This report discusses the Air Force F-22 fighter, also known as the Raptor. The administration wants to end F-22 procurement at 187 aircraft, and the administration's proposed FY2010 budget does not request funding for the procurement of additional F-22s in FY2010. The issue of F-22 procurement has emerged as one of the highest-profile items of debate on the FY2010 defense budget. This report discusses both sides of the debate.

This report discusses key issues regarding funding for a next-generation bomber (NGB) program. Congress's decisions on these issues could affect Air Force capabilities and funding requirements, and the U.S. aircraft manufacturing industrial base.

Compilation of Advanced Light Source newsletter, ALSNews, for 2009, Volumes 294-304.

This report examines China's foreign assistance and government-supported, often-preferential investment ventures in three regions: Africa, Latin America (Western Hemisphere), and Southeast Asia. These activities often are collectively referred to as "economic assistance" by some analysts and in this report.

This report examines changes to the Federal Budget for Fiscal Years 2008-2010. The report considers the factors that have an effect on various budgetary functions and decisions. The report specifically focuses on the effect of the 2007-2008 financial recession on the budget, but also considers more long-term fiscal issues such as health care for retiring Baby-Boomers.

This report presents an overview of Canada's financial system and its supervisory framework and draws some distinctions between that system and the current U.S. framework.

This report provides a historical account and analysis of the crisis through November 14, 2009. While business contraction appears to have abated, unemployment is shown to be on the rise and many businesses and countries are still facing difficulties.

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2010, after about 25 years of work and the expenditure of billions of dollars, the International Space Station (ISS) will be completed. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the ISS crew will then be able to redirect its efforts from assembling the station to conducting research. In 2005, Congress designated the ISS as a national laboratory; in addition, the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 required NASA to provide a research management plan for the ISS National Laboratory. In light of these developments, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to review the research use of the ISS. Specifically, GAO (1) identified how the ISS is being used for research and how it is expected to be used once completed, (2) identified challenges to maximizing ISS research; and (3) identified common management practices at other national laboratories and large science programs that could be applicable to the management of the ISS. To accomplish this, GAO interviewed NASA officials and reviewed key documents related to the ISS. GAO also studied two ground-based national laboratories and several large science institutions."

This report looks at the background of Iran's nuclear policy. It covers the current status of Iran's nuclear facilities, and current controversy surrounding them, as well as the effects of international sanctions on Iran, recent sabotages on the Iran Enrichment Program, an estimated timeline of Iran's nuclear weapon capabilities, and whether or not Iran even has a nuclear weapons program.

This report discusses the relationship between the United States and Japan, including Japanese efforts to support the U.S. in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks and the two countries' economic ties, especially with regards to the recent economic downturn. This report also discusses the general political atmosphere of Japan, including the recent and ongoing political turmoil in Tokyo.

This report discusses the Navy's proposed FY2011 budget requests (about $1.8 billion) for the procurement of 22 F/A- 18E/F Super Hornet strike fighters and about $1.0 billion for the procurement of 12 EA-18G Growler electric attack aircraft.

A request for studying the spectral performance of in-vacuum undulators (IVUs) for the APS storage ring was recently put forward. In-vacuum undulators are prevalent at other synchrotron radiation facilities such as the ESRF and the Spring-8. However, they never made it into the arsenal of undulators at the APS because the brilliance tuning curves were sufficiently wide due to the fact that the undulator minimum gap could be set as low as 10.5 mm. For sector 3, which in the past used a narrow-gap vacuum chamber, the minimum undulator pole gap was allowed to be set as low as 8.5 mm, providing contiguous tuning curves between the first and third harmonic radiation for a 2.7-cm-period device. (Subsequently, the narrow-gap vacuum chamber was removed and replaced with a standard vacuum chamber, which allows a minimum gap of 10.5 mm.) For sector 4, which currently holds the only narrow-gap vacuum chamber at the APS, the minimum gap is 9.5 mm. In this sector, a permanent magnet hybrid undulator with SmCo magnets is used instead of NdFeB magnets because of their higher radiation resistance and their better protection against radiation-induced demagnetization of the magnets. In the realm of looking to the future, new …

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This report focuses on current conflicts in Africa in which sexual violence is reported to be widespread or systematic. It describes the context in which such violence takes place, selected cases where it is currently occurring, and U.S. policy responses. It concludes with a discussion of potential policy considerations for Congress.

This report provides an overview discussion on the modernization of U.S. military tactical aircraft, meaning fighter aircraft, strike fighters, and attack planes. Tactical aircraft are a major component of U.S. military capability, and account for a significant portion of U.S. defense spending. In early 2009, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps collectively had an inventory of about 3,500 tactical aircraft.

This report provides a review of traumatic brain injury (TBI) as an illness, its prevalence among veterans, current activity to address the issue in the Department of Veterans Affairs, and current policy issues.

This report examines the eligibility criteria and the fundamentals of the VA-administered disability benefit programs and related issues. It supplements and condenses the relevant materials that are available from the VA and its website. It also provides specific citations for further information and more in-depth analysis of information contained herein.

This report discusses the VH-71 program, which is intended to provide 23 new presidential helicopters to replace the current fleet of 19 aging presidential helicopters.

This report discusses background information on the V-22 Osprey Tilt-Rotor Aircraft, as well as procurement and related oversight issues for Congress.

Advanced theoretical methods and high-performance computers may finally unlock the secrets of nuclear fission, a fundamental nuclear decay that is of great relevance to society. In this work, we studied the phenomenon of spontaneous fission using the symmetry-unrestricted nuclear density functional theory (DFT). Our results show that many observed properties of fissioning nuclei can be explained in terms of pathways in multidimensional collective space corresponding to different geometries of fission products. From the calculated collective potential and collective mass, we estimated spontaneous fission half-lives, and good agreement with experimental data was found. We also predicted a new phenomenon of trimodal spontaneous fission for some transfermium isotopes. Our calculations demonstrate that fission barriers of excited superheavy nuclei vary rapidly with particle number, pointing to the importance of shell effects even at large excitation energies. The results are consistent with recent experiments where superheavy elements were created by bombarding an actinide target with 48-calcium; yet even at high excitation energies, sizable fission barriers remained. Not only does this reveal clues about the conditions for creating new elements, it also provides a wider context for understanding other types of fission. Understanding of the fission process is crucial for many areas of science and …

This report illustrates how the United States has been in the midst of a profound demographic change: the rapid aging of its population, as reflected by an increasing proportion of persons aged 65 and older, and an increasing median age in the population.

This technical report documents the results of laboratory geochemical and hydrologic measurements of sediments collected from new borehole 299-E13-65 (C7047) and comparison of the results with those of nearby borehole 299-13E-62 (C5923) both drilled in the BC Cribs and Trenches Area. The total and water-leachable concentrations of key contaminants will be used to update contaminant-distribution conceptual models and to provide more data for improving baseline risk predictions and remedial alternative selections. Improved understanding of subsurface conditions and methods to remediate these principal contaminants can be also used to evaluate the application of specific technologies to other contaminants across the Hanford Site.

The objective of this project was to develop an effective chemical filtering system for significantly reducing the content of inclusion particles in the steel melts exiting the tundish for continuous casting. This project combined a multi-process approach that aimed to make significant progress towards an "inclusion free" steel by incorporating several interdependent concepts to reduce the content of inclusions in the molten steel exiting the tundish for the caster. The goal is to produce "cleaner" steel.

The objective of this project was to develop an effective chemical filtering system for significantly reducing the content of inclusion particles in the steel melts exiting the tundish for continuous casting. This project combined a multi-process approach that aimed to make significant progress towards an "inclusion free" steel by incorporating several interdependent concepts to reduce the content of inclusions in the molten steel exiting the tundish for the caster. The goal is to produce "cleaner" steel.