Award Data

Research reactors such as the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) have a long history of service to the nation and are expected to continue to operate successfully for many more years. However, these reactors are old and have not benefited much from recent advances in maintenance and ...

Power generation utilities are striving to use wireless technologies in nuclear power plants, but a number of important challenges must be overcome. These challenges include infrastructure issues, security risks, reliability questions, and interference problems. This project will develop a prototype system to acquire data from wireless sensors for equipment and process diagnostics in nuclear pow ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Autoimmune diseases are thought to arise from abnormalities in innate or adaptive immune responses and most likely have both genetic and environmental components. Diagnosis of autoimmune disease is often difficult, as t he symptoms can be relatively nonspecific. Furthermore, no available blood test can accurately exclude the possibility of an autoimmune disease ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The aim of the proposed research is to develop an enabling technology that will allow development of a molecular diagnostic for identification and discrimination among closely related bacterial species that cause signif icant disease at low microorganism numbers. The technology will be advanced through the development of a diagnostic system for detection of spe ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): BCR Diagnostics, Inc. (BCR) has recently developed and patented a technology platform for engineering fluorogenic functionality into living Bacillus spores. Fluorogenic spores (F-spores) produced at BCR appear to be phy siologically identical to normal spores except for performing as self reporters of initial germination events. Considering the unique features ...

Existing and planned neutron facilities, such as the Spallation Neutron Source, generate bursts of cold neutrons for materials research. The efficiency of the beam line components, which convert the fast neutrons to a cold neutron beam, determines the usefulness of the facility. Existing solid methane moderators have a high efficiency, but cannot be scaled to work on high power facilities. A co ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in the cannabis plant, has a wide range of pharmacological properties of therapeutic value. The drug has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) (Marinol(r) soft gelatin capsules) for the treatment of nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy and for appetite stimulation in AIDS p ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes is an organ-specific autoimmune disease resulting from destruction of insulinproducing pancreatic beta-cells. In non-diabetics, islet cell antigen-specific T cells are either deleted in thymic development or are converted to T regulatory cells that actively suppress effector responses to islet cell antigens. In juvenile diabetics and ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Much efforts in gene expression analysis in the past have been focused mainly on the messenger RNAs (mRNAs), thanks to the availability of Differential Display (DD), SAGE and DNA microarray technologies, which all targ et the poly(A) tails present in most eukaryotic mRNAs. The recent discovery of a large microRNA population begged the question of whether there ...

Many Scientific and technical data sets have been placed in a distributed set of data repositories, and more are added continuously. Internet search engines can provide some answers to user queries, but the quality and completeness of the results are uneven and unreliable. This project will demonstrate how an integrated tool can locate, harvest, and deposit data into a user-specified repository. ...