A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Chemicals play an important role in everyday life, but some may be harmful to human health and the environment. Chemicals are used to produce items widely used throughout society, including consumer products such as cleansers, paints, plastics, and fuels, as well as industrial solvents and additives. However, some chemicals, such as lead and mercury, are highly toxic at certain doses and need to be regulated because of health and safety concerns. In 1976, the Congress passed the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to authorize the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to control chemicals that pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment. GAO reviewed EPA's efforts to (1) control the risks of new chemicals not yet in commerce, (2) assess the risks of existing chemicals used in commerce, and (3) publicly disclose information provided by chemical companies under TSCA."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "On September 30, 2002, the most recent date for which Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data were available, about 126,000 foster children were waiting to be adopted. Estimates suggest that a significant portion of these children had one or more special needs, such as a medical condition or membership in a minority group, that may discourage or delay their adoption. Federal support in the form of adoption subsidies and incentive payments to states is available to promote special needs adoption. This report (1) identifies the major challenges to placing and keeping special needs children in adoptive homes, (2) examines what states and HHS have done to facilitate special needs adoptions, and (3) assesses how well the Adoption Assistance Program and the Adoption Incentives Program have worked to facilitate special needs adoptions, and determines if changes might be needed."

Memorandum of Meeting to discuss the RC-PAT organization and USAR Participation.

As a step toward investigating the parsec-scale properties of faint extragalactic radio sources, the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) was used at 5.0 GHz to obtain phase-referenced images of 76 sources in the NOAO Booetes field. These 76 sources were selected from the FIRST catalog to have peak flux densities above 10 mJy at 5'' resolution and deconvolved major diameters of less than 3'' at 1.4 GHz. Fifty-five of these faint radio sources were identified with accretion-powered radio galaxies and quasars brighter than 25.5 mag in the optical I band. On VLA scales at 1.4 GHz, a measure of the compactness of the faint sources (the ratio of the peak flux density from FIRST to the integrated flux density from the NVSS catalog) spans the full range of possibilities arising from source-resolution effects. Thirty of the faint radio sources, or 39{sub -7}{sup +9}%, were detected with the VLBA at 5.0 GHz with peak flux densities above 6 {sigma} {approx} 2 mJy at 2 mas resolution. The VLBA detections occur through the full range of compactness ratios. The stronger VLBA detections can themselves serve as phase-reference calibrators, boding well for opening up much of the radio sky to VLBA imaging. For …

This report summarizes the Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act (H.R. 1279) and its effects. This includes information such as an increase in criminal penalties assigned to violent crimes and expanding the instances where juveniles could be tried as adults. For more information see CRS Report RL32946 "Gang Deterrence A Legal Analysis of H.R. 1279 With References to S. 155.

We have carried out numerical simulations of three-dimensional non-isothermal flow around an in situ heat-based flow sensor to investigate how formation heterogeneities can affect the interpretation of ground water flow velocities from this instrument. The flow sensor operates by constant heating of a 0.75 m long, 5 cm diameter cylindrical probe, which contains 30 thermistors in contact with the formation. The temperature evolution at each thermistor can be inverted to obtain an estimate of the ground water flow velocity vector using the standard interpretive method, which assumes that the formation is homogeneous. Analysis of data from heat-based flow sensors installed in a sand aquifer at the Former Fort Ord Army Base near Monterey, California suggested an unexpected component of downward flow. The magnitudes of the vertical velocities were expected to be much less than the horizontal velocities at this site because the sensors were installed just above a clay aquitard. Numerical simulations were conducted to examine how differences in thermal conductivities may lead to spurious indications of vertical flow velocities. We found that a decrease in the thermal conductivity near the bottom of the sensor can perturb the temperature profiles along the instrument in such a manner that analyses assuming …

Recent experiments at the Institute of Laser Engineering (ILE) in Japan [1] and at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the United Kingdom [2] have shown good coupling of short-pulse high-intensity laser light into high-energy electrons channeled down a narrow fiber. Such target configurations are being considered as backlighter targets on the National Ignition Facility (NIF). We will report on LSP calculations of these cone-wire experiments and other candidate target configurations. These calculations also give insight into the transport of MeV-electrons, which remains the critical issue for the achievement of fast ignition [3]. The LSP code uses a direct implicit particle-in-cell (PIC) algorithm in 2 or 3 dimensions to solve for beam particle transport, while treating the background particles as a fluid [4]. We have modified LSP to produce K{alpha} photons in a non-interfering manner and will show calculated absolute K{alpha} yields for the experiments reported by Key [2].

A responsibility of the Laser Safety Officer (LSO) is to perform laser audits. The American National Standard Z136.1 Safe Use of Lasers references this requirement through several sections. One such reference is Section 1.3.2.8, Safety Features Audits, ''The LSO shall ensure that the safety features of the laser installation facilities and laser equipment are audited periodically to assure proper operation''. The composition, frequency and rigor of that inspection/audit rests in the hands of the LSO. A common practice for institutions is to develop laser audit checklists or survey forms It is common for audit findings from one inspector or inspection to the next to vary even when reviewing the same material. How often has one heard a comment, ''well this area has been inspected several times over the years and no one ever said this or that was a problem before''. A great number of audit items, and therefore findings, are subjective because they are based on the experience and interest of the auditor to particular items on the checklist. Beam block usage, to one set of eyes might be completely adequate, while to another, inadequate. In order to provide consistency, the Laser Safety Office of the National Ignition Facility …

In this paper, we use a coupled climate and carbon cycle model to investigate the global climate and carbon cycle changes out to year 2300 that would occur if CO2 emissions from all the currently estimated fossil fuel resources were released to the atmosphere. By year 2300, the global climate warms by about 8 K and atmospheric CO2 reaches 1423 ppmv. In our simulation, the prescribed cumulative emission since pre-industrial period is about 5400 Gt-C by the end of 23rd century. At year 2300, nearly 45 % of cumulative emissions remain in the atmosphere. In our simulations both soils and living biomass are net carbon sinks throughout the simulation. Despite having relatively low climate sensitivity and strong carbon uptake by the land biosphere, our model projections suggest severe long-term consequences for global climate if all the fossil-fuel carbon is ultimately released to the atmosphere.

Sludge-contaminated waste consists of waste contaminated with both insoluble species (the sludge fraction) and entrained supernate. The WCS is based on the assumption that approximately 70% of the weight of what is commonly referred to as sludge is interstitial supernate; the remaining approximately 30% consists of the insoluble species (Reference 1). Development of a method for characterization of sludge-contaminated waste must consider both fractions. Separate waste cuts may contain sludge and supernate fractions in varying proportions due to the nature of the job generating the waste and the variability in waste handling techniques. Development of a distribution representative of all sludge-contaminated waste cuts must allow for varying fractions of sludge and supernate contamination. This document will develop a radionuclide distribution in accordance with the methodology outlined in WSRC 1S SRS Waste Acceptance Criteria Manual, Procedure 2.02, Revision 8 for the sludge fraction of sludge-contaminated waste generated in the F-Area Tank Farm This distribution was based on the assumption that sludge-contaminated waste from F-Area Tank Farm Waste Tanks could be co-mingled, and the actual contamination present on waste in a series of containers from these tanks will be representative of the mean radionuclide distribution. The original characterization was based primarily on …

As petroleum prices continue to rise and the United States seeks to reduce its dependency on foreign oil, there is a renewed interest in the research and development of more efficient and alternative energy sources, such as fuel cells. One approach is to utilize processes that can produce long-chain hydrocarbons from other sources. One such reaction is Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Fischer-Tropsch synthesis is a process by which syngas (CO and H{sub 2}) is converted to higher molecular weight hydrocarbons. The reaction involves a complex set of bond-breaking and bond-making reactions, such as CO and H{sub 2} activation, hydrocarbon hydrogenation reactions, and hydrocarbon coupling reactions. This report details our initial construction of an ab initio based kinetic Monte Carlo code that can be used to begin to simulate Fischer-Tropsch synthesis over model Co(0001) surfaces. The code is based on a stochastic kinetic formalism that allows us to explicitly track the transformation of all reactants, intermediates and products. The intrinsic kinetics for the simulations were derived from the ab initio results that we reported in previous year summaries.

Our inability to associate distant regulatory elements with the genes that they regulate has largely precluded their examination for sequence alterations contributing to human disease. One major obstacle is the large genomic space surrounding targeted genes in which such elements could potentially reside. In order to delineate gene regulatory boundaries we used whole-genome human-mouse-chicken (HMC) and human-mouse-frog (HMF) multiple alignments to compile conserved blocks of synteny (CBS), under the hypothesis that these blocks have been kept intact throughout evolution at least in part by the requirement of regulatory elements to stay linked to the genes that they regulate. A total of 2,116 and 1,942 CBS>200 kb were assembled for HMC and HMF respectively, encompassing 1.53 and 0.86 Gb of human sequence. To support the existence of complex long-range regulatory domains within these CBS we analyzed the prevalence and distribution of chromosomal aberrations leading to position effects (disruption of a genes regulatory environment), observing a clear bias not only for mapping onto CBS but also for longer CBS size. Our results provide a genome wide data set characterizing the regulatory domains of genes and the conserved regulatory elements within them.

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New approaches are being explored to facilitate multidisciplinary collaborative research of Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) combustion processes. In this paper, collaborative sharing of the Range Identification and Optimization Toolkit (RIOT) and related data and models is discussed. RIOT is a developmental approach to reduce the computational of detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms, enabling their use in modeling kinetically controlled combustion applications such as HCCI. These approaches are being developed and piloted as a part of the Collaboratory for Multiscale Chemical Sciences (CMCS) project. The capabilities of the RIOT code are shared through a portlet in the CMCS portal that allows easy specification and processing of RIOT inputs, remote execution of RIOT, tracking of data pedigree, and translation of RIOT outputs to a table view and to a commonly-used mechanism format.

A first demonstration has recently been made of radiography of implosions using a nonthermal K{alpha} radiation source generated with a high intensity picosecond laser pulse [1]. Absolute source brightness is important in assessing the potential of this diagnostic and we present here measurements and Monte-Carlo simulations of the brightness of the Ti K{alpha} back-lighter source. The experiment was conducted at the Vulcan laser within the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK. A set of radiographs were taken in which a back-lighting source was produced using a 1 ps CPA beam. The beam delivered an average of 49J, within an 800 {micro}m by 400 {micro}m elliptical spot, onto a 25 {micro}m thick Ti foil (Figure 1). The first of two instruments used to characterize the K{alpha} source was a spherical Bragg crystal imager (Quartz 20{bar 2}3, 2d of 0.2749 nm, radius of curvature 38 cm, aperture 1.6 cm) used to spatially resolve the emission of the K{alpha} back-lighter [2]. The crystal focused the 4.5 keV K{alpha} photons with 10 mm spatial resolution and 7.9 x magnification onto a cooled, 16-bit, 1'' x 1'', 1024 x 1024 pixel CCD chip. The instrument observation angle was normal to the rear axis of …

This procedure provides instructions for assembling the CH Packaging Drum payload assembly, Standard Waste Box (SWB) assembly, Abnormal Operations and ICV and OCV Preshipment Leakage Rate Tests on the packaging seals, using a nondestructive Helium (He) Leak Test.

A dominant force of inhibition of fast electrons in normal density matter is due to an axially directed electrostatic field. Fast electrons leave the critical density layer and enter the solid in an assumed relativistic Maxwellian energy distribution. Within a cycle of the solid density plasma frequency, the charge separation is neutralized by a background return current density j{sub b} = en{sub b}v{sub b} equal and opposite to the fast electron current density j{sub f} = en{sub f}v{sub f} [1] where it is assumed that the fast electron number density is much less than the background number density, n{sub f} << n{sub b} [2]. This charge and current neutralization allows the forward moving fast electron current to temporarily exceed the Alfven limit by many orders of magnitude [3]. During this period the cold return current, in passing through the material resistivity, ohmically generates an electric field in opposition to the fast current. As a result, the fast electron current loses its energy to the material, via the return current, in the form of heat [4]. So, although the highly energetic electrons suffer relatively little direct collisional loss of energy (owing to the inverse relation of the Coulomb cross section to …

The accuracy and efficiency of several methods are compared for simulating multifluid compressible flows. The methods include a Godunov scheme (Colella, 1985), a Weighted Essentially Non-Oscillatory method (Jiang and Shu, 1996), an Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian algorithm (Marinak et al., 2001) and a compact scheme (Cook and Cabot, 2005). Test problems include a compressible breaking wave, the Shu-Osher problem, the Taylor-Green vortex and decaying turbulence. The compact method employs an artificial bulk viscosity for treating shocks and an artificial shear viscosity for modeling turbulence. The compact method is demonstrated to capture shocks as well as the other schemes, while providing superior resolution of post-shock features.

We report a measurement of the rate of prompt diphoton production in p{bar p} collisions at {radical}s = 1.96 TeV using a data sample of 207 pb{sup -1} collected with the upgraded Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF II). The background from non-prompt sources is determined using a statistical method based on differences in the electromagnetic showers. The cross section is measured as a function of the diphoton mass, the transverse momentum of the diphoton system, and the azimuthal angle between the two photons and is found to be consistent with perturbative QCD predictions.

This report discusses the major provisions of the ADA and will discuss selected recent issues, including the supreme court cases. It will be updated as development warrant.

Executive Correspondence – Letter to the Commission from Kenneth Tavares, Chairman of the Board of Selectmen of Plymouth MA enclosing a proclamation from that same body encouraging the continuous operation of Otis AFB.

Executive Correspondence – Letter to Chairman Principi from the Medina Central School District (Medina, NY) Superintendent of Schools Richard M. Galante expressing concern over DoD’s recommendation to close Niagara Falls Air force Reserve base and requesting that it be removed from the closure list.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE REPORT TO THE DEFENSE BASE CLOSURE AND REALIGNMENT COMMISSION Volume V, Part 1 of 2. Report establishes a capabilities-based defense strategy, and challenges the military departments to transform themselves to better meet new threats in a changed security environment.