Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Osteoarthritis (OA) is the leading cause of chronic disability in the United States. A clinical goal in the treatment and prevention of OA is to develop replacement cartilage using tissue engineering (TE) technologies. Although TE cartilage presently lacks the mechanical stability of native cartilage, studies have demonstrated that mechanical stability can be e ...

ABSTRACT: Adversarial installations, such as those housing the means for nuclear weapons production, are increasingly being constructed in heavily fortified locations and often using ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) as the construction material. As such, the U.S. Air Force has considerable interest in further developments of ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) to maintain an advantage o ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Becoming a mother is a significant transition in a woman's life. This transition can precipitate major changes in health behaviors, like physical activity. Once a woman has a child she is much less likely to participate in regular, moderate to vigorous physical activity compared to women without children. Thus, new mothers are at risk for future weight gain and ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Informed consent has become an essential component of the doctor-patient interaction. The informed consent process requires that patients not only be given information about proposed medical treatment, but that it be presented in an understandable way so the patient can make meaningful choices about medical alternatives. At the heart of the informed consent doc ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to synthesize, based on genomic sequence information, a human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) strain with demonstrated ability to establish persistent infection in sero-positive individuals. The resulting synthetic product will form the basis for the development of attenuated HCMV vaccines. Innovative synthetic biology methods will overcome ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this study is to develop a head tracking procedure for the automated assessment of hearing in infants using Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA). The head tracking procedure will be incorporated into the Intelligent Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (IVRA) system from Intelligent Hearing Systems Corp. The IVRA system currently provides automa ...

Multi-processor computing systems are growing in capacity and usage. They encompass multiple, distributed implementations as well as heterogeneous, embedded computing architectures. The processing density enabled by such approaches holds promise for unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) with their plethora of mission sensors and command and control processing requirements. However, the software ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Over the past decade, an investigation of how family members talk through cancer on the telephone has resulted in the recent publication of a lengthy volume entitled A Natural History of Family Cancer: Interactional Resources for Managing Illness (NH). Based on the conversations analyzed for this volume, and related research on the psychosocial impacts and con ...

The objective of Phase I is to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the various multi-reference coupled-cluster (MRCC) methods that have been proposed for the description of molecular states depending upon near degeneracies and non-dynamic electron correlation. Such effects are encountered in bond breaking, at transition states, for complex open shell systems like transition metal atoms, and f ...

Modern processor design is trending increasingly toward multicore architectures. This is problematic for programmers because writing a correct parallel program is known to be difficult compared to writing the equivalent sequential program. Additionally, a wide body of sequential code has already been developed that cannot exploit the power offered by these new cores because it was written in a s ...