The extremely halophilic archaea are present worldwide in saline environments and have important biotechnological applications. Ten complete genomes of haloarchaea are now available, providing an opportunity for comparative analysis. We report here the comparative analysis of five newly sequenced haloarchaeal genomes with five previously published ones. Whole genome trees based on protein sequences provide strong support for deep relationships between the ten organisms. Using a soft clustering approach, we identified 887 protein clusters present in all halophiles. Of these core clusters, 112 are not found in any other archaea and therefore constitute the haloarchaeal signature. Four of the halophiles were isolated from water, and four were isolated from soil or sediment. Although there are few habitat-specific clusters, the soil/sediment halophiles tend to have greater capacity for polysaccharide degradation, siderophore synthesis, and cell wall modification. Halorhabdus utahensis and Haloterrigena turkmenica encode over forty glycosyl hydrolases each, and may be capable of breaking down naturally occurring complex carbohydrates. H. utahensis is specialized for growth on carbohydrates and has few amino acid degradation pathways. It uses the non-oxidative pentose phosphate pathway instead of the oxidative pathway, giving it more flexibility in the metabolism of pentoses. These new genomes expand our understanding of haloarchaeal …

The Texas Panhandle is regarded as the 'Cattle Feeding Capital of the World', producing 42% of the fed beef cattle in the United States within a 200-mile radius of Amarillo generating more than 5 million tons of feedlot manure/year. Apart from feedlots, the Bosque River Region in Erath County, just north of Waco, Texas with about 110,000 dairy cattle in over 250 dairies, produces 1.8 million tons of manure biomass (excreted plus bedding) per year. While the feedlot manure has been used extensively for irrigated and dry land crop production, most dairies, as well as other concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's), the dairy farms utilize large lagoon areas to store wet animal biomass. Water runoff from these lagoons has been held responsible for the increased concentration of phosphorus and other contaminates in the Bosque River which drains into Lake Waco - the primary source of potable water for Waco's 108,500 people. The concentrated animal feeding operations may lead to land, water, and air pollution if waste handling systems and storage and treatment structures are not properly managed. Manure-based biomass (MBB) has the potential to be a source of green energy at large coal-fired power plants and on smaller-scale combustion systems …

An alternative biomass-based route to benzoic acid from the renewable starting materials quinic acid and shikimic acid is described. Benzoic acid is obtained selectively using a highly efficient, one-step formic acid-mediated deoxygenation method.

This report presents the means through which the total debt of the federal government can increase, gives a historical overview of debt limits, and discusses how the current economic slowdown has led to higher deficits and thereby a series of debt limit increases, as well as legislation related to these increases.

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The local structure and 4f orbital occupancy have been investigated in Ce{sub 1−x}Yb{sub x}CoIn{sub 5} via Yb L{sub III}-edge extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), Ce and Yb L{sub III}-edge x-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES), and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) measurements. Yb(III) (4f{sup 13}) is the hole analog of Ce(III) (4f{sup 1}). Yb is found to be strongly intermediate-valent in Ce{sub 1−x}Yb{sub x}CoIn{sub 5} throughout the entire doping range, including pure YbCoIn{sub 5}, with an f-hole occupancy for Yb of n{sub f} ≃ 0.3 (i.e. Yb{sup 2.3+}), independent of Yb concentration and independent of temperature down to T = 20 K. In contrast, the f-electron orbital occupancy for Ce remains close to 1 for all Yb concentrations, suggesting that there is no mutual influence on n{sub f} between neighboring Ce and Yb sites. Likewise, ARPES measurements at 12 K have found that the electronic structure along {Gamma} − X is not sensitive to the Yb substitution, suggesting that the Kondo hybridization of Ce f electrons with the conduction band is not affected by the presence of Yb impurities in the lattice. The emerging picture is that in Ce{sub 1−x}Yb{sub x}CoIn{sub 5} there are two networks, interlaced but independent, that couple …

This report begins with a brief examination of clean energy, renewable energy, and alternative energy. It then presents possible selection criteria Congress could use to determine which sources could be eligible for a CES depending on the goal(s) of the CES. The report provides an overview of the energy sources most commonly discussed as potential CES qualifying sources: biomass, fossil fuels (natural gas combined-cycle and coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and sequestration), geothermal resources, nuclear, solar, water, and wind. The report describes where each source can be found in the United States, the estimated quantity available for electricity generation, technologies used to create electricity from the source, advantages and disadvantages of using the source for electricity generation, and policy implications should the source be included in a CES.5 The report also contains a section on energy efficiency and its potential inclusion in a CES.

I briefly survey a number of novel hadron physics topics which can be investigated with the 12 GeV upgrade at J-Lab. The topics include new the formation of exotic heavy quark resonances accessible above the charm threshold, intrinsic charm and strangeness phenomena, the exclusive Sivers effect, hidden-color Fock states of nuclei, local two-photon interactions in deeply virtual Compton scattering, and non-universal antishadowing.

This report is categorized into Five Categories: (I) Background, (II) E-Verify, (III) Recent Proposals on Electronic Employment Verification, (IV) Policy Considerations and (V) Conclusion.

We have an ongoing research program for characterization of superconductor composite strands, the principal output of which is sensitive measurements of critical current Ic over a broad range of the essential parameters: longitudinal strain ε, temperature T, and magnetic field B. This features a new apparatus for integrated measurement of Ic(ε,T,B) on the same, long-conductor sample without remounting.

We report the discovery of a self-doped multi-layer high T{sub c} superconductor Ba{sub 2}Ca{sub 3}Cu{sub 4}O{sub 8}F{sub 2} (F0234) which contains distinctly different superconducting gap magnitudes along its two Fermi surface(FS) sheets. While formal valence counting would imply this material to be an undoped insulator, it is a self-doped superconductor with a T{sub c} of 60K, possessing simultaneously both electron- and hole-doped FS sheets. Intriguingly, the FS sheet characterized by the much larger gap is the electron-doped one, which has a shape disfavoring two electronic features considered to be important for the pairing mechanism: the van Hove singularity and the antiferromagnetic ({pi}/a, {pi}/a) scattering.

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Côte d'Ivoire is emerging from a severe political-military crisis that followed a disputed November 28, 2010, presidential runoff election between former president Laurent Gbagbo and his, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara. Both claimed electoral victory and formed opposing governments. Their rivalry spurred a full-scale civil military conflict in early March 2011, after months of growing political violence. Armed conflict largely ended days after Gbagbo's arrest by pro-Ouattara forces, aided by United Nations (U.N.) and French peacekeepers, but limited residual fighting was continuing to occur as of April 20.

This report discusses about Côte d’Ivoire which is emerging from a severe political-military crisis that followed a disputed November 28, 2010, Presidential runoff election between former president Laurent Gbagbo and his, former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara.

This is a summary for work performed under cooperative agreement DE FC36 04GO14006 (Design and Development of New Carbon-based Sorbent Systems for an Effective Containment of Hydrogen). The project was directed to discover new solid and liquid materials that use reversible catalytic hydrogenation as the mechanism for hydrogen capture and storage. After a short period of investigation of solid materials, the inherent advantages of storing and transporting hydrogen using liquid-phase materials focused our attention exclusively on organic liquid hydrogen carriers (liquid carriers). While liquid carriers such as decalin and methylcyclohexane were known in the literature, these carriers suffer from practical disadvantages such as the need for very high temperatures to release hydrogen from the carriers and difficult separation of the carriers from the hydrogen. In this project, we were successful in using the prediction of reaction thermodynamics to discover liquid carriers that operate at temperatures up to 150 C lower than the previously known carriers. The means for modifying the thermodynamics of liquid carriers involved the use of certain molecular structures and incorporation of elements other than carbon into the carrier structure. The temperature decrease due to the more favorable reaction thermodynamics results in less energy input to release hydrogen …

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This report is designed to shed some light on the KOREU FTA for Congress.4 It briefly reviews EU-South Korean economic ties and the respective EU and South Korean objectives regarding the KOREU FTA. It then discusses the KOREU FTA in general and examines some of its major provisions in more detail, with special focus on autos and some other manufacturing sectors, agriculture, services, and labor-areas of particular interest to U.S. policymakers and the U.S. business community. The report does not attempt to determine if one FTA is better than the other. Finally, the report analyzes the prospects for the KOREU FTA and the agreement's potential implications for the United States.

This report covers health benefits made available to Members of Congress through federal government employment, including FEHBP, dental and vision insurance, flexible spending accounts, long-term care insurance, and Medicare.

Combining contemporary cytogenetic methods with DNA CGH microarray technology and chromosome flow-sorting increases substantially the ability to resolve exchange breakpoints associated with interstitial deletions and translocations, allowing the consequences of radiation damage to be directly measured at low doses, while also providing valuable insights into molecular mechanisms of misrepair processes that, in turn, identify appropriate biophysical models of risk at low doses. The aims of this work apply to cells recovered from 3D tissue constructs of human skin and, for the purpose of comparison, the same cells irradiated in traditional 2D cultures. These aims are: to analyze by multi-flour fluorescence in situ hybridization (mFISH) the chromosomes in clonal descendents of individual human fibroblasts that were previously irradiated; to examine irradiated clones from Aim 1 for submicroscopic deletions by subjecting their DNA to comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) microarray analysis; and to flow-sort aberrant chromosomes from clones containing stable radiation-induced translocations and map the breakpoints to within an average resolution of 100 kb using the technique of 'array painting'.

This report identifies, by Senate committee, presidentially appointed positions requiring Senate confirmation as of June 30, 2016. For each committee list, positions are categorized as full- or part-time and then grouped by department or agency. Where nominations have been referred to more than one committee, they are noted under each of the committees to which the nominations were referred. The lists also include the lengths of fixed terms, where applicable.

This report is a research aid, which lists the Department Of Defense authorization bills and appropriations bills for FY1970-FY2011. It includes all the pertinent information on the passage of these bills through the legislative process: bill numbers, report numbers, dates reported and passed, recorded vote numbers and vote tallies, dates of passage of the conference reports with their numbers and votes, vetoes, substitutions, dates of final passage, and public law numbers. Key definitions are also included.

The ferroelectric degenerate semiconductor Sn{sub 1-{delta}}Te exhibits superconductivity with critical temperatures, T{sub c}, of up to 0.3 K for hole densities of order 10{sup 21} cm{sup -3}. When doped on the tin site with greater than x{sub c} = 1.7(3)% indium atoms, however, superconductivity is observed up to 2 K, though the carrier density does not change significantly. We present specific heat data showing that a stronger pairing interaction is present for x > x{sub c} than for x < x{sub c}. By examining the effect of In dopant atoms on both T{sub c} and the temperature of the ferroelectric structural phase transition, T{sub SPT}, we show that phonon modes related to this transition are not responsible for this T{sub c} enhancement, and discuss a plausible candidate based on the unique properties of the indium impurities.

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