Award Data

Cultures differ in cognition. These cognitive differences naturally result in expectancy violations and perceptual mismatches between people of different cultures. And while they are, by nature, difficult to observe, a culture’s cognitive attributes significantly influence individual perceptions and overt behaviors. A training program that addresses general cross-cultural perspective taking s ...

Contemporary operational environments are often characterized by ambiguous, multi-cultural contexts, where Army Soldiers must rapidly adapt without extensive prior knowledge of a region or its people. Ongoing training development efforts are addressing the need for general cultural competence, but this broad competence must be clearly defined and assessed in order to determine if our Soldiers are ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals for this Phase I proposal are: 1) construction and bench testing of a novel device to dissociate tissue from donor pancreas using ultrasound for the recovery of pancreatic islet cells for transplantation, and 2) marked improvement in yields and viability of islets recovered using this approach as compared to the existing, standard method. Pancreatic i ...

Carbon seals generlly used for bearing compartments will incrasingly become unsuitable for future gas turbine engines with higher buffer air temperatures, higher pressur and rotor surface speeds.Phase I effort will focus on a synergistic approach including advanced materials and design.Three materials including a (Ti,Mo)(C,N) cermet, B-C composite and a current high temperature grade carbon MAT-12 ...

Homologous recombination (HR) permits the precise insertion, deletion, or substitution of genetic material in the genome of an organism. HR offers numerous opportunities for modifying plant genomes to enhance our understanding of plant gene function and regulation, especially with respect to enhancing the production of biofuels. Although HR normally occurs at very low frequencies, approximately ...

We propose to use physiological sensors to measure the quality of a trainee's interaction with a virtual environment (VE) as a function of VE fidelity to enable design improvements in VEs and to enhance training effectiveness through feedback of physiological-based performance information. Currently, VE design is guided by subjective design models that involve multiple design iterations and focus ...

In its SBIR Phase I, Agile Systems Inc. developed concepts for new shipboard automated material handling technologies that address important opportunities to reduce crew size and generally increase logistics efficiency on Navy surface combatants—present and future—as well as on aircraft carriers and the CLF supply vessels that serve Carrier Battle Groups. NAVPAK is a system that automates the ...

The development of proton exchange membrane (PEM)(also known as polymer electrolyte membrane) fuel cells has been limited by the availability of suitable membrane materials. In order to achieve acceptable performance at low cost, such fuel cells are required to work at elevated temperature and low (near 0) relative humidity (RH) for extended periods of time. For example, the U.S. Department of Ene ...

The proposed project consists of developing a prototype exciter/igniter unit that can operate to a subset of expected flight performance requirements. The main focus of this development effort will be the physical integration of a small, compact exciter with a "flight like" igniter or spark plug. This exciter/igniter prototype will represent the exciter/igniter units used to generate sparks that ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The importance of brain-derived G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) in mental function and health can hardly be overstated. However, our knowledge of the molecular biophysical basis for how GPCRs bind to their cognate agonists and antagonists to elicit function is limited by the lack of high resolution 3-D structural information for these proteins. In this p ...