Report in Response to America COMPETES Act: SEC. 7022

This report is written in response to the America COMPETES Act request that the NSF Director report on the NSF broader impact merit review criterion. This report includes background on the NSF implementation of the broader impact criterion and responds to each of the five specific requests made in the COMPETES Act Sec 7022

New Source of Natural Fertilizer Discovered in Oceans

New findings suggest that the deep ocean is teeming with organisms that produce essential natural fertilizers. A National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team led by Jonathan Zehr, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has discovered a previously unknown type of photosynthetic bacteria that fixes nitrogen, converting nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form other organisms can use

The NSF Scientific Collections Survey: A Brief Overview of Findings

This white paper describes the state of digital collections resulting from NSF funded research in biodiversity, ecology, environmental health, environmental education, and environmental resource management

Synthesis and Assessment Product

This document is part of the Synthesis and Assessment Products (SAP) described in the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) Strategic Plan. This report is meant to reduce uncertainty in projections of how the Earth's climate and related systems may change in the future. It provides scientific information for supporting the decision-making audience and the expert scientific and stakeholder community

Scientific and Legal Perspectives on Science Generated for Regulatory Activities

This article originated from a conference that asked “Should scientific work conducted for purposes of advocacy before regulatory agencies or courts be judged by the same standards as science conducted for other purposes?” In the article, which focuses on the regulatory advocacy context, we argue that it can be and should be. First, we describe a set of standards and practices currently being used to judge the quality of scientific research and testing and explain how these standards and practices assist in judging the quality of research and testing regardless of why the work was conducted. These standards and practices include the federal Information Quality Act, federal Good Laboratory Practice standards, peer review, disclosure of funding sources, and transparency in research policies. The more that scientific information meets these standards and practices, the more likely it is to be of high quality, reliable, reproducible, and credible. We then explore legal issues that may be implicated in any effort to create special rules for science conducted specifically for a regulatory proceeding. Federal administrative law does not provide a basis for treating information in a given proceeding differently depending on its source or the reason for which it was generated. To the contrary, this law positively assures that interested persons have the right to offer their technical expertise toward the solution of regulatory problems. Any proposal to subject scientific information generated for the purpose of a regulatory proceeding to more demanding standards than other scientific information considered in that proceeding would clash with this law and would face significant administrative complexities. In a closely related example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considered but abandoned a program to implement standards aimed at “external” information

Major Matters: A Comparison of the Within-Major Gender Pay Gap across College Majors for Early-Career Graduates

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75560/1/j.1468-232X.2008.00538.x.pd

Towards sustainable agriculture: fossil-free ammonia

Citation: Pfromm, P. H. (2017). Towards sustainable agriculture: Fossil-free ammonia. Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, 9(3), 034702. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4985090About 40% of our food would not exist without synthetic ammonia (NH3) for fertilization. Yet, NH3 production is energy intensive. About 2% of the world's commercial energy is consumed as fossil fuels for NH3 synthesis based on the century-old Haber-Bosch (H.-B.) process. The state of the art and the opportunities for reducing the fossil energy footprint of industrial H.-B. NH3 synthesis are discussed. It is shown that even a hypothetical utterly revolutionary H.-B. catalyst could not significantly reduce the energy demand of H.-B. NH3 as this is governed by hydrogen production. Renewable energy-enabled, fossil-free NH3 synthesis is then evaluated based on the exceptional and continuing cost decline of renewable electricity. H.-B. syngas (H2, N2) is assumed to be produced by electrolysis and cryogenic air separation, and then supplied to an existing H.-B. synthesis loop. Fossil-free NH3 could be produced for energy costs of about $232 per tonne NH3 without claiming any economic benefits for the avoidance of about 1.5 tonnes of CO2 released per tonne NH3 compared to the most efficient H.-B. implementations. Research into alternatives to the H.-B. process might be best targeted at emerging markets with currently little NH3 synthesis capacity but significant future population growth such as Africa. Reduced capital intensity, good scale-down economics, tolerance for process upsets and contamination, and intermittent operability are some desirable characteristics of NH3 synthesis in less developed markets, and for stranded resources. Processes that are fundamentally different from H.-B. may come to the fore under these specific boundary conditions

Developing a conceptual framework for an evaluation system for the NIAID HIV/AIDS clinical trials networks

Globally, health research organizations are called upon to re-examine their policies and practices to more efficiently and effectively address current scientific and social needs, as well as increasing public demands for accountability

The Choice between Formal and Informal Intellectual Property: A Review

We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal intellectual property protection. (JEL D82, K11, O31, O34) </jats:p

International Decade of Ocean Exploration /

iii, 64 p.