Daily newspaper from Perry, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Weekly newspaper from Alvin, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Altus, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Photograph of Bert Martin (left) and Rusty Allen (right) at the GALA Festival VII held in Montreal, Canada. Rusty stands next to Martin and wears a white t-shirt covered with small turtle illustrations. Martin is visible from the neck upwards. They stand in front of a brown wall in a dimly lit room.

Photograph of Bert Martin at the GALA Festival VII held in Montreal, Canada. Martin wears a white t-shirt with a Texas flag on it. He sits in a dark room and smiles towards the camera.

Photograph of Turtle Creek Chorale members (l-r) Chris Stinnett, Pat McCann, and Rusty Allen at the GALA Festival VII held in Montreal, Canada. They pose next to each other in front of a red curtain and smile towards the camera.

Interview with Joba Ramirez, a nurse from Denton, Texas, regarding her Mexican-American heritage. Ramirez discusses her background, medical education, family traditions, discrimination she experienced, and the history of Denton's Mexican-American community.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Baytown, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

Daily newspaper from Sapulpa, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.

We use the eight year light curve database from the MACHO (MAssive Compact Halo Objects) project together with infrared colors and magnitudes from 2MASS (the Two Micron All Sky Survey) to identify a sample of 22,000 long period variables in the Large Magellanic Cloud (referred to hereafter as LMC LPVs). A period luminosity diagram of these stars reveals six well defined sequences, in substantial agreement with previous analyses of samples from OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment). In our analysis we identify analogues to galactic LPVs in the LMC LPV sample. We find that carbon dominated AGB stars populate only two of the sequences, one of which includes the Mira variables. The high luminosity end of the same two sequences are also the location of the only stars with J K{sub s} > 2, indicating that they are enshrouded in dust. The unknown mechanism that produces the variability of the last sequence--those stars with long secondary periods--produces different morphology in the period luminosity diagram than what is seen in the first four sequences, which are thought to be caused by pulsation. In particular, the last sequence extends to lower luminosity RGB stars and the luminosity function does not peak among the …

The Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) is a single, highly integrated technical program for maintaining the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The SSP uses past nuclear test data along with future non-nuclear test data, computational modeling and simulation, and experimental facilities to advance understanding of nuclear weapons. It includes stockpile surveillance, experimental research, development and engineering programs, and an appropriately scaled production capability to support stockpile requirements. This integrated national program will require the continued use of current facilities and programs along with new experimental facilities and computational enhancements to support these programs. The Advanced Simulation and Computing program (ASC) is a cornerstone of the SSP, providing simulation capabilities and computational resources to support the annual stockpile assessment and certification, to study advanced nuclear weapon design and manufacturing processes, to analyze accident scenarios and weapons aging, and to provide the tools to enable stockpile life extension programs and the resolution of significant finding investigations (SFIs). This requires a balanced system of technical staff, hardware, simulation software, and computer science solutions.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has proven to be useful in short range, high data rate, robust, and low power communications. These features can make UWB systems ideal candidates for reliable data communications between nodes of a wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the low powered UWB pulses can be significantly degraded by channel noise, inter-node interference, and intentional jamming. In this paper we present a novel interference suppression technique for UWB based WSNs that promises self-organization in terms of power conservation, scalability, and channel estimation for the entire distributed network.

Raman spectroscopy has been used to study fluid water at approximately 1000 K and 2 to 60 GPa in a laser heated diamond anvil cell. First principles molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have also been employed to simulate water under similar conditions. The experimental Raman intensity of the O-H stretch mode was observed to decrease with pressure, and beyond 50 GPa this mode was no longer visible. At approximately the same pressure we inferred a change in the slope of the melting curve. Consistent with these experimental observations, the MD simulations show that water under these conditions forms a dynamically ionized liquid state, which is dominated by very short lived (<10 fs) H{sub 2}O, H{sub 3}O{sup +} and O{sup 2-} species.

Gas desorption and electron emission coefficients were measured for 1 MeV potassium ions incident on stainless steel at grazing angles (between 80 and 88 from normal incidence) using a new gas-electron source diagnostic (GESD). Issues addressed in design and commissioning of the GESD include effects from backscattering of ions at the surface, space-charge limited emission current, and reproducibility of desorption measurements. We find that electron emission coefficients {gamma}{sub e} scale as 1/cos({theta}) up to angles of 86, where {gamma}{sub e} = 90. Nearer grazing incidence, {gamma}{sub e} is reduced below the 1/cos({theta}) scaling by nuclear scattering of ions through large angles, reaching {gamma}{sub e} = 135 at 88. Electrons were emitted with a measured temperature of {approx}30 eV. Gas desorption coefficients {gamma}{sub sigma} were much larger, of order {gamma}{sub sigma} = 104. They also varied with angle, but much more slowly than 1/cos({theta}). From this we conclude that the desorption was not entirely from adsorbed layers of gas on the surface. Two mitigation techniques were investigated: rough surfaces reduced electron emission by a factor of ten and gas desorption by a factor of two; a mild bake to 230 had no effect on electron emission, but decreased gas desorption by …

The interaction of water with Si- and C- terminated {beta}-SiC(001) surfaces was investigated by means of ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. Irrespective of coverage, varied from 1/4 to 1 monolayer, we found that water dissociates on the Si-terminated surface, substantially modifying the clean surface reconstruction, while the C-terminated surface is nonreactive and hydrophobic. Based on our results, we propose that STM images and photoemission experiments may detect specific changes induced by water on both the structural and electronic properties of SiC(001) surfaces.

This CRADA project involved the cooperative research of investigators in ORNL's Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research (CESAR) with researchers at Caterpillar, Inc. The subject of the research was the development of cooperative control strategies for autonomous vehicles performing applications of interest to Caterpillar customers. The project involved three Phases of research, conducted over the time period of November 1998 through December 2001. This project led to the successful development of several technologies and demonstrations in realistic simulation that illustrated the effectiveness of our control approaches for distributed planning and cooperation in multi-robot teams. The primary objectives of this research project were to: (1) Develop autonomous control technologies to enable multiple vehicles to work together cooperatively, (2) Provide the foundational capabilities for a human operator to exercise oversight and guidance during the multi-vehicle task execution, and (3) Integrate these capabilities to the ALLIANCE-based autonomous control approach for multi-robot teams. These objectives have been successfully met with the results implemented and demonstrated in a near real-time multi-vehicle simulation of up to four vehicles performing mission-relevant tasks.

This report discusses hearings in the U.S. Senate and is divided into four main sections: (1) the role of hearings in the committee process, types of hearings, and broad organizational issues, (2) a discussion of the planning process, (3) how a hearing is held, and (4) activities committees often undertake following a hearing.

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This report contains a guide for preparation and procedure on the Hearings in the U.S. Senate.

A large-acceptance, highly segmented electromagnetic lead glass calorimeter for Experiment E781 (SELEX) at Fermi National Acceleration Laboratory was designed and built. This detector has been used to reconstruct photons and electrons with energies ranging from few GeV up to 500 GeV in the collisions of the 650 GeV {Sigma}{sup -} hyperons and {pi}{sup -} mesons with the target nucleons. The design, calibration and performance of the calorimeter are described. Energy resolution and position resolution are assessed using both calibration electron beams and {pi}{sup 0} mesons reconstructed in 650 GeV hadron-hadron interactions. The performance of the calorimeter in selecting resonant states that involve photons is demonstrated.

Unlike the common belief that crack propagation behavior can be predicted successfully by employing fracture criteria based on a constant crack tip opening displacement or angle (CTOD/CTOA), this paper shows that the initially non-constant portion of the CTOD/CTOA plays an essential role in predicting the fracture load for a growing crack. Three- and two-dimensional finite element analyses indicate that a severe underestimate of the experimental load vs. crack extension curve would occur if a constant CTOD/CTOA criterion is used. However, the use of a simplified, bilinear CTOD/CTOA criterion including its non-constant portion will closely duplicate the test data. Furthermore, as a result of using the experimental data from J-integral test with various crack length to specimen width ratios (a/W), it is demonstrated that the CTOD/CTOA is crack tip constraint dependent. The initially higher values of the CTOD/CTOA are in fact a natural consequence of crack growth process which is refl ected by the J-resistance curve and its slope (tearing modulus).

In previous years, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, we developed methods for construction of normalized and subtracted cDNA libraries, and constructed hundreds of high-quality libraries for production of Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs). Our clones were made widely available to the scientific community through the IMAGE Consortium, and millions of ESTs were produced from our libraries either by collaborators or by our own sequencing laboratory at the University of Iowa. During this grant period, we focused on (1) the development of a method for preferential cloning of tissue-specific and/or rare transcripts, (2) its utilization to expedite EST-based gene discovery for the NIH Mouse Brain Molecular Anatomy Project, (3) further development and optimization of a method for construction of full-length-enriched cDNA libraries, and (4) modification of a plasmid vector to maximize efficiency of full-length cDNA sequencing by the transposon-mediated approach. It is noteworthy that the technology developed for preferential cloning of rare mRNAs enabled identification of over 2,000 mouse transcripts differentially expressed in the hippocampus. In addition, the method that we optimized for construction of full-length-enriched cDNA libraries was successfully utilized for the production of approximately fifty libraries from the developing mouse nervous system, from which over 2,500 full-ORF-containing …

We developed a linear-scaling semiempirical quantum mechanical (QM) program (DivCon). Using DivCon we can now routinely carry out calculations at the fully QM level on systems containing up to about 15 thousand atoms. We also implemented a Poisson-Boltzmann (PM) method into DivCon in order to compute solvation free energies and electrostatic properties of macromolecules in solution. This new suite of programs has allowed us to bring the power of quantum mechanics to bear on important biological problems associated with protein folding, drug design and enzyme catalysis. Hence, we have garnered insights into biological systems that have been heretofore impossible to obtain using classical simulation techniques.