Monthly newsletter from the Texas State Office of the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) discussing news and activities of the FSA, funding opportunities, and other information related to farming and agriculture in Texas.

Newsletter focusing on pecan disease and pest control in Texas, including prevention, identification, treatment, and educational opportunities.

A weekly publication, the Texas Register serves as the journal of state agency rulemaking for Texas. Information published in the Texas Register includes proposed, adopted, withdrawn and emergency rule actions, notices of state agency review of agency rules, governor's appointments, attorney general opinions, and miscellaneous documents such as requests for proposals. After adoption, these rulemaking actions are codified into the Texas Administrative Code.

A series of pilot plant runs were made on the Jackpile ore, Jackpile mixed blend, Jackpile-Poison Valley blend, and Jackpile-Arrowhead blend.

A study of metallurgical problems resulting from variation in grain boundaries, bonding layers, and inclusions in metals and alloys has become increasingly important over the past several years. To keep pace with and aid in these studies, several new techniques have been developed in emission and X-ray spectroscopy. In X-ray, areas as smalls as one square micron can be studied by making them targets for a focused electron beam and observing the X-rays emitted (5,2). Such an instrument would be quite helpful at Hanford, but the high original cost is prohibitive.

A neutron burst from an untamped cylindrical Oy assembly occurred at the Pajarito Remote Control Laboratory at 1800 hours on 18 April 1952. The circumstances causing the burst and a description of the assembly involved are given There was no personnel hazard. Normal operations could have been resumed on other assemblies withing two or three hours after the burst. No evidence of damage to the oy was observed. It was determined that the burst resulted in 1.5 x 10(16) fissions in the oy. Also reported are some results of the computations and post-burst tests and a discussion of probable time behavior of power level during the burst.

Patent for improvement on the usage of die-stocks which are used to cut and thread metal objects such as pipes.

Patent for a hanger designed to easily attach and detach from a cotton sack without damaging the sack or the hands of a cotton picker. It is designed to be made of a single piece of material and may be used to hang the sack on a scale for weighing the contents.

Patent for a device that will hold soft shirt collars in position, giving them a neater appearance.

Patent for improvements in jacks used for shipbuilding. The device described is designed to aid in the processes of fastening siding to the ribs of a ship hull by first forcing the boards that form the siding close together so that they can then be secured to the hull's ribs. The improvements this jack provides is the necessary force required to closely align the boards easily and quickly before they are nailed in place. This mechanical device is lightweight, efficient and easy to repair. It can adapt to various similar tasks such as bending iron beams.

Patent for a tractor "of the caterpillar type, having a caterpillar on each side, said caterpillars being independently driven either forwardly or reversely" (lines 11-14).

Patent for gearing mechanisms in feed planters that are more efficient, faster, and less costly.

Patent for an elevated carrier, primarily used to travel merchandise and such from one point to another.

Patent for a foldable stool "primarily designed for the purpose of attachment to a sewing machine, and which may be collapsed into a compact form and swung into position underneath the top of the machine and out of the way, when not in use" (lines 12-17). It is intended to be used with a desk, table, or other similar furniture.

Patent for a mold of the character described in the illustrations, designed for use in cement and concrete constructions. It is specifically well-suited for building boats and ships.

Two approaches for calculating soil structure interaction (SSI) are compared: finite element and lumped mass. Results indicate that the calculations with the lumped mass method are generally conservative compared to those obtained by the finite element method. They also suggest that a closer agreement between the two sets of calculations is possible, depending on the use of frequency-dependent soil springs and dashpots in the lumped mass calculations. There is a total lack of suitable guidelines for implementing the lumped mass method of calculating SSI, which leads to the conclusion that the finite element method is generally superior for calculative purposes.

Lithium fluoride as received from the vendor in boule form is 38 x 38 x 13 mm thick. This block is cleaved to wafers of the desired thickness, x-ray-evaluated for ''d'' spacing and greatest intensity, bent to the required radius, and then acid-etched to remove foreign material. The diffraction and dispersion characteristics of a wafer are analyzed using well-collimated tungsten x rays that strike the crystal and are diffracted onto no-screen x-ray film. If the crystal is satisfactory, it is mounted in a spectrogoniometer and rotated through an x-ray beam while a detector is set at the optimized angle for the diffracted x rays. The average intensity across the length of the crystal is recorded by multichannel scaling. Any imperfections appear as peaks or dips compared to the average intensity. The crystal next goes to a 10-channel, filter-fluorescer x-ray unit that compares zero-order intensity to diffracted K..cap alpha.. and K..beta.. intensity. Counts for 100-s intervals are taken in groups of three and averaged. Correction factors for instrument geometry, air, pinhole diameter at zero order, K..cap alpha..-K..beta.., barometric pressure, temperature, etc., are added to the efficiency calculations to obtain the crystal efficiency (epsilon) vs keV data. The crystal is mounted in …

Error field multipoles due to systematic errors in the current distribution are computed and compared with the error field multipoles due to random errors in the current distribution. The systematic field error multipoles are found to vary rapidly across the aperture, and in some cases may be the dominant error multipoles.

Various leaching agents were tested to determine their capability for dissolving PuO/sub 2/, UO/sub 2/, and U/sub 3/O/sub 8/. The amount of radionuclides retained by the filter media was investigated. Adsorption isotherms for two leaching systems were obtained. A four-stage dissolution process was developed. 10 figures, 2 tables.

The cylindrically symmetric beam-foil collision produces excitation and alignment of atom and ion levels similar, but not identical, to that resulting at comparable energies from ion-atom or ion-molecule collisions. When the foil is tilted, the macroscopic change acts on the microscopic scale to produce coherent alignment and orientation of the excited levels. The maximum beam energy range bounding this interaction has not yet been defined. The dynamic interaction which produces these effects is currently not predicted by any theory, although the dynamics of the ions subsequent to the collision are well understood. Refinement of current experimental technique can be expected to better define the final foil surface. The beam-tilted-foil collision promises to be useful in the study of ionic structure via quantum beat, radio-frequency and level-crossing spectroscopy techniques, and may provide a useful probe for certain surface interactions. 4 figs, 48 refs.

The primary objective of the proposed research will be elucidation of the etiology and pathogenesis of bovine leukemia. We have consistently demonstrated C-type particles in mitogen stimulated lymphocyte cultures from leukemic cows and cows with a persistent lymphocytosis. These particles have been concentrated and partially purified by continuous flow, density gradient, ultracentrifugation. Newborn calves and late stage bovine fetuses have been inoculated with these concentrated cell free preparations. Our current study involves extensive monitoring of these inoculated animals to detect early pre-cancerous changes. The following parameters are being measured: the serological titer against a bovine leukemia associated antigen; the percentage of lymphocytes showing nuclear pockets; the percentage of mitogen stimulated lymphocytes with C-type particles adherent to their surface; the percentage of B-lymphocytes in the peripheral circulation; the complete blood count; and the quantity of bovine leukemia virus (BLV) production as determined by the syncytia induction assay. Additional proposals include: using the monitoring parameters to study animals with the juvenile and thymic forms of leukemia; the examination of adult lymphosarcoma cases to determine which tissues harbor BLV; and lymphocyte subpopulation work to further define which cell types are associated with BLV production and tumor formation.

Newsletter of the Texas Bureau of Disease Control and Epidemiology discussing the news, activities, and events of the organization and other information related to health in Texas.

COGEMA Engineering Corporation (COGEMA), under a contract from CH2M Hill Hanford Group (CH2M Hill), has performed an ultrasonic nondestructive examination of selected portions of Double-Shell Tank 241-SY-101. The purpose of this examination was to provide information that could be used to evaluate the integrity of the wall of the primary tank. The requirements for the ultrasonic examination of Tank 241-SY-101 were to detect, characterize (identify, size, and locate), and record measurements made of any wall thinning, pitting, or cracks that might be present in the wall of the primary tank. Any measurements that exceed the requirements set forth in the Engineering Task Plan (ETP), RPP-17750 (Jensen 2003) and summarized on page 1 of this document, are reported to CH2M Hill and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for further evaluation. Under the contract with CH2M Hill, all data is to be recorded on disk and paper copies of all measurements are provided to PNNL for third-party evaluation. PNNL is responsible for preparing a report that describes the results of the COGEMA ultrasonic examinations.

This paper focuses on a numerical procedure that addresses the difficulties of dealing with large, finite arrays while preserving the generality and robustness of full-wave methods. We present a fast method based on approximating interactions between sufficiently separated array elements via a relatively coarse interpolation of the Green's function on a uniform grid commensurate with the array's periodicity. The interaction between the basis and testing functions is reduced to a three-stage process. The first stage is a projection of standard (e.g., RWG) subdomain bases onto a set of interpolation functions that interpolate the Green's function on the array face. This projection, which is used in a matrix/vector product for each array cell in an iterative solution process, need only be carried out once for a single cell and results in a low-rank matrix. An intermediate stage matrix/vector product computation involving the uniformly sampled Green's function is of convolutional form in the lateral (transverse) directions so that a 2D FFT may be used. The final stage is a third matrix/vector product computation involving a matrix resulting from projecting testing functions onto the Green's function interpolation functions; the low-rank matrix is either identical to (using Galerkin's method) or similar to that for …