The concept of a flowing lithium first wall for a fusion reactor may lead to a significant advance in reactor design, since it could virtually eliminate the concerns with power density and erosion, tritium retention, and cooling associated with solid walls. Sputtering and erosion tests are currently underway in the PISCES device at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). To complement...

Scarab is a prospecting rover for lunar missions to survey resources, particularly water ice, in polar craters. It is designed for the deployment of a deep coring drill and for transport of soil analysis instruments. Its chassis can transform to stabilize the drill in contact with the ground and can also adjust to ascend and descent steep slopes of unconsolidated soil. Additional features inclu...

A 96-h LC(50) values of 2,4-D [(2,4-dichlorophenoxy)acetic acid], a common contaminating agricultural herbicide, were determined on the adult common carp (Cyprinus carpio L., 1758; Pisces, Cyprinidae). The study was conducted in two stages using 130 carp. The data obtained were statistically evaluated by the use of the EPA computer program based on Finney's Probit Analysis Method and a 96-h LC(...

In ITER mixed Be/W layers are likely to form and their retention behavior is unknown. A series of ITER-grade tungsten samples have been exposed in PISCES-B to deuterium plasma at 300oC, with and without beryllium impurity seeding of the plasma. If the beryllium concentration is small, the majority of the incident beryllium is re-eroded from the sample surface and only a few nm thick layer of mi...

Non-redundant protein datasets are of utmost importance in bioinformatics. Constructing such datasets means removing protein sequences that overreach certain similarity thresholds. Several programs such as 'Decrease redundancy', 'cd-hit', 'Pisces', 'BlastClust' and 'SkipRedundant' are available. The issue that we focus on here is to what extent the non-redundant datasets produced by different p...

In this paper, a power SJMOSFET (Super junction MOSFET) transistor is simulated using PISCES-II, a 2-D numerical device simulator. The doping densities and device dimensions are chosen so as to simulate a typical device structure. These simulations are aimed at understanding the device physics through various electrical quantities like potential distribution, electric field distribution, and el...

We present results of ROSAT/PSPC and HRI observations of the AWM7 group of galaxies, which is a poor galaxy cluster and forms part of the Perseus-Pisces lament. The X-ray emission originates from intracluster gas at temperatures of 1.7 to 4.5 keV. The cluster obviously is elliptical with a position angle perpendicular to the position angle of the dominant elliptical galaxy NGC1129, which is oos...

Asexual organisms, often perceived as evolutionary dead ends, can be long-lived and geographically widespread. We propose that epigenetic mechanisms could play a crucial role in the evolutionary persistence of these lineages. Genetically identical organisms could rely on phenotypic plasticity to face environmental variation. Epigenetic modifications could be the molecular mechanism enabling suc...

A generic image learning system, CogniSight, is being used for the inspection of fishes before filleting offshore. More than thirty systems have been deployed on seven fishing vessels in Norway and Iceland over the past three years. Each CogniSight uses four neural network chips (a total of 312 neurons) based on a natively parallel hardwired architecture performing real time learning and non-li...

A power VDMOSFET has been simulated using PISCES-II, a 2-D numerical device simulator. The doping densities and device dimensions are chosen so as to simulate a typical device structure with one micron channel length. These simulations are aimed at understanding the device physics through various internal electrical quantities like potential distribution, electric field distribution, and electr...