Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a municipality that operates a pool slide at its municipal swimming pool must purchase insurance in compliance with the Amusement Ride Safety Inspection and Insurance Act, chapter 2151 of the Occupations Code, although the municipality’s liability is limited by the Texas Tort Claims Act, chapter 101 of the Civil Practice and Remedies Code (RQ-0519-GA)

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether funds collected by a county clerk as part of the records management and preservation fee may be used to purchase certain archival records (RQ-0525-GA)

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Air ambulance transport is widely regarded as improving the chances of survival for trauma victims and other critical patients. However, in recent years, the number of air ambulance accidents has led to increased industry scrutiny by government agencies, the public, the media, and the industry itself. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which provides safety oversight, has been called upon by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and others to issue more stringent safety requirements for the industry. GAO's study addressed (1) recent trends in the air ambulance industry, (2) FAA's challenges in providing safety oversight, and (3) FAA's efforts to address the challenges and what is known about the effects of these efforts. To address these issues, we analyzed FAA, NTSB, and industry data, interviewed federal and industry officials, and conducted five site visits, among other things."

This report discusses the information related to business tax issues in the year 2007. It also discusses the business tax legislation, 2001-2006.

This report reviews the statutory basis for the triennial exemptions, explains the Copyright Office's rule-making process pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), summarizes the exemptions granted and rejected in 2006, and describes public reactions to the 2006 exemptions.

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This report is a brief overview of key issues addressed in CRS Report RL33864, Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) Renewal: Core Labor Standards Issues. This report (1) identifies key labor provisions in the current TPA law and how they have translated into free trade agreements negotiated under it; (2) presents some legislative options, and summarizes arguments for and against listing enforceable core labor standards as a principal negotiating objective; and (3) looks at possible outcomes and implications of the legislative options.

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This report provides information about the Status and Current Issues in Biotechnology in Animal Agriculture which has rapid advances.

On December 8, 1999, the Department of Energy (DOE) published Title 10 CFR 850 (hereafter referred to as the Rule) to establish a chronic beryllium disease prevention program (CBDPP) to: {sm_bullet} reduce the number of workers currently exposed to beryllium in the course of their work at DOE facilities managed by DOE or its contractors, {sm_bullet} minimize the levels of, and potential for, expos exposure to beryllium, and {sm_bullet} establish medical surveillance requirements to ensure early detection of the disease.

This project is to develop theoretical framework for protein motors based on experimental data. Protein motors use chemical and electrochemical energies to perform mechanical work. Protein motors are machines of life. They are essential for many biological processes, including cell division, DNA transcription, replication, etc. Understanding the working mechanisms of protein motors has both scientific and medical/clinical significances, including revealing the physiological origins of certain diseases, designing of drugs against pathogens. Experiments with new techniques, especially recent advances in single molecule force measurements, have accumulated a large amount of experimental data that requires systematic theoretical analysis. We worked out a theoretical analysis on protein fluctuations to explain the recent single molecule experiment on dynamic disorders, proposed a new mechanism to explain mechanical signal propagation through the allosteric effect, a fundamental property of proteins, and examined the dynamic disorder effects on protein interaction networks. We also examined various theoretical formulations describing mechanical stress propagation in proteins, and derived mathematical formula for various approximate methods solving the mathematical equations.

The experimental work was conducted to determine whether there is a potential for waste simulant to transport or 'creep' up the air link line and contaminate the pulse jet vent system, and possibly cause long term restriction of the air link line. Additionally, if simulant creep occurred, establish operating parameters for washing down the line. The amount of the addition of flush fluids and mixer downtime must be quantified.

This report summarizes the work performed for the program entitled “High Performance Flexible Reversible Solid Oxide Fuel Cell” under Cooperative Agreement DE-FC36-04GO14351 for the U. S. Department of Energy. The overall objective of this project is to demonstrate a single modular stack that generates electricity from a variety of fuels (hydrogen and other fuels such as biomass, distributed natural gas, etc.) and when operated in the reverse mode, produces hydrogen from steam. This project has evaluated and selected baseline cell materials, developed a set of materials for oxygen and hydrogen electrodes, and optimized electrode microstructures for reversible solid oxide fuel cells (RSOFCs); and demonstrated the feasibility and operation of a RSOFC multi-cell stack. A 10-cell reversible SOFC stack was operated over 1000 hours alternating between fuel cell (with hydrogen and methane as fuel) and steam electrolysis modes. The stack ran very successfully with high power density of 480 mW/cm2 at 0.7V and 80% fuel utilization in fuel cell mode and >6 SLPM hydrogen production in steam electrolysis mode using about 1.1 kW electrical power. The hydrogen generation is equivalent to a specific capability of 2.59 Nm3/m2 with electrical energy demand of 3 kWh/Nm3. The performance stability in electrolysis mode was …

Nanotechnology holds great promise for many application fields, ranging from the semiconductor industry to medical research and national security. Novel, nanostructured materials are the fundamental building blocks upon which all these future nanotechnologies will be based. In this Strategic Initiative (SI) we conducted a combined theoretical and experimental investigation of the modeling, synthesis, characterization, and design techniques which are required to fabricate semiconducting and metallic nanostructures with enhanced properties. We focused on developing capabilities that have broad applicability to a wide range of materials and can be applied both to nanomaterials that are currently being developed for nanotechnology applications and also to new, yet to be discovered, nanomaterials. During this 3 year SI project we have made excellent scientific progress in each of the components of this project. We have developed first-principles techniques for modeling the structural, electronic, optical, and transport properties of materials at the nanoscale. For the first time, we have simulated nanomaterials both in vacuum and in aqueous solution. These simulation capabilities harness the worldleading computational resources available at LLNL to model, at the quantum mechanical level, systems containing hundreds of atoms and thousands of electrons. Significant advances in the density functional and quantum Monte Carlo techniques …

Type B radioactive material package failures can occur due to any one of the following: inadequate design, manufacture, and maintenance of packages, load conditions beyond those anticipated in the regulations, and improper package loading and operation. The rigorous package design evaluations performed in the certification process, robust package manufacture quality assurance programs, and demanding load conditions prescribed in the regulations are all well established. This paper focuses on the operational aspects of Type B package loading with respect to an overbatch which may cause a package failure.

The AdS/CFT correspondence between string theory in AdS space and conformal .eld theories in physical spacetime leads to an analytic, semi-classical model for strongly-coupled QCD which has scale invariance and dimensional counting at short distances and color confinement at large distances. Although QCD is not conformally invariant, one can nevertheless use the mathematical representation of the conformal group in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space to construct a first approximation to the theory. The AdS/CFT correspondence also provides insights into the inherently non-perturbative aspects of QCD, such as the orbital and radial spectra of hadrons and the form of hadronic wavefunctions. In particular, we show that there is an exact correspondence between the fifth-dimensional coordinate of AdS space z and a specific impact variable {zeta} which measures the separation of the quark and gluonic constituents within the hadron in ordinary space-time. This connection allows one to compute the analytic form of the frame-independent light-front wavefunctions, the fundamental entities which encode hadron properties and allow the computation of decay constants, form factors, and other exclusive scattering amplitudes. New relativistic lightfront equations in ordinary space-time are found which reproduce the results obtained using the 5-dimensional theory. The effective light-front equations possess remarkable algebraic structures …

Direct observation of fast intermetallic phase formation in Reactive Multilayer Foils (RMLFs) has been achieved. Snap-shots of the reaction appear to show development of mass-thickness contrast of the unmixed Al and Ni layers and an intermetallic phase. Electron imaging of these RMLF reaction fronts have never been attained in the past. The reaction front travels at {approx}10 meters per second as the nanoscale layers mix in an exothermic chain reaction, thus making traditional in situ electron microscopy {approx}10{sup 5} times too slow to produce such an image. The DTEM capability to produce several million electrons within nanoseconds for single-pulse imaging made this experiment possible. Additionally, the sample drive laser ensures reliable experiment initiation and repeatability. In no other way could such a high velocity event be captured at this magnification. RMLF reaction fronts continue to be analyzed via diffraction for complete phase evolution with respect to time. High quality diffraction patterns enable quantitative phase information to be obtained for future comparison to simulation.

We propose to develop a high-energy heavy-ion experimental database and make it accessible to the scientific community through an on-line interface. The database will be searchable and cross-indexed with relevant publications, including published detector descriptions. It should eventually contain all published data from older heavy-ion programs such as the Bevalac, AGS, SPS and FNAL fixed-target programs, as well as published data from current programs at RHIC and new facilities at GSI (FAIR), KEK/Tsukuba and the LHC collider. This data includes all proton-proton, proton-nucleus to nucleus-nucleus collisions as well as other relevant systems and all measured observables. Such a database would have tremendous scientific payoff as it makes systematic studies easier and allows simpler benchmarking of theoretical models to a broad range of experiments. To enhance the utility of the database, we propose periodic data evaluations and topical reviews. These reviews would provide an alternative and impartial mechanism to resolve discrepancies between published data from rival experiments and between theory and experiment. Since this database will be a community resource, it requires the high-energy nuclear physics community's financial and manpower support.

The model assumes that an 'initiating event' results in positive ions on the surface near the anode and reverses the direction of the normal component of electric field so that electrons in vacuum are attracted to the dielectric locally. A sequence of surface electron avalanches progresses in steps from the anode to the cathode. For 200 kV across 1 cm, the spacing of avalanches is predicted to be about 13 microns. The time for avalanches to step from the anode to the cathode is predicted to be about a ns.

Immobilization of proteins onto surfaces is of great importance in numerous applications, including protein analysis, drug screening, and medical diagnostics, among others. The success of all these technologies relies on the immobilization technique employed to attach a protein to the corresponding surface. Non-specific physical adsorption or chemical cross-linking with appropriate surfaces results in the immobilization of the protein in random orientations. Site-specific covalent attachment, on the other hand, leads to molecules being arranged in a definite, orderly fashion and allows the use of spacers and linkers to help minimize steric hindrances between the protein and the surface. The present work reviews the latest chemical and biochemical developments for the site-specific covalent attachment of proteins onto solid supports.

Background: A substantial fraction of non-coding DNAsequences of multicellular eukaryotes is under selective constraint. Inparticular, ~;5 percent of the human genome consists of conservednon-coding sequences (CNSs). CNSs differ from other genomic sequences intheir nucleotide composition and must play important functional roles,which mostly remain obscure.Results: We investigated relative abundancesof short sequence motifs in all human CNSs present in the human/mousewhole-genome alignments vs. three background sets of sequences: (i)weakly conserved or unconserved non-coding sequences (non-CNSs); (ii)near-promoter sequences (located between nucleotides -500 and -1500,relative to a start of transcription); and (iii) random sequences withthe same nucleotide composition as that of CNSs. When compared tonon-CNSs and near-promoter sequences, CNSs possess an excess of AT-richmotifs, often containing runs of identical nucleotides. In contrast, whencompared to random sequences, CNSs contain an excess of GC-rich motifswhich, however, lack CpG dinucleotides. Thus, abundance of short sequencemotifs in human CNSs, taken as a whole, is mostly determined by theiroverall compositional properties and not by overrepresentation of anyspecific short motifs. These properties are: (i) high AT-content of CNSs,(ii) a tendency, probably due to context-dependent mutation, of A's andT's to clump, (iii) presence of short GC-rich regions, and (iv) avoidanceof CpG contexts, due to their hypermutability. Only a small number ofshort …

The burgeoning field of nanotechnology opens windows between science and art. Exploration of this interplay encourages interaction between scientists, artists and educators alike. The image below serves as an example of the fertile ground for exchange. The substrate that this image captures is made of silicon, the material from which computer chips are made. A thin ({approx}1 nm thick) chemical coating was applied homogeneously to the silicon. Specific regions of the coating, 600 nm wide (approximately 150 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair), were then locally removed from the silicon via photocatalytic nanolithography (PCNL(Bearinger, Hiddessen et al. 2005)). PCNL engages light, such as from a light emitting diode or an ultraviolet source, to activate molecules that are attached to a transparent mask above the silicon substrate. These molecules can be compounds similar to chlorophyll, the photoactive material that aids plants in photosynthesis, or may be semiconductor materials, such as TiO{sub 2}. Once these molecules are activated, chemical reactions result in local destruction of the coating on the silicon. Thus, only regions of the coated silicon in close contact with mask are affected. A non-fouling polymer hydrogel ({approx}10 nm thick) was then grafted to the retained coating. Hydrogels …

As the cost of computers declines relative to outfitting andmaintaining laser spectroscopy laboratories, computers will account foran increasing proportion of the research conducted in fundamentalcombustion science. W.C. Gardiner foresaw that progress will be limitedby the ability to understand the implications of what has been computedand to draw inferences about the elementary components of the combustionmodels. Yet the diagnostics that are routinely applied to computerexperiments have changed little from the sensitivity analyses includedwith the original chemkin software distribution. This paper describessome diagnostics capabilities that may be found on the virtual combustionscience workbench of the future. These diagnostics are illustrated bysome new results concerning which of the hydrogen/oxygen chain branchingreactions actually occur in flames, the increased formation of NOx inwrinkled flames versus flat flames, and the adequacy oftheoreticalpredictions of the effects of stretch. Several areas are identified wherework is needed, including the areas of combustion chemistry and laserdiagnostics, to make the virtual laboratory a reality.