This report discusses the U.S. commercial ties with France, which are extensive, mutually profitable, and growing. With over $1.2 billion in commercial transactions taking place between the two countries every day of the year, each country has an increasingly large stake in the health and openness of the other's economy

This document provides a description of the survey performed on different componentsof the ATLAS Pixel Detector at different stages of its assembly.

A total of 66 urine samples, 6 blank fecal and 6 spiked artificial fecal samples were submitted during the report period (April 1, 2006 through March 31, 2007) to General Engineering Laboratories, South Carolina by the Hanford Internal Dosimetry Program (IDP) to check the accuracy, precision, and detection levels of their analyses. Urine analyses for tritium, Sr, 238Pu, 239Pu, 241Am, 243Am 235U, 238U, elemental uranium and fecal analyses for 241Am, 238Pu and 239Pu were tested this year. The number of QC urine samples submitted during the report period represented 1.7% of the total samples submitted. In addition to the samples provided by IDP, GEL was also required to conduct their own QC program, and submit the results of analyses to IDP. About 36% of the analyses processed by GEL during the second year of this contract were quality control samples. GEL tested the performance of 16 radioisotopes, all of which met or exceeded the specifications in the Statement of Work. IDP concluded that GEL was performing well for all analyses tested, and concerns identified earlier were satisfactorily resolved.

We have developed a monolithic radiation pixel detector using silicon on insulator (SOI) with a commercial 0.15 {micro}m fully-depleted-SOI technology and a Czochralski high resistivity silicon substrate in place of a handle wafer. The SOI TEG (Test Element Group) chips with a size of 2.5 x 2.5 mm{sup 2} consisting of 20 x 20 {micro}m{sup 2} pixels have been designed and manufactured. Performance tests with a laser light illumination and a {beta} ray radioactive source indicate successful operation of the detector. We also briefly discuss the back gate effect as well as the simulation study.

Using 230 million B{bar B} events recorded with the BABAR detector at the e{sup +}e{sup -} storage rings PEP-II, they reconstruct approximately 4100 B{sup 0} {yields} J/{psi} K{sup +}{pi}{sup -} and 9930 B{sup +} {yields} J/{psi}K{sup +} decays with J/{psi} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} and e{sup +} e{sup -}. From the measured B-momentum distributions in the e{sup +}e{sup -} rest frame, they determine the mass difference m(B{sup 0}) - m(B{sup +}) = (+0.33 {+-} 0.05 {+-} 0.03) MeV/c{sup 2}.

This report consists of the budget for fiscal year 2009.

This report offers a brief history of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. It discusses the establishment of a regional home heating oil reserve and addresses the question when the SPR should be used.

The microbial catalysis of Mn(II) oxidation is believed to be a dominant source of abundant sorption- and redox-active Mn oxides in marine, freshwater, and subsurface aquatic environments. In spite of their importance, environmental oxides of known biogenic origin have generally not been characterized in detail from a structural perspective. Hyporheic zone Mn oxide grain coatings at Pinal Creek, Arizona, a metals-contaminated stream, have been identified as being dominantly microbial in origin and are well studied from bulk chemistry and contaminant hydrology perspectives. This site thus presents an excellent opportunity to study the structures of terrestrial microbial Mn oxides in detail. XRD and EXAFS measurements performed in this study indicate that the hydrated Pinal Creek Mn oxide grain coatings are layer-type Mn oxides with dominantly hexagonal or pseudo-hexagonal layer symmetry. XRD and TEM measurements suggest the oxides to be nanoparticulate plates with average dimensions on the order of 11 nm thick x 35 nm diameter, but with individual particles exhibiting thickness as small as a single layer and sheets as wide as 500 nm. The hydrated oxides exhibit a 10-A basal-plane spacing and turbostratic disorder. EXAFS analyses suggest the oxides contain layer Mn(IV) site vacancy defects, and layer Mn(III) is inferred …

In 2005, the 109th Congress approved a new Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) round. As the Department of Defense (DOD) implements the new round, issues for Congress include the pace and costs of closing and realigning the selected installations and the impacts on surrounding communities. The disposal of surplus property has stimulated interest among affected communities in how the land can be redeveloped to replace jobs lost as a result of the planned closures. Environmental contamination can limit the potential for economic redevelopment if the availability of funding or technological capabilities constrains the degree of cleanup needed to make the land suitable for its intended use.

This report discusses bills introduced into the 110th Congress pertaining to food safety that could affect farmers and ranchers. Several of these bills would expressly have required enforceable on-farm safety standards. Others that focused primarily on post-harvest food safety measures nonetheless might have led to changes in on-farm practices if the regulated sectors (handlers and processors of agricultural products) placed new demands on their suppliers in order to comply. Similar proposals are re-emerging in the 111th Congress, where food safety reform is expected to be on the agenda.

A synergistic approach involving experiment and first-principles theory not only shows that carbon nanostructures can be used as catalysts for hydrogen uptake and release in complex metal hydrides such as sodium alanate, NaAlH{sub 4}, but also provides an unambiguous understanding of how the catalysts work. The stability of NaAlH{sub 4} originates from the charge transfer from Na to the AlH{sub 4} moiety, resulting in an ionic bond between Na{sup +} and AlH{sub 4}{sup -} and a covalent bond between Al and H. Interaction of NaAlH{sub 4} with an electro-negative substrate such as carbon fullerene or nanotube affects the ability of Na to donate its charge to AlH{sub 4}, consequently weakening the Al-H bond and causing hydrogen to desorb at lower temperatures as well as facilitating the absorption of H{sub 2} to reverse the dehydrogenation reaction. Ab initio molecular dynamics simulation further reveals the time evolution of the charge transfer process with hydrogen desorption occurring when the charge transfer is complete.

This report is categorized into three categories: (I) Introduction, (II) Key Issue and (III) Congressional Action. It also consist a figure for F-22A Weapons Loadout.

Te inclusions existing at high concentrations in CdZnTe (CZT) material can degrade the performance of CZT detectors. These microscopic defects trap the free electrons generated by incident radiation, so entailing significant fluctuations in the total collected charge and thereby strongly affecting the energy resolution of thick (long-drift) detectors. Such effects were demonstrated in thin planar detectors, and, in many cases, they proved to be the dominant cause of the low performance of thick detectors, wherein the fluctuations in the charge losses accumulate along the charge's drift path. We continued studying this effect using different tools and techniques. We employed a dedicated beamline recently established at BNL's National Synchrotron Light Source for characterizing semiconductor radiation detectors, along with an IR transmission microscope system, the combination of which allowed us to correlate the concentration of defects with the devices performances. We present here our new results from testing over 50 CZT samples grown by different techniques. Our goals are to establish tolerable limits on the size and concentrations of these detrimental Te inclusions in CZT material, and to provide feedback to crystal growers to reduce their numbers in the material.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) was tasked by the DOE Office of Electricity (OE) to recommend load reduction and grid integration strategies, and identify additional demand response (energy efficiency/conservation opportunities) and strategies at the Forest City Housing (FCH) redevelopment at Pearl Harbor and the Marine Corps Base Hawaii (MCBH) at Kaneohe Bay. The goal was to provide FCH staff a path forward to manage their electricity load and thus reduce costs at these FCH family housing developments. The initial focus of the work was at the MCBH given the MCBH has a demand-ratchet tariff, relatively high demand (~18 MW) and a commensurate high blended electricity rate (26 cents/kWh). The peak demand for MCBH occurs in July-August. And, on average, family housing at MCBH contributes ~36% to the MCBH total energy consumption. Thus, a significant load reduction in family housing can have a considerable impact on the overall site load. Based on a site visit to the MCBH and meetings with MCBH installation, FCH, and Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) staff, recommended actions (including a "smart grid" recommendation) that can be undertaken by FCH to manage and reduce peak-demand in family housing are made. Recommendations are also …

Devices are increasingly vulnerable to soft errors as their feature sizes shrink. Previously, soft error rates were significant primarily in space and high-atmospheric computing. Modern architectures now use features so small at sufficiently low voltages that soft errors are becoming important even at terrestrial altitudes. Due to their large number of components, supercomputers are particularly susceptible to soft errors. Since many large scale parallel scientific applications use iterative linear algebra methods, the soft error vulnerability of these methods constitutes a large fraction of the applications overall vulnerability. Many users consider these methods invulnerable to most soft errors since they converge from an imprecise solution to a precise one. However, we show in this paper that iterative methods are vulnerable to soft errors, exhibiting both silent data corruptions and poor ability to detect errors. Further, we evaluate a variety of soft error detection and tolerance techniques, including checkpointing, linear matrix encodings, and residual tracking techniques.

This report includes a description of the Congressional Research Service and it's benefits to the American Legislative Process

This report examines the current state of constitutional law on the subject of governmentally mandated drug testing in employment and of students in the public schools, which is followed by a brief review of federal drug-free workplace programs presently in effect.

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The branching fractions for the decays B {yields} P{ell}{nu}{sub {ell}}, where P are the pseudoscalar charmless mesons {pi}{sup {+-}}, {pi}{sup 0}, {eta} and {eta}{prime} and {ell} is an electron or muon, are measured with B{sup 0} and B{sup {+-}} mesons found in the recoil of a second B meson decaying as B {yields} D{ell}{nu}{sub {ell}} or B {yields} D*{ell}{nu}{sub {ell}}. The measurements are based on a data set of 348 fb{sup -1} of e{sup +}e{sup -} collisions at {radical}s = 10.58 GeV recorded with the BABAR detector. Assuming isospin symmetry, measured pionic branching fractions are combined into {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {pi}{sup -}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}) = (1.54 {+-} 0.17{sub (stat)} {+-} 0.09{sub (syst)}) x 10{sup -4}. First evidence of the B{sup +} {yields} {eta}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}} decay is seen; its branching fraction is measured to be {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {eta}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}) = (0.64 {+-} 0.20{sub (stat)} {+-} 0.03{sub (syst)}) x 10{sup -4}. It is determined that {Beta}(B{sup +} {yields} {eta}{prime}{ell}{sup +}{nu}{sub {ell}}) < 0.47 x 10{sup -4} to 90% confidence. Partial branching fractions for the pionic decays in ranges of the momentum transfer and various published calculations of the B {yields} {pi} hadronic form factor are used to obtain values …

We employ Runs 1-4 off-peak data sample (about 21.5 fb{sup -1}) to produce the current world-best spectra and production rates measurements for three strangely-flavored baryons: the {Lambda} hyperon, the cascade hyperon, and the {Omega} hyperon. These improved measurements shall enable theoretical and phenomelogical workers to generate more realistic models for the hadronization process, currently one of the unresolved problem areas in the standard model of particle physics. This analysis was conducted using codes from release 16 series. We report the production rate at 10.54 GeV for the {Lambda} as 0.0900 {+-} 0.0006(stat.) {+-} 0.0039(sys.) per hadronic event. Our measured production rate at the same energy for the cascade hyperon is 0.00562 {+-} 0.00013(stat.) {+-} 0.00045(sys.) per hadronic event, while that for the {Omega} hyperon is 0.00027 {+-} 0.00004(stat.) {+-} 0.0008(sys.) per hadronic event. The spectral measurements for the respective particles also constitute current world-best measurements.

This month's issue has the following articles: (1) Biomedical Technology Has a Home at Livermore--Commentary by Cherry A. Murray; (2) Shaping the Future of Aneurysm Treatments--Livermore foam devices may offer significant advantages for treating some forms of aneurysms; (3) Ring around a Stellar Shell: A Tale of Scientific Serendipity--Using a three-dimensional model, Livermore scientists have solved a long-standing puzzle of stellar evolution; and (4) On Assignment in Washington, DC--Livermore personnel in Washington, DC, support federal sponsors and become valuable assets to Laboratory programs.

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This report describes the formula and eligibility changes adopted by Congress since 1972 related to the allocation of wastewater treatment assistance. It focuses on the interplay and decision-making by Congress on factors to include in the formula.

The Environmental Protection Agency is attempting to develop a regulatory response to a 2006 federal court ruling that vacated a long-standing rule that exempts discharges associated with the normal operation of vessels from permit requirements of the Clean Water Act. Concern that this ruling could require millions of recreational boaters to obtain permits has led to the introduction of legislation to exempt these and other types of vessels from water quality regulation. This report discusses background to the issue; bills introduced in response, two of which were passed by Congress on July 22; and draft permits proposed by EPA on June 17.