From one o’clock on the afternoon of July 24, 1974, until shortly before ten o’clock the night of August 3, eleven days later, one of the longest hostage-taking sieges in the history of the United States took place in Texas’s Huntsville State Prison. The ringleader, Federico (Fred) Gomez Carrasco, the former boss of the largest drug-running operation in south Texas, was serving life for assault with intent to commit murder on a police officer. Using his connections to smuggle guns and ammunition into the prison, and employing the aid of two other inmates, he took eleven prison workers and four inmates hostage in the prison library. Demanding bulletproof helmets and vests, he planned to use the hostages as shields for his escape. Negotiations began immediately with prison warden H. H. Husbands and W. J. Estelle, Jr., Director of the Texas Department of Corrections. The Texas Rangers, the Department of Public Safety, and the FBI arrived to assist as the media descended on Huntsville. When one of the hostages suggested a moving structure of chalkboards padded with law books to absorb bullets, Carrasco agreed to the plan. The captors entered their escape pod with four hostages and secured eight others to …

Rattler One-Seven puts you in the helicopter seat, to see the war in Vietnam through the eyes of an inexperienced pilot as he transforms himself into a seasoned combat veteran. When Chuck Gross left for Vietnam in 1970, he was a nineteen-year-old Army helicopter pilot fresh out of flight school. He spent his entire Vietnam tour with the 71st Assault Helicopter Company flying UH-1 Huey helicopters. Soon after the war he wrote down his adventures, while his memory was still fresh with the events. Rattler One-Seven (his call sign) is written as Gross experienced it, using these notes along with letters written home to accurately preserve the mindset he had while in Vietnam. During his tour Gross flew Special Operations for the MACV-SOG, inserting secret teams into Laos. He notes that Americans were left behind alive in Laos, when official policy at home stated that U.S. forces were never there. He also participated in Lam Son 719, a misbegotten attempt by the ARVN to assault and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail with U.S. Army helicopter support. It was the largest airmobile campaign of the war and marked the first time that the helicopter was used in mid-intensity combat, with …

Email from Catherine Murphy to Eleanor Brown discussing additions to the WASP roster.

Semi-weekly newspaper from Livingston, Texas that includes local, state and national news along with advertising.

A project to relocate and consolidate tritium processing activities from old, second generation buildings to newer buildings was initiated in the late 1990's at the Savannah River Site (SRS). This project replaces two existing gaseous process waste treatment systems currently operating in an older facility. The new waste gas processing systems located in the newer facility use recent technology, including metal getters, an innovative permeator design, and TCAP--Thermal Cycling Absorption Process--technology for removal of residual tritium prior to releasing the effluent to the environment. Startup testing results and corresponding lessons learned for these systems are presented. These systems have successfully completed startup testing and are operational.

I present the theory and analysis behind the experiment by Fomalont and Kopeikin involving Jupiter and quasar J0842 + 1845 that purported to measure the speed of gravity. The computation of the v{sub J}/c correction to the gravitational time delay difference relevant to the experiment is derived, where v{sub J} is the speed of Jupiter as measured from Earth. Since the v{sub J}/c corrections are too small to have been measured in the Jupiter/quasar experiment, it is impossible that the speed of gravity was extracted from the data, and I explain what went wrong with the data analysis. Finally, mistakes are shown in papers by Fomalont and Kopeikin intended to rebut my work and the work of others.

This report describes three advanced technology scenarios and various illustrative cases developed by staff of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program. These scenarios and illustrative cases explore the energy, emissions and economic implications of using advanced energy technologies and other climate change related technologies to reduce future emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The cases were modeled using the Mini Climate Assessment Model (MiniCAM) developed by PNNL. The report describes the scenarios, the specifications for the cases, and the results. The report also provides background information on current emissions of GHGs and issues associated with stabilizing GHG concentrations.

Evolutionary theory holds that aging is a consequence of the declining force of natural selection with age. We discuss here the evidence that among the causes of aging in complex multicellular organisms, such as mammals, is the antagonistically pleiotropic effects of the cellular responses that protect the organism from cancer. Cancer is relatively rare in young mammals, owing in large measure to the activity of tumor suppressor mechanisms. These mechanisms either protect the genome from damage and/or mutations, or they elicit cellular responses--apoptosis or senescence--that eliminate or prevent the proliferation of somatic cells at risk for neoplastic transformation.We focus here on the senescence response, reviewing its causes, regulation and effects. In addition, we describe recent data that support the idea that both senescence and apoptosis may indeed be the double-edged swords predicted by the evolutionary hypothesis of antagonistic pleiotropy--protecting organisms from cancer early in life, but promoting aging phenotypes, including late life cancer, in older organisms.

Complete mitochondrial genome sequences are now available for 126 metazoans (see Boore 1999; Mitochondrial Genomics link at http://www.jgi.doe.gov), but the taxonomic representation is highly biased. For example, 80 are from a single phylum, Chordata, and show little variation for many molecular features. Arthropoda is represented by 16 taxa, Mollusca by eight, and Echinodermata by five, with only 17 others from the remaining {approx}30 metazoan phyla. With few exceptions (see Wolstenholme 1992 and Boore 1999) these are circular DNA molecules, about 16 kb in size, and encode the same set of 37 genes. A variety of non-standard names are sometimes used for animal mitochondrial genes; see Boore (1999) for gene nomenclature and a table of synonyms. Mitochondrial genome comparisons serve as a model of genome evolution. In this system, much smaller and simpler than that of the nucleus, are all of the same factors of genome evolution, where one may find tractable the changes in tRNA structure, base composition, genetic code, gene arrangement, etc. Further, patterns of mitochondrial gene rearrangements are an exceptionally reliable indicator of phylogenetic relationships (Smith et al.1993; Boore et al. 1995; Boore, Lavrov, and Brown 1998; Boore and Brown 1998, 2000; Dowton 1999; Stechmann and Schlegel 1999; …

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

Semi-monthly newspaper from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma that includes local, state, and national news and advertising of interest to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community.

The state of New York asked the U.S. Department of Energy to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the requirement for Heat Recovery for Service Water Heating that exists in the 2003 International Energy Conservation Code to determine whether this requirement should be adopted into the New York State Energy Code. A typical hotel application that would trigger this requirement was examined using whole building simulation software to generate baseline annual chiller and service hot water loads, and a spreadsheet was used to examine the energy savings potential for heat recovery using hourly load files from the simulation. An example application meeting the code requirement was developed, and the energy savings, energy cost savings, and first costs for the heat recovery installation were developed. The calculated payback for this application was 6.3 years using 2002 New York state average energy costs. This payback met the minimum requirements for cost effectiveness established for the state of New York for updating the commercial energy conservation code.

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

To better understand preferential flow in fractured rock, we carried out an in situ field experiment in the Exploratory Studies Facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. This experiment involved the release of {approx} 22 m3 of ponded water (at a pressure head of {approx} 0.04 m) over a period of 7 months, directly onto a 12 m2 infiltration plot located on a fractured welded tuff surface. As water was released, changes in moisture content were monitored along horizontal boreholes located in the formation {approx} 19-22 m below. Distinct flow zones, varying in flow velocity, wetted cross-sectional area, and extent of lateral movement, intercepted the monitoring boreholes. There was also evidence of water being diverted above the ceiling of a cavity in the immediate vicinity of the monitoring boreholes. Observations from this field experiment suggest that isolated conduits, each encompassing a large number of fractures, develop within the fractured rock formation to form preferential flow paths that persist if there is a continuous supply of water. In addition, in fractured welded tuffs the propensity for fracture-matrix interactions is significantly greater than that suggested by existing conceptual models,in which flow occurs along a section of fracture surfaces. An overriding conclusion is that field …

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

As the project approaches the end of the first year, the materials screening components of the work are ahead of schedule, while all other tasks are on schedule. For solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), a series of 16 sealing glasses have been prepared and characterized. Traditional melting was used to prepare all of the glasses, and the sol-gel approach has been used to prepare some of the glasses as well as other compositions that might be viable because of the low processing temperatures afforded by the sol-gel method. The glass characterization included measurements of the viscosity and thermal expansion of the glasses, as well as the thermal expansion of the partly crystalline glass ceramics. In addition, the wetting and sintering behavior of all glasses has been measured, as well as the crystallization behavior. The time and temperature at which crystalline phases form from the glasses has been determined for all of the glasses. Each glass ceramic contains at least two crystalline phases, and most of the crystalline phases have been positively identified. Room temperature leak testing has been completed for all sealants, and experiments are in progress to determine the DC electrochemical degradation and degradation in wet hydrogen. The second …

The ion-ion center of mass energies at the LHC will exceed that at RHIC by nearly a factor of 30, providing exciting opportunities for addressing unique physics issues in a completely new energy domain. Some highlights of this new physics domain are presented here. We briefly describe how these collisions will provide new insights into the high density, low momentum gluon content of the nucleus expected to dominate the dynamics of the early state of the system. We then discuss how the dense initial state of the nucleus affects the lifetime and temperature of the produced system. Finally, we explain how the high energy domain of the LHC allows abundant production of ''rare'' processes, hard probes calculable in perturbative quantum chromodynamics, QCD. At the LHC, high momentum jets and b{bar b} bound states, the {Upsilon} family, will be produced with high statistics for the first time in heavy ion collisions.

Daily newspaper from Chickasha, Oklahoma 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.

Semiweekly newspaper from Carthage, Texas that includes local, state, and national news along with advertising.