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1. Agency Merger Plan Faces High Hurdles

Agency |Personnel| 1995Budget -----------------------------------------------+---------+----------- Department of Energy | 20,000 | 17.5bil National Aeronautic and Space Admin | 23,000 | 14.4bil Environmental Protection Agency | 14,000 | 7.2bil National Science Foundation | 1,221 | 3.4bil US Geological Survery | 2,768 | .6bil Commerce Dept | | -National Oceanic and Atmospheric admin | 13,000 | 1.9bil -National Institude of Standards and Tech | 2,000 | .9bil -Patent and trademark office | 914 | .08bil -National technical information service | 378 | .08bil -National telecommunications and info admin | 378 | .03bil S +

2. Asian Network seeks data sharing

Energy -Energy Efficiency -Storage conditioning, distribution and transmission -Improved generation Environmental Quality -Monitoring and Assessment -Pollution Control -Remediation and Restoration Information and Communication -Components -Communications -Computing Systems -Information Management -Intelligent complex adaptive systems -Sensors -S/W and toolkits Living Systems -Biotechnology -Medical Technologies -Agriculture and Food technologies -Human Systems Manufacturing -Discrete product manufacturing -Continuous Materials processing -Micro/Nanofabrication and Machining Materials -Materials -Structures Transportation -Aerodynamics -Avionics and controls -Propulsion and power -Systems Integration -Human interface. S +

3. Nonlinear competition heats up

-Four materials that transform light in unusual ways are going head to head in the face to build the fastest devices - such as switches for optical communications systems. S +

4. Paving the Information Superhighway with Plastic

-Graded index plastic optical fibers have faster lanes for photons near their perimeters ensuring that - unlike step index fibers - all the photons arrive closer together. Bandwidth/100m Carrier Mbits/sec 100 Copper wire 100 Step-index plastic fiber 2500 Graded-index plastic fiber S +

5. Formation of Glasses from Liquids and Biopolymers

1. Vapor deposition 2. Shock,irradiation, or intense grinding, treatments of crystal 3. Cold compression of crystal 4. In situ liquid polymerization reaction 5. Chemical vapor deposition 6. Solid-state, diffusion controlled reaction 7. Hydrolysis of precursor organics and drying 8. Solvent evaporation 9. Cold electrochemical deposition S +

6. A Topographic View of Supercooled Liquids and Glass Formation

-Various static and dynamic phenomena displayed by glass-forming liquids, particularly those near the so-called "fragile" limit, emerge as manifestations of the multidimensional complex topography of the collective potential energy function. These include non-Arrhenius viscosity and relaxation times, bifurcation between the alpha and beta-relaxation processes, and a breakdown of the stokes-einstein relation for self-diffusion. This multidimensional viewpoint also produces an extension of the venerable Lindemann melting criterion and provides a critical evaluation of the popular "ideal glass state" concept. S +

7. The Microscopic Basis of the Glass Transition in Polymers from Neutron Scattering Studies

-Recent neutron scattering experiments on the microscopic dynamics of polymers below and above the glass transition temperature Tg are reviewed. The results presented cover different dynamic processes appearing in glases: local motions, vibrations, and different relaxation processes such as alpha and beta relaxation . For the alpha-relaxation, which occurs above Tg, it is posible to extend the time-temperature superposition principle, which is valid for polymers on a macroscopic scale, to the microscopic time scale. However, this principle is not applicable for temperatures approaching Tg. Below Tg, an inelastic excitation at a frequency of some hundred gigahertz (on the order of several wave numbers), the "boson peak", survives from a quasi-elastic overdamped scattering law at high temperatures, The connection between this boson peak and the fast dynamic process appearing near Tg is discussed. S +

8. Spatially Resolved Visible Luminescence of Self-Assembles Semiconductor Quantum Dots

-Ensembles of defect-free InAIAs islands of ultrasmall dimensions embedded in AlGaAs have been grown by molecular beam epitaxy. Cathodoluminescence was used to directly image the spatial distribution of the quantum dots by mapping their luminescence and to spectrally resolve very sharp peaks from small groups of dots, thus providing experimental verification for the discrete density of states in a zero-dimensional quantum structure. Visible luminescence is produced by different nominal compositions of InxAl(1-x)As-AlyGa(1-y)As S +

9 Design and Application of Electron-Transporting Organic Materials

-Operating lifetime is the main problem that complicated the use of polymeric light-emitting diodes (LEDs). A class of electron transport (ET) polymers (polyaryl acrylate) and polyaryl ethers is reported in which moieties with high electron affinities are covalently attached to stable polymer backbones. Devices based on poly(p-phenylenevinylene)PPV prepared with these materials exhibited a 30-fold improvement in stability and in one case, dramatically lower operating voltage relative to those having conventional ET layers. The current-carrying cpacity of indium tin oxide PPV polymeric ET layer aluminum LEDs was also increased by a factor of 30. These improvements lead to an enhancement in power efficiency of nearly an order of magnitude. Choosing polymers with high glass transition temperatures increases deivce lifetime. --fin