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This report discusses expedited or "fast-track" legislative procedures, which are special procedures that Congress adopts to promote timely committee and floor action on a specifically defined type of bill or resolution.

This report provides background information and oversight issues for Congress on the Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) program. The two Virginia-class boats requested for procurement in FY2013 are the final two in a group of eight covered by a multiyear procurement (MYP) arrangement for the period FY2009-FY2013. Issues for Congress include whether or not to approve the MYP arrangement request, whether to restore procurement of a second Virginia-class boat in FY2014, and the Virginia-class procurement rate in general.

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 the South Texas Water Authority may adopt an effective tax rate under the provisions of chapter 26 of the Tax Code (RQ-0815-GA)

This report provides a brief overview of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI).

Electricity generation relies heavily on water resources and their availability. To examine the interdependence of energy and water in the electricity context, the impacts of a severe drought to assess the risk posed by drought to electricity generation within the western and Texas interconnections has been examined. The historical drought patterns in the western United States were analyzed, and the risk posed by drought to electricity generation within the region was evaluated. The results of this effort will be used to develop scenarios for medium- and long-term transmission modeling and planning efforts by the Western Electricity Coordination Council (WECC) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). The study was performed in response to a request developed by the Western Governors Association in conjunction with the transmission modeling teams at the participating interconnections. It is part of a U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored, national laboratory-led research effort to develop tools related to the interdependency of energy and water as part of a larger interconnection-wide transmission planning project funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This study accomplished three main objectives. It provided a thorough literature review of recent studies of drought and the potential implications for electricity generation. It analyzed …

The client, a government agency, requires its contractor to obtain an Earned Value Management System (EVMS) certification that meets the intent of ANSI/EIA-748-B, Earned Value Management Systems. The contractor has extensive experience with certification preparation, having completed two certifications within two years. Information from a previous EVMS certification and internal system surveillances are used to prepare for client-based EVMS certifications and bi-annual surveillances. The contractor also sent members of its group to assist other companies preparing for surveillances and certifications to perform 'Black Hat Reviews.' This paper is a lessons learned on preparing a team for EVMS certification. The information is also applicable for surveillances, since the contractor prepares its team for the surveillance in the same manner as the initial certification. Some of the areas covered include required documents, tracing the data through the systems, Control Account Manager (CAM) preparation, and system verification.

Solar energy conversion through biology would provide a renewable and nonpolluting abundance of energy. The bacterium Halobacterium salinarum converts solar to electrical energy by virtue of a transmembrane protein, bacteriorhodopsin. This transmembrane protein pumps protons across a nonconducting bilayer upon irradiation with green light. The bacterium evolved to perform this function inefficiently. If we were able to understand this process to engineer this protein for efficiency, then inexpensive energy production could be achieved. There are tens of thousands of different types of halobacteria, giving the opportunity to study different efficiencies and relating these to the protein structures. Technology does not yet exist to perform such screening. The goal of this research is to generate new separation technology that can ultimately enable such screening. This involves creating a method for separating oriented and functional transmembrane proteins that remain in an electrically insulating lipid bilayer, with aqueous solutions on either side of the bilayer. A pH change across the lipid bilayer upon irradiation of a known concentration of proteins would probe function. Differences in proton pumping efficiency for different proteins variants would provide structure-function information for engineering the proteins. A schematic diagram from the original proposal is shown here. The idea is …

We develop a model based on simulation and experiment that explains the behavior of solid-state laser-supported absorption fronts generated in fused silica during high intensity (up to 5GW/cm{sup 2}) laser exposure. We find that the absorption front velocity is constant in time and is nearly linear in laser intensity. Further, this model can explain the dependence of laser damage site size on these parameters. This behavior is driven principally by the temperature-activated deep sub band-gap optical absorptivity, free electron transport and thermal diffusion in defect-free silica for temperatures up to 15,000K and pressures < 15GPa. The regime of parameter space critical to this problem spans and extends that measured by other means. It serves as a platform for understanding general laser-matter interactions in dielectrics under a variety of conditions.

Fusion promises to provide clean and safe energy, and a considerable amount of research effort is underway to turn this aspiration intoreality. This work focuses on a building block for analyzing data produced from the simulation of microturbulence in magnetic confinementfusion devices: the task of efficiently extracting regions of interest. Like many other simulations where a large amount of data are produced,the careful study of ``interesting'' parts of the data is critical to gain understanding. In this paper, we present an efficient approach forfinding these regions of interest. Our approach takes full advantage of the underlying mesh structure in magnetic coordinates to produce acompact representation of the mesh points inside the regions and an efficient connected component labeling algorithm for constructingregions from points. This approach scales linearly with the surface area of the regions of interest instead of the volume as shown with bothcomputational complexity analysis and experimental measurements. Furthermore, this new approach is 100s of times faster than a recentlypublished method based on Cartesian coordinates.

The constituents of the current profile have been computed for a wide range of high-performance plasmas in NSTX [M. Ono, et al., Nuclear Fusion 40, 557 (2000)]; these include cases designed to maximize the non-inductive fraction, pulse length, toroidal-β, or stored energy. In the absence of low-frequency MHD activity, good agreement is found between the reconstructed current profile and that predicted by summing the independently calculated inductive, pressure-driven, and neutral beam currents, without the need to invoke any anomalous beam ion diffusion. Exceptions occur, for instance, when there are toroidal Alfven eigenmode avalanches or coupled m/n=1/1+2/1 kink-tearing modes. In these cases, the addition of a spatially and temporally dependent fast ion diffusivity can reduce the core beam current drive, restoring agreement between the reconstructed profile and the summed constituents, as well as bringing better agreement between the simulated and measured neutron emission rate. An upper bound on the fast ion diffusivity of ~0.5-1 m2/sec is found in “MHD-free” discharges, based on the neutron emission, time rate of change of the neutron signal when a neutral beam is stepped, and reconstructed on-axis current density.

The fragmentation mechanisms of monolignols under various energetic processes are studied with jet-cooled thermal desorption molecular beam (TDMB) mass spectrometry (MS), 25 keV Bi3+ secondary ion MS (SIMS), synchrotron vacuum-ultraviolet secondary neutral MS (VUV-SNMS) and theoretical methods. Experimental and calculated appearance energies of fragments observed in TDMB MS indicate that the coniferyl alcohol photoionization mass spectra contain the molecular parent and several dissociative photoionization products. Similar results obtained for sinapyl alcohol are also discussed briefly. Ionization energies of 7.60 eV ? 0.05 eV for coniferyl alcohol and<7.4 eV for both sinapyl and dihydrosinapyl alcohols are determined. The positive ion SIMS spectrum of coniferyl alcohol shares few characteristic peaks (m/z = 137 and 151) with the TDMB mass spectra, shows extensive fragmentation, and does not exhibit clear molecular parent signals. VUV-SNMS spectra, on the other hand, are dominated by the parent ion and main fragments also present in the TDMB spectra. Molecular fragmentation in VUV-SNMS spectra can be reduced by increasing the extraction delay time. Some features resembling the SIMS spectra are also observed in the desorbed neutral products. The monolignol VUV-SNMS peaks shared with the TDMB mass spectra suggest that dissociative photoionization of ion-sputtered neutral molecules predominate in the VUV-SNMS …

This chapter will address some of the many issues associated with the identification of signatures based on genomic DNA/RNA, which can be used to identify and characterize pathogens for biodefense and microbial forensic goals. For the purposes of this chapter, we define a signature as one or more strings of contiguous genomic DNA or RNA bases that are sufficient to identify a pathogenic target of interest at the desired resolution and which could be instantiated with particular detection chemistry on a particular platform. The target may be a whole organism, an individual functional mechanism (e.g., a toxin gene), or simply a nucleic acid indicative of the organism. The desired resolution will vary with each program's goals but could easily range from family to genus to species to strain to isolate. The resolution may not be taxonomically based but rather pan-mechanistic in nature: detecting virulence or antibiotic-resistance genes shared by multiple microbes. Entire industries exist around different detection chemistries and instrument platforms for identification of pathogens, and we will only briefly mention a few of the techniques that we have used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to support our biosecurity-related work since 2000. Most nucleic acid based detection chemistries involve …

This report summarizes NOAA's budget request for the 2011 fiscal year.

Ultra intense short pulse laser pulses incident on solid targets can generate energetic protons. In additions to their potentially important applications such as in cancer treatments and proton fast ignition, these protons are essential to understand the complex physics of intense laser plasma interaction. To better understand these laser-produced protons, we designed and constructed a novel, spatially imaging proton spectrometer that will not only provide at high-resolution the energy distribution, but also the protons angular characteristics. The information obtained from this spectrometer compliments those from other methods using radiochromic film packs, CR39 films and other protons spectrometers. The basic characterizations and example data from this diagnostics will be presented. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344, as part of the Cimarron project funded by LDRD-09SI11.

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This report discusses family based immigration law and policy and arguments for expanding or restricting family-based immigration numbers.

This report discusses the enforcement of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and various penalties available for violations.

This report discusses the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) which was passed as a part of the 2018 budget bill.

This report discusses Congressional gold medals which are awarded by Congress periodically for distinguished contributions to the United States. The history, selection process, award designs and production process, and issues for Congress are discussed.

This report discusses legislation related to insurance companies introduced or passed in the 115th Congress.

This report provides background information and potential issues for Congress on the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), a relatively inexpensive Navy surface combatant equipped with modular "plug-and-fight" mission packages for countering mines, small boats, and diesel-electric submarines, particularly in littoral (i.e., near-shore) waters.

This report provides an overview of the FY2016 State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPS) request and account-by-account funding comparisons with FY2014 actuals and FY2015 estimates.