Use of ERTS-1 data to access and monitor change in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and central coastal zone of California

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Continuous Isosorbide Production From Sorbitol Using Solid Acid Catalysis

This is a final report for a project funded by the US Department of Agriculture and managed by the US Department of Energy. The Iowa Corn Promotion Board was the principal contracting entity for the grant. The Iowa Corn Promotion Board subcontracted with General Electric, Pacific Northwest National Lab and New Jersey Institute of Technology to conduct research in this project. The Iowa Corn Promotion Board and General Electric provided cost share for the project. The purpose of this diverse collaboration was to integrate both the conversion and the polymer applications into one project and increase the likelihood of success. This project has led to additional collaborations among other polymer companies. The goals of the project were to develop a renewable route to isosorbide for commercialization that is economically competitive with all existing production technologies and to develop new applications for isosorbide in various products such as polymers and materials. Under this program a novel process for the production of isosorbide was developed and evaluated. The novel process converts corn based sorbitol into isosorbide using a solid catalyst with integrated water removal and product recovery. In addition the work under this program has identified several novel products based on isosorbide chemistries. These market applications include: epoxy resins, UV stabilizers, plasticizers and polyesters. These market applications have commercial interest within the current polymer industry. This report contains an overview summary of the accomplishments. Six inventions and four patent applications have been written as a result of this project. Additional data will be published in the patent applications. The data developed at New Jersey Institute of Technology was presented at two technical conferences held in June of 2006. Several companies have made inquiries about using this material in their products

Energy loss and angular distributions of gold cluster constituents

Heavy gold cluster beams are accelerated to high energy (hundreds of keV/atom) and break up when going through a thin foil. The energy and angular distributions of the constituents are then measured and very well reproduced by a SRIM code calculation, which takes into account atomic interactions only. These distributions do not depend on the number of constituents in the cluster and are found to be the same as those of single gold atoms at the same velocity, in the studied energy range

Very large gold and silver sputtering yields induced by keV to MeV energy Aun_n clusters (n = 1-13)

CAS, BIA

Positive youth development in swimming: clarification and consensus of key psychosocial assets

The purpose of this study was to gain a more cohesive understanding of the assets considered necessary to develop in young swimmers to ensure both individual and sport specific development. This two stage study involved (a) a content analysis of key papers to develop a list of both psychosocial skills for performance enhancement and assets associated with positive youth development, and (b) in-depth interviews involving ten expert swim coaches, practitioners and youth sport scholars. Five higher order categories containing seventeen individual assets emerged. These results are discussed in relation to both existing models of positive youth development and implications for coaches, practitioners and parents when considering the psychosocial development of young British swimmers

Evaluation of PRNP Expression Based on Genotypes and Alleles of Two Indel Loci in the Medulla Oblongata of Japanese Black and Japanese Brown Cattle

BACKGROUND: Prion protein (PrP) level plays the central role in bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) susceptibility. Increasing the level of PrP decreases incubation period for this disease. Therefore, studying the expression of the cellular PrP or at least the messenger RNA might be used in selection for preventing the propagation of BSE and other prion diseases. Two insertion/deletion (indel) variations have been tentatively associated with susceptibility/resistance of cattle to classical BSE. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We studied the expression of each genotype at the two indel sites in Japanese Black (JB) and Japanese Brown (JBr) cattle breeds by a standard curve method of real-time PCR. Five diplotypes subdivided into two categories were selected from each breed. The two cattle breeds were considered differently. Expression of PRNP was significantly (p<0.0001) greater in the homozygous deletion genotype at the 23-bp locus in JB breed. Compared to the homozygous genotypes, the expression of PRNP was significantly greater in the heterozygous genotype at the 12-bp locus in JB (p<0.0001) and in JBr (p = 0.0394) breeds. In addition, there was a statistical significance in the PRNP levels between the insertion and the deletion alleles of the 23-bp locus in JB (p = 0.0003) as well as in JBr (p = 0.0032). There was no significance in relation to sex, age, geographical location or due to their interactions (p>0.05). CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that the del/del genotype or at least its del allele may modulate the expression of PRNP at the 23-bp locus in the medulla oblongata of these cattle breeds

Waveguide-integrated silicon T centres

The performance of modular, networked quantum technologies will be strongly dependent upon the quality of their quantum light-matter interconnects. Solid-state colour centres, and in particular T centres in silicon, offer competitive technological and commercial advantages as the basis for quantum networking technologies and distributed quantum computing. These newly rediscovered silicon defects offer direct telecommunications-band photonic emission, long-lived electron and nuclear spin qubits, and proven native integration into industry-standard, CMOS-compatible, silicon-on-insulator (SOI) photonic chips at scale. Here we demonstrate further levels of integration by characterizing T centre spin ensembles in single-mode waveguides in SOI. In addition to measuring long spin T_1 times, we report on the integrated centres' optical properties. We find that the narrow homogeneous linewidth of these waveguide-integrated emitters is already sufficiently low to predict the future success of remote spin-entangling protocols with only modest cavity Purcell enhancements. We show that further improvements may still be possible by measuring nearly lifetime-limited homogeneous linewidths in isotopically pure bulk crystals. In each case the measured linewidths are more than an order of magnitude lower than previously reported and further support the view that high-performance, large-scale distributed quantum technologies based upon T centres in silicon may be attainable in the near term