Inside this Issue 2 Simulation: A Window into the Detonation of High Explosives 3 Modeling of High-Explosive Detonation Performance 5 The Detonation Sandwich 6 Joint DoD/DOE Munitions Technology Development Program—High Explosives 9 New Faces at the Office of Stockpile Stewardship 10 Publication Highlights T you all for your excellent contributions in FY 2011. The Obama Administration and U.S. ...

INTRODUCTION Historically, aggregate gradation has been controlled by specifications that call out envelopes for individual fractions, typically the coarse aggregate and the fine aggregate. The shortcoming of this approach is that the gradation of the overall system is not addressed. While it is sensible to stockpile coarse and fine fractions separately to prevent segregation, it is the combine...

Progression through meiosis requires two waves of maturation promoting factor (MPF) activity corresponding to meiosis I and meiosis II. Frog oocytes contain a pool of inactive "pre-MPF" consisting of cyclin-dependent kinase 1 bound to B-type cyclins, of which we now find three previously unsuspected members, cyclins B3, B4 and B5. Protein synthesis is required to activate pre-MPF, and we show h...

The aim of this study was to test a possible use of Urtica dioica (common nettle) plant as a biomonitor of polonium (210)Po and lead (210)Pb contamination near phosphogypsum stacks by determining concentrations of these radionuclides in samples collected from the area of phosphogypsum stockpile in Wiślinka (northern Poland). The (210)Po and (210)Pb contents in roots depended on their concentrat...

BACKGROUND Many nations maintain stockpiles of neuraminidase inhibitor (NAI) antiviral agents for use in influenza pandemics to reduce transmission and mitigate the course of clinical infection. Pandemic preparedness plans include the use of these stockpiles to deliver proportionate responses, informed by emerging evidence of clinical impact. Recent uncertainty about the effectiveness of NAIs h...

An influenza pandemic remains a major public health concern. A key strategy to prevent a pandemic is to stockpile and pre-position stable influenza vaccine to allow rapid deployment in response to an outbreak. However, most influenza vaccines today are formulated as liquids that are stable only within a temperature range of 2°C to 8°C and require use of a cold chain, making vaccine transportati...

Sandia National Laboratories is responsible for assuring that our nuclear deterrent remains credible and that the one in a billion disaster of unintended nuclear detonation never occurs. Letting mistake-generated defects into the stockpile would undermine its mission. The current era of shrinking stockpiles is shrinking Sandia’s opportunities to discover and correct mistakes and fine-tune proce...

Disease control programmes for an influenza pandemic will rely initially on the deployment of antiviral drugs such as Tamiflu, until a vaccine becomes available. However, such control programmes may be severely hampered by logistical constraints such as a finite stockpile of drugs and a limit on the distribution rate. We study the effects of such constraints using a compartmental modelling appr...

The race to meet vital needs following sudden onset disasters leads response organizations to establish stockpiles of inventory that can be deployed immediately, without needing to rely on suppliers. These government or non-government organizations dynamically make stockpile decisions in isolation, and they do so without empirical metrics on how the stock will improve the response effort. To ad...

In this paper, a demand-responsive decision support system is proposed by integrating the operations of coal shipment, coal stockpiles and coal railing within a whole system. A generic and flexible scheduling optimisation methodology is developed to identify, represent, model, solve and analyse the coal transport problem in a standard and convenient way. As a result, the integrated train-stockp...