Annual summary report of the Decontamination and Decommissioning surveillance and maintenance program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for period ending September 30, 1992

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Decontamination and Decommissioning (D D) Program is part of the Department of Energy (DOE) Environmental Restoration D D Program and has continued to provide surveillance and maintenance (S M) support for 34 surplus facilities. The objectives are (1) to ensure adequate containment of residual radioactive materials remaining in the facilities, (2) to provide safety and security controls to minimize the potential hazards to on-site personnel and to the general public, and (3) to manage the facilities in the most cost-effective manner while awaiting decommissioning. This support has included work in three principal areas: (1) S M planning, (2) routine S M, and (3) special projects designed to correct serious facility deficiencies beyond the scope of routine maintenance

Annual summary report of the decontamination and decommissioning surveillance and maintenance program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for period ending September 30, 1991

The Surplus Facilities Management Program and Defense Facilities Decommissioning Program were established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1976 in order to provide collective management of all surplus sites under ORNL control on the Oak Ridge Reservation. Some 34 facilities, classified into 3 civilian-related and 8 defense-related projects, are currently managed by the recently integrated Decontamination and Decommissioning Program. Support includes (1) surveillance and maintenance (S M) planning, (2) routine S M, and (3) special maintenance projects. This report documents routine S M, special projects, and special maintenance performed on these facilities for the period of October 1990 through September 1991

Technical assessment of Mir-1 life support hardware for the international space station

NASA has been progressively learning the design and performance of the Russian life support systems utilized in their Mir space station. In 1992, a plan was implemented to assess the benefits of the Mir-1 life support systems to the Freedom program. Three primary tasks focused on: evaluating the operational Mir-1 support technologies and understanding if specific Russian systems could be directly utilized on the American space station and if Russian technology design information could prove useful in improving the current design of the planned American life support equipment; evaluating the ongoing Russian life support technology development activities to determine areas of potential long-term application to the U.S. space station; and utilizing the expertise of their space station life support systems to evaluate the benefits to the current U.S. space station program which included the integration of the Russian Mir-1 designs with the U.S. designs to support a crew of six

Explaining species distribution patterns through hierarchical modeling

Understanding spatial patterns of species diversity and the distri- butions of individual species is a consuming problem in biogeography and con- servation. The Cape Floristic Region (CFR) of South Africa is a global hotspot of diversity and endemism, and the Protea Atlas Project, with some 60,000 site records across the region, provides an extraordinarily rich data set to analyze bio- diversity patterns. Analysis for the region is developed at the spatial scale of one minute grid-cells ( 37; 000 cells total for the region). We report on results for 40 species of a owering plant family Proteaceae (of about 330 in the CFR) for a de ned subregion. Using a Bayesian framework, we develop a two stage, spatially explicit, hierar- chical logistic regression. Stage one models the suitability or potential presence for each species at each cell, given species attributes along with grid cell (site-level) climate, precipitation, topography and geology data using species-level coe cients, and a spatial random e ect. The second level of the hierarchy models, for each species, observed presence=absence at a sampling site through a conditional speci- cation of the probability of presence at an arbitrary location in the grid cell given that the location is suitable. Because the atlas data are not evenly distributed across the landscape, grid cells contain variable numbers of sampling localities. Indeed, some grid cells are entirely unsampled; others have been transformed by human intervention (agriculture, urbanization) such that none of the species are there though some may have the potential to be present in the absence of distur- bance. Thus the modeling takes the sampling intensity at each site into account by assuming that the total number of times that a particular species was observed within a site follows a binomial distribution.In fact, a range of models can be examined incorporating di erent rst and second stage speci cations. This necessitates model comparison in a misaligned multilevel setting. All models are tted using MCMC methods. A best" model is selected. Parameter summaries o er considerable insight. In addition, results are mapped as the model-estimated potential presence for each species across the domain. This probability surface provides an alternative to customary empiri- cal \range of occupancy" displays. Summing yields the predicted species richness over the region. Summaries of the posterior for each environmental coe cient show which variables are most important in explaining species presence. Other biodi- versity measures emerge as model unknowns. A considerable range of inference is available. We illustrate with only a portion of the analyses we have conducted, noting that these initial results describe biogeographical patterns over the modeled region remarkably well

Significant ophthalmoarthropathy associated with ectodermal dysplasia in a child with Marshall-Stickler overlap: a case report

© 2008 Al Kaissi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licens

Critical Josephson Current in a Model Pb/YBa_2Cu_3O_7 Junction

In this article we consider a simple model for a c--axis Pb/YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-\delta} Josephson junction. The observation of a nonzero current in such a junction by Sun et al. [A. G. Sun, D. A. Gajewski, M. B. Maple, R. C. Dynes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 2267 (1994)] has been taken as evidence against d--wave superconductivity in YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-\delta}. We suggest, however, that the pairing interaction in the CuO_2 planes may well be d--wave but that the CuO chains destroy the tetragonal symmetry of the system. We examine two ways in which this happens. In a simple model of an incoherent junction, the chains distort the superconducting condensate away from d_{x^2-y^2} symmetry. In a specular junction the chains destroy the tetragonal symmetry of the tunneling matrix element. In either case, the loss of tetragonal symmetry results in a finite Josephson current. Our calculated values of the critical current for specular junctions are in good agreement with the results of Sun and co-workers.Comment: Latex File, 21 pages, 6 figures in uuencoded postscript, In Press (Phys. Rev. B

Formation of the Food Vacuole in Plasmodium falciparum: A Potential Role for the 19 kDa Fragment of Merozoite Surface Protein 1 (MSP119)

Plasmodium falciparum Merozoite Surface Protein 1 (MSP1) is synthesized during schizogony as a 195-kDa precursor that is processed into four fragments on the parasite surface. Following a second proteolytic cleavage during merozoite invasion of the red blood cell, most of the protein is shed from the surface except for the C-terminal 19-kDa fragment (MSP119), which is still attached to the merozoite via its GPI-anchor. We have examined the fate of MSP119 during the parasite's subsequent intracellular development using immunochemical analysis of metabolically labeled MSP119, fluorescence imaging, and immuno-electronmicroscopy. Our data show that MSP119 remains intact and persists to the end of the intracellular cycle. This protein is the first marker for the biogenesis of the food vacuole; it is rapidly endocytosed into small vacuoles in the ring stage, which coalesce to form the single food vacuole containing hemozoin, and persists into the discarded residual body. The food vacuole is marked by the presence of both MSP119 and the chloroquine resistance transporter (CRT) as components of the vacuolar membrane. Newly synthesized MSP1 is excluded from the vacuole. This behavior indicates that MSP119 does not simply follow a classical lysosome-like clearance pathway, instead, it may play a significant role in the biogenesis and function of the food vacuole throughout the intra-erythrocytic phase

The Long Term Response of Birds to Climate Change: New Results from a Cold Stage Avifauna in Northern England

The early MIS 3 (55–40 Kyr BP associated with Middle Palaeolithic archaeology) bird remains from Pin Hole, Creswell Crags, Derbyshire, England are analysed in the context of the new dating of the site’s stratigraphy. The analysis is restricted to the material from the early MIS 3 level of the cave because the upper fauna is now known to include Holocene material as well as that from the Late Glacial. The results of the analysis confirm the presence of the taxa, possibly unexpected for a Late Pleistocene glacial deposit including records such as Alpine swift, demoiselle crane and long-legged buzzard with southern and/or eastern distributions today. These taxa are accompanied by more expected ones such as willow ptarmigan /red grouse and rock ptarmigan living today in northern and montane areas. Finally, there are temperate taxa normally requiring trees for nesting such as wood pigeon and grey heron. Therefore, the result of the analysis is that the avifauna of early MIS 3 in England included taxa whose ranges today do not overlap making it a non-analogue community similar to the many steppe-tundra mammalian faunas of the time. The inclusion of more temperate and woodland taxa is discussed in the light that parts of northern Europe may have acted as cryptic northern refugia for some such taxa during the last glacial. These records showing former ranges of taxa are considered in the light of modern phylogeographic studies as these often assume former ranges without considering the fossil record of those taxa. In addition to the anomalous combination of taxa during MIS 3 living in Derbyshire, the individuals of a number of the taxa are different in size and shape to members of the species today probably due to the high carrying capacity of the steppe-tundra