Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of newborn hearing screening is to identity infants with inner ear pathology (IEP), but most neonates who fail screening have conductive disorders (CD) rather than IEP, resulting in high false positive rates and costly follow-up diagnostic evaluation. The Rhode Island study (1993) has shown that the prevalence of conductive disorders (CD) over inner ea ...

In these times of increasing deficits and limited budgets, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is using the idea of Capability-Based Acquisitions. This concept limits spending by focusing investments only for key capabilities. With this concept, Research and Development at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) now also needs to be such that funding is focused on R&D that supports these key ...

Effective and timely assessments of total thermal and power energy management is critical to the design and eventual cost-effective deployment of emerging air vehicles. To fully assess the overall weapon system benefits requires evaluating the technology impacts to aircraft and weapon system effectiveness, survivability, reliability and affordability. What is needed is the ability to integrate s ...

The goal of this project is to determine the feasibility of a long wave infrared (8.5-12 micron) semiconductor laser source that can operate near ambient temperature with several hundred mWs of average output power. At present, the main focus will be placed on the quantum cascade laser, which has already demonstrated high performance in this wavelength range at ambient temperature. Intrinsic per ...

Computational steering consists of determining initial parameters for a problem and monitoring progress of software in order to stop the process if the calculation is not proceeding well. The "operator" then resets parameters based on some measure and restarts the compuutation. This process is repeated until the desired result is obtained or a critical limit is achieved. The purpose of this pro ...

The proposed innovation is the development of a novel dual band detector responding in both the UV and IR regions, based on a GaN/AlGaN heterostructure. The IR response is based on HEterojunction Interfacial Workfunction Internal Photoemission (HEIWIP) detectors, which have been demonstrated using AlGaAs/GaAs structures. By also using interband transitions, response in the UV range can be incorpor ...

The overall objective of this proposal is to demonstrated that imidazenil is a more potent and safer protective agent than diazepam against chemical warfare nerve agent (CWNA)-induced seizure/status epilepticus, neuropathology, and neurobehavioral deficits. Thus we will compare the dose-dependent efficacy of imidazenil or diazepam administered alone and in combination with levetiracetam in protect ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Neurodegenerative diseases and injuries of the central nervous system (CMS) - such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's desease, amytrophic leteral sclerosis (ALS), and stroke - disable and kill millions of American's each year, yet there is no cure or even effective treatment for any of these diseases. The discovery of multipotent neural stem cells (NSCs) in a ...

In this SBIR project we aim to exploit a new invention in quantum cryptography to secure free-space optical links and networks. Unlike the techniques based on single-photon states that are limited to low bit rates and short distances, our approach is based on coherent states emitted by ordinary lasers, permitting scaling to high speeds and deployment over realistic distances. We have already demon ...

Addressing the issue of cognitive performance in the battlefield necessitates addressing the issue of sleep. Mounting evidence suggests that sleep deprivation impairs cognitive function by disrupting gene expression within the hippocampus. Our approach to cognitive enhancement of brain function under sleep deprivation will take advantage of the Clock mutant model that retains cognitive performance ...