecting workers and the environment from radiological contamination.

Interview with Jodi-Anne Davidson, Jamaican immigrant, for the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex Immigration Project. She discusses her childhood and family history in Jamaica; parents’ divorce; father’s decision to immigrate to the U.S. with two daughters; experiences with the U.S. immigration system; reminiscences of family life in Jamaica and Jamaican history.