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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 37 records · Page 2

Viral Dynamic Models During COVID‐19: Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic?

Mathematical models have been used for about 30 years to improve our understanding of virus-host interaction, in particular during chronic infections. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these models have been used to provide insights into the natural history of acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, optimize antiviral treatment strategies, understand factors associated with transmission, and optimize surveillance systems. The impact of modeling has been accelerated by the availability of unprecedented multidimensional immune data from animal and human systems, which enhanced partnerships between experimentalists and theorists and led to exciting new modeling and statistical developments. In this mini review, we examine the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss the main insights provided by mathematical models of viral dynamics at the different stages of the outbreak. Although we focus on respiratory infection, we also consider the new areas for development in anticipation of future acute infections from new or reemerging pathogens.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Foodborne illness outbreaks linked to unpasteurised milk and relationship to changes in state laws – United States, 1998–2018

Consumption of unpasteurised milk in the United States has presented a public health challenge for decades because of the increased risk of pathogen transmission causing illness outbreaks. We analysed Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System data to characterise unpasteurised milk outbreaks. Using Poisson and negative binomial regression, we compared the number of outbreaks and outbreak-associated illnesses between jurisdictions grouped by legal status of unpasteurised milk sale based on a May 2019 survey of state laws. During 2013–2018, 75 outbreaks with 675 illnesses occurred that were linked to unpasteurised milk; of these, 325 illnesses (48%) were among people aged 0–19 years. Of 74 single-state outbreaks, 58 (78%) occurred in states where the sale of unpasteurised milk was expressly allowed. Compared with jurisdictions where retail sales were prohibited (n = 24), those where sales were expressly allowed (n = 27) were estimated to have 3.2 (95% CI 1.4–7.6) times greater number of outbreaks; of these, jurisdictions where sale was allowed in retail stores (n = 14) had 3.6 (95% CI 1.3–9.6) times greater number of outbreaks compared with those where sale was allowed on-farm only (n = 13). This study supports findings of previously published reports indicating that state laws resulting in increased availability of unpasteurised milk are associated with more outbreak-associated illnesses and outbreaks.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Trends in the administration of COVID-19 vaccines with other vaccines in the United States reported to V-safe during December 14, 2020—May 19, 2023

Introduction COVID-19 vaccines may be administered with other vaccines during the same healthcare visit. COVID-19 monovalent (Fall 2021) and bivalent (Fall 2022) vaccine recommendations coincided with annual seasonal influenza vaccination. Data describing the frequency of the co-administration of COVID-19 vaccines with other vaccines are limited. Methods We used V-safe, a voluntary smartphone-based U.S. safety surveillance system established by the CDC, to describe trends in the administration of COVID-19 vaccines with other vaccines reported to V-safe during December 14, 2020 – May 19, 2023. Results Of the 21 million COVID-19 vaccinations reported to V-safe, 2.2% (459,817) were administered with at least 1 other vaccine. Co-administration most frequently occurred during the first week of October 2023 (27,092; 44.1%). Most reports of co-administration included influenza vaccine (393,003; 85.5%). Co-administration was most frequently reported for registrants aged 6 months-6 years (4,872; 4.4%). Conclusion Reports of co-administration to V-safe peaked during October 2023, when influenza vaccination most often occurs, possibly reflecting increased opportunities for multiple vaccinations and greater acceptability of the co-administration of COVID-19 vaccine with other vaccines, especially influenza vaccine.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

The impact of adjusting for hysterectomy prevalence on cervical cancer incidence rates and trends among women aged 30 years or older—United States, 2001-2019

Abstract Hysterectomy protects against cervical cancer when the cervix is removed. However, measures of cervical cancer incidence often fail to exclude women with a hysterectomy from the population-at-risk denominator, underestimating and distorting disease burden. In this study, we estimated hysterectomy prevalence from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System surveys to remove the women who were not at risk of cervical cancer from the denominator and combined these estimates with the US Cancer Statistics data. From these data, we calculated age-specific and age-standardized incidence rates for women aged >30 years from 2001-2019, adjusted for hysterectomy prevalence. We calculated the difference between unadjusted and adjusted incidence rates and examined trends by histology, age, race and ethnicity, and geographic region using joinpoint regression. The hysterectomy-adjusted cervical cancer incidence rate from 2001-2019 was 16.7 per 100 000 women—34.6% higher than the unadjusted rate. After adjustment, incidence rates were higher by approximately 55% among Black women, 56% among those living in the East South Central division, and 90% among women aged 70-79 and ≥80 years. These findings underscore the importance of adjusting for hysterectomy prevalence to avoid underestimating cervical cancer incidence rates and masking disparities by age, race, and geographic region. This article is part of a Special Collection on Gynecological Cancers.

Public, Environmental & Occupational Health↗

Use of nucleic acid amplification testing for rapid detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex among U.S. tuberculosis patients from 2011–2017

Background: Nucleic acid amplification (NAA) tests rapidly detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex directly from clinical specimens, providing valuable results for those evaluated for tuberculosis. Methods: We analyzed characteristics of cases with NAA testing performed, compared cases with positive and negative NAA test results, and calculated turnaround time and time to treatment for all verified cases reported to the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System in the United States during 2011–2017. Results: Among 67082 verified tuberculosis cases with NAA testing information, 30820 (45.9%) were reported as not having an NAA test performed; the proportion without NAA testing declined annually, from 60.5% in 2011 to 33.6% in 2017. Of 67082 verified cases, 27912 (41.6%) had positive, 8215 (12.2%) had negative, and 135 (0.2%) had indeterminate NAA test results. Among the 33937 cases with an acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear-positive result, 24093 (70.9%) had an NAA test performed; 11490 of the 30244 (38.0%) with an AFB smear-negative result had an NAA test performed. Although sputum was the most common specimen type tested, 79.8% (7023/8804) of nonsputum specimen types had a positive NAA test result. Overall, 63.7% of cases with laboratory testing had NAA test results reported <6 days following specimen collection; for 13891 cases not yet on treatment, median time to treatment after the laboratory report date was 2 days. Conclusions: Our analyses demonstrate increased NAA test utilization between 2011 and 2017. However, a large proportion of cases did not have an NAA test performed, reflecting challenges in broader uptake, suggesting an opportunity to expand use of this diagnostic methodology.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

3D-Printed mmWave Quasi-Holographic Antenna for 2-D Beamforming

This paper presents the design and manufacturing of a novel 2D-scanning antenna that integrates a 3D-printed Rotman lens with a quasi-holographic leaky-wave antenna (HLWA). The proposed design achieved beam-scanning capabilities by leveraging the beamforming of the Rotman lens and the high-gain directive properties of the quasi-HLWA. The Rotman lens (RL) enables beam steering in the elevation plane by switching between input ports. The quasi-HLWA, designed using holographic principles, achieves frequency-controlled beam scanning in the azimuth plane. The entire antenna structure was fabricated using additive manufacturing with an Ink1092 substrate and silver ink for the conductive traces. This approach provides greater control over material placement and design freedom compared to traditional methods. A 25° transmission linear substrate taper was used to ensure good impedance matching between the Rotman lens and the quasi-HLWA, allowing greater gain while maintaining a good scanning range. The experimental results validate the 2D scanning capability of the proposed antenna. The antenna system provides coverage from −54° to 54° in the elevation θ plane and −28° to 28° in the azimuth plane ϕ , with a maximum measured gain of 21.3 dBi at 28 GHz with an average radiation efficiency η=60 %. The fabricated prototype was tested, and the performance was in good agreement with the simulated performance.

Rotman lens↗

Molecular Dialogues between Early Divergent Fungi and Bacteria in an Antagonism versus a Mutualism

Animals and plants interact with microbes by engaging specific surveillance systems, regulatory networks, and response modules that allow for accommodation of mutualists and defense against antagonists. Antimicrobial defense responses are mediated in both animals and plants by innate immunity systems that owe their functional similarities to convergent evolution. Like animals and plants, fungi interact with bacteria. However, the principles governing these relations are only now being discovered. In a study system of host and nonhost fungi interacting with a bacterium isolated from the host, we found that bacteria used a common gene repertoire to engage both partners. In contrast, fungal responses to bacteria differed dramatically between the host and nonhost. These findings suggest that as in animals and plants, the genetic makeup of the fungus determines whether bacterial partners are perceived as mutualists or antagonists and what specific regulatory networks and response modules are initiated during each encounter.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Anomalous And Normal High Performance Computing Datacenter Activities

This code provides annotation and an interface to 10+ hours of video activities in a high performance datacenter with 20+ different types of anomalous activities. The purpose is to enable machine learning for video surveillance systems in high performance computing centers. This is the first code of this type addressing the space of high performance computing datacenters.

Anderson, Matthew↗

Inferring transmission heterogeneity using virus genealogies: estimation and targeted prevention

Spread of HIV typically involves uneven transmission patterns where some individuals spread to a large number of individuals while others to only a few or none. Such transmission heterogeneity can impact how fast and how much an epidemic spreads. Further, more efficient interventions may be achieved by taking such transmission heterogeneity into account. To address these issues, we developed two phylogenetic methods based on virus sequence data: 1) to generally detect if significant transmission heterogeneity is present, and 2) to pinpoint where in a phylogeny high-level spread is occurring. We derive inference procedures to estimate model parameters, including the amount of transmission heterogeneity, in a sampled epidemic. We show that it is possible to detect transmission heterogeneity under a wide range of simulated situations, including incomplete sampling, varying levels of heterogeneity, and including within-host genetic diversity. When evaluating real HIV-1 data from different epidemic scenarios, we found a lower level of transmission heterogeneity in slowly spreading situations and a higher level of heterogeneity in data that included a rapid outbreak, while R0 and Sackin’s index (overall tree shape statistic) were similar in the two scenarios, suggesting that our new method is able to detect transmission heterogeneity in real data. We then show by simulations that targeted prevention, where we pinpoint high-level spread using a coalescence measurement, is efficient when sequence data are collected in an ongoing surveillance system. Such phylogeny-guided prevention is efficient under both single-step contact tracing as well as iterative contact tracing as compared to random intervention.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Hazard Detection Detector Cards

This report presents a comprehensive summary of five advanced anomaly detection tools developed and deployed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in support of the VA’s Health Information Technology modernization. These detectors—Order Path Tracker, Trend Watcher, Pain Pointer, Performance Monitor, and Patient Record Flag Detector—leverage statistical and machine learning methods to monitor workflow disruptions, detect anomalies in care sequences and volumes, identify bottlenecks, and track system-level performance metrics across VistA and Millennium systems. All detectors have been integrated into the Health Data Analytics Platform (HDAP), with most having completed deployment and testing using live data from targeted stations in cardiology and oncology domains. This work enhances VA’s capacity for proactive system surveillance, promotes patient safety, and informs data-driven operational improvements across the EHR ecosystem.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Infant burn injuries related to water heating for powdered infant formula preparation

Guidance for preparing powdered infant formula (PIF) helps to ensure it meets the nutritional needs of infants and is safe to consume. Among safety concerns is Cronobacter sakazakii contamination which can lead to serious infections and death. PIF preparation guidance varies; there is a lack of consensus on whether there is a need to boil water to inactivate potential Cronobacter and for how long to let the water cool before reconstitution. We sought to quantify the burden of burn injuries among infants related to water heating for PIF preparation. Estimating this burden may help inform preparation recommendations. Burn injuries among infants <18 months of age were identified from 2017 to 2019 National Electronic Injury Surveillance System data collected from sampled hospital emergency departments. Injuries were classified as related to PIF water heating, potentially related to PIF water heating but with undetermined causation, related to other infant feeding aspects, or unrelated to infant formula or breast milk feeding. Unweighted case counts for each injury classification were determined. Across sampled emergency departments, 7 PIF water heating injuries were seen among the 44,395 injuries reported for infants <18 months. No reported PIF water heating injuries were fatal, but 3 required hospitalization. Another 238 injuries potentially related to PIF water heating but with undetermined causation were also seen. Preparation guidance should consider both the potential risk for Cronobacter infection and the potential risk for burns.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Robust Wheel Detection for Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification is a demanding and challenging task in automated surveillance systems. The goal of vehicle re-identification is to associate images of the same vehicle to identify re-occurrences of the same vehicle. Robust re-identification of individual vehicles requires reliable and discriminative features extracted from specific parts of the vehicle. In this work, we construct an efficient and robust wheel detector that precisely locates and selects vehicular wheels from vehicle images. The associated hubcap geometry can hence be utilized to extract fundamental signatures from vehicle images and exploit them for vehicle re-identification. Wheels pattern information can yield additional information about vehicles in questions. To that end, we utilized a vehicle imagery dataset that has thousands of side-view vehicle collected under different illumination conditions and elevation angles. The collected dataset was used for training and testing the wheel detector. Experiments show that our approach could detect vehicular wheels accurately for 99.41% of the vehicles in the dataset.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

State-Specific Prevalence of Inactivity, Self-Rated Health Status, and Severe Joint Pain Among Adults With Arthritis — United States, 2019

Arthritis is associated with joint pain, disability, and physical inactivity, potentially resulting in poor quality of life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed 2019 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data to estimate state-specific arthritis prevalence and, among adults with arthritis, the prevalence of physical inactivity, fair/poor self-rated health status, and severe joint pain. Among adults with arthritis, age-standardized prevalences of physical inactivity, fair/poor health status, and severe joint pain were high in all states and highest in southeastern states. Increased promotion and use of evidence-based public health interventions for arthritis may improve health-promoting behaviors and health outcomes among adults with arthritis.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Integrating Safety, Security, and Nuclear Operations for Advanced Reactors

The traditional separation between safety, security, and operations teams has created significant barriers to achieving optimal outcomes. When security considerations are introduced late in the design process, they often conflict with already-established architectural, operational, or engineering parameters. Retrofitting security measures can lead to increased costs, schedule delays, and compromises in security effectiveness. For instance, the need to retrofit physical barriers or surveillance systems often results in trade-offs that could have been avoided with earlier input from security professionals. Delayed integration can also affect regulatory processes and result in licensing delays. Security reviews conducted at later stages frequently identify gaps that necessitate significant redesign efforts, impacting not only scope, schedule, and budget, but also adding risk and lowering stakeholder confidence in the project. This paper aims to address these challenges by identifying practical opportunities for integrating security considerations seamlessly with design and operations teams throughout the entire lifecycle of nuclear facilities—from conceptual design to commissioning and beyond. The research emphasizes the value of early and continuous collaboration among stakeholders to ensure that security measures are robust, operationally effective, and cost-efficient. By examining case studies, analyzing past incidents, and leveraging best practices from other high-security industries, this study highlights actionable strategies for bridging the gap between safety, security, and operations teams.

Zineddin, Dr. Z. [ORNL] (ORCID:0009000848740725)↗

Method and system for automated plant surveillance and manipulation

A method and a system for automated plant surveillance and manipulation are provided. Pursuant to the method and the system, images of target plants are obtained through a machine vision system having multiple cameras. The obtained images of the target plants are processed to determine tissue candidates of the target plants and to determine a position and an orientation of each tissue candidate. A tool is manipulated, based on the position and the orientation of each tissue candidate, to excise each tissue candidate to obtain tissue samples. The tissue samples are transported for subsequently manipulation including live processing of the tissue samples or destructive processing of the tissue samples.

Kalluri, Udaya C.↗

Deep Learning Systems for Increased Safeguards Surveillance Review Productivity

Nuclear safeguards inspectors expend significant time and maintain intense focus in reviewing video surveillance for safeguards relevant events. To increase efficiency and reduce the time burden of safeguards inspectors performing surveillance data review, this paper presents a novel deep learning (DL) systems concept to integrate generalized DL models into the safeguards surveillance review workflow. The Agency is investigating several DL algorithms for object recognition, localization, tracking, and flagging relevant activities. The project team is working closely with nuclear safeguards inspectors to identify review use cases (based on specific safeguards objectives) and collect their associated requirements. We focused on CANDU and LWR Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) and their associated dry storage areas as these present a particularly heavy burden on the inspector surveillance review process due to the number of these facilities under safeguards worldwide. Initial DL algorithm results on safeguards data are promising. Using a convolutional neural network, the team attained a mean average precision (mAP) of 92.9% identifying and localizing spent fuel (SF) casks from a 475 surveillance image dataset. Further, the team had initial success in training a recurrent neural network to identify reactor area activities in video clips, successfully indicating when SF casks enter or exit a pool. We discuss how such DL algorithms would be integrated into the Next Generation Surveillance Review (NGSR) software application. Another issue impacting review productivity is the long time inspectors may have to wait when running these algorithms in NGSR. We present a concept to pre-process remotely collected surveillance data with DL models as the data arrives to IAEA headquarters so that results are already available when starting a new review in NGSR. The proposed DL system concept shows a pathway and workflow for increasing an inspector’s surveillance review productivity by quickly and accurately identifying declared and undeclared safeguards relevant objects and activities in large quantities of surveillance imagery data.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗

Los Alamos National Laboratory SAVY-4000 Field Surveillance Plan Update for 2020

The Packaging Surveillance Program section of the Department of Energy (DOE) Manual 441.1-1, Nuclear Material Packaging Manual (DOE 2008), requires DOE contractors to “ensure that a surveillance program is established and implemented to ensure the nuclear material storage package continues to meet its design criteria.” The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) SAVY-4000 Field Surveillance Plan was first issued in fiscal year (FY) 2013. The surveillance plan is reviewed annually and updated as necessary based on SAVY-4000 surveillance findings, as well as results of the lifetime extension studies. Five surveillance plan updates have been issued, one in 2014, one in 2016, one in 2017, one in 2018, and one in 2019. This 2020 update documents what was actually done in 2019 and what is planned for 2020. Deviations from the 2019 surveillance plan were necessary because some of the planned surveillance containers were not available for examination. The goal of the surveillance program is to provide data to: evaluate container component performance over time against the initial baseline qualification; validate the current SAVY container design life; provide data for future design life extensions of components as indicated; identify indications of container degradation early and identify similar containers and/or contents that may need remediation; maintain and continuously improve the surveillance information system that documents the complete life cycle of the containers including the initial production baseline, usage history, surveillance, and disposition; identify container issues related to wear and tear that could indicate the need for a maintenance program for in-service containers prior to the end of the design life.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗