Emission line profiles from collimated high-velocity outflows or jets in planetary nebulae (PNe) have diverse characteristics that indicate the influence of binary cores and magnetic confinement mechanisms in their origin. In this contribution, a number of cases are presented that exemplify the complexity of these outflows in PNe.

The structure and phase evolution of nanocrystalline Ce(1-x)Ln(x)O(2-x/2-delta) (Ln = Yb, Lu, x = 0 - 1) oxides upon heating in H(2) was studied for the first time. Up to 950 degrees C the samples were single-phase, with structure changing smoothly with x from fluorite type (F) to bixbyite type (C). For the Lu-doped samples heated at 1100 degrees C in the air and H(2), phase separation into coe...

Ethylene is produced by cultured radish roots in amounts large enough to be physiologically important. When roots were grown in controlled atmospheres, applied ethylene was generally inhibitory to elongation, lateral root initiation, and cambial activity. 1% CO(2) similarly affected roots not given ethylene. In contrast, elongation and lateral root production of ethylene-treated roots were stim...

The phase or orbital light curves of extrasolar terrestrial planets in reflected or emitted light will contain information about their atmospheres and surfaces complementary to data obtained by other techniques such as spectrosopy. We show calculated light curves at optical and thermal infrared wavelengths for a variety of Earth-like and Earth-unlike planets. We also show that large satellites ...

The discovery and characterization of exoplanets have the potential to offer the world one of the most impactful findings ever in the history of astronomy--the identification of life beyond Earth. Life can be inferred by the presence of atmospheric biosignature gases--gases produced by life that can accumulate to detectable levels in an exoplanet atmosphere. Detection will be made by remote sen...

We present results from a spectropolarimetric survey of young supernovae completed at the Keck Observatory, including at least one example from each of the major supernova types: Ia (1997dt), Ib (1998T, 1997dq), Ib/c-pec (1997ef), IIn (1997eg), and II-P (1997ds). All objects show evidence for intrinsic polarization, suggesting that asphericity may be a common feature in young supernova atmosphe...

We have developed a two-dimensional (2D) model for inhomogeneous cirrus clouds in plane-parallel and spherical geometries for the analysis of the transmission and backscattering of high-energy laser beams. The 2D extinction-coefficient and mean effective ice-crystal size fields for cirrus clouds can be determined from a combination of the remote sensing of cirrus clouds by use of the Advanced V...

We briefly describe the current version of the PHOENIX code. We then present some results on the modeling of Type II supernovae and show that fits to observations can be obtained, when account is taken for spherically symmetric, line-blanketed, expanding atmospheres. We describe the SEAM method of obtaining distances to supernovae and briefly discuss its future prospects.

An apparent Ca underabundance for cool metal rich disk dwarfs was derived by Feltzing & Gustafsson (1998). This was suggested to be a NLTE effect, following the prediction by Drake (1991). New NLTE calculations with MARCS atmospheres and opacities show that deviations from LTE are very small and can not explain the underabundance. It is shown that the underabundance was primarily due to erroneo...