C weapons are recent acquisitions in humankind’s ever-growing arsenal of destruction. But bacteria and fungi have been practicing chemical warfare for a very long time. Among the numerous and structurally diverse antimicrobial agents that microbes produce are penicillin by the mold Penicillium notatum, many important antibiotics by streptomycetes, a wide range of bacteriocins by Escherichia col...

a. Since World War II, the Soviet Union has represented the principal threat to the national security interests of the US. During this period, the military capability of the Soviet Armed Forces grew enormously. Starting in the later years of the 1980's, the international security environment has undergone rapid, fundamental, and revolutionary changes. The Soviet Union has disintegrated with the...

The need for effective methods for the detection and measurement of chemical warfare agents (CWA) has increased in recent years. Current stockpiles need to be monitored to ensure their safe containment. The remediation of sites containing abandoned CWAs requires analysis in support of safe removal and destruction of agents. More recently, counterterrorism efforts have underscored the need for m...

The ability to directly characterize chemical transport and interactions that occur within a material (i.e., subsurface dynamics) is a vital component in understanding contaminant mass transport and the ability to decontaminate materials. If a material is contaminated, over time, the transport of highly toxic chemicals (such as chemical warfare agent species) out of the material can result in v...

Evolutionary processes generating biodiversity and ecological mechanisms maintaining biodiversity seem to be diverse themselves. Conventional explanations of biodiversity such as niche differentiation, density-dependent predation pressure, or habitat heterogeneity seem satisfactory to explain diversity in communities of macrobial organisms such as higher plants and animals. For a long time the ...

The large-scale use of chemical warfare agents first occurred during World War I (the "chemists' war"), and was thereafter repeated at irregular intervals, most recently during the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. There was consequently a possibility that chemical weapons might be used in the Gulf war. The threat posed by terrorist groups became evident in 1994-95, when Japanese civilians were ...

Photocatalysis has been widely applied to solar-energy conversion and environmental purification. Photocatalyst, typically titanium dioxide (TiO(2)), produces active oxygen species under irradiation of ultraviolet light, and can decompose not only conventional pollutants but also different types of hazardous substances at mild conditions. We have recently started the study of photocatalytic dec...