Adaptive Sample Preparation and Target Fabrication for High-Throughput Materials Science

Experimental researches using high power optical lasers combined with free electron lasers (FELs) open new frontiers in high energy density (HED) sciences. Probing and pumping capabilities are dramatically improved due to the brightness of the XFEL pulses with ultrafast duration. Besides, the peak intensities of Ti:sapphire laser Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) systems reach petawatt (PW)-class with operating in few tens of fs and commercially available at a few Hz of repetition rate. We have been developing an experimental platform for HED sciences using high power, high intensity optical lasers at the XFEL facility, SACLA.Currently, an experimental platform with a dual 0.5 PW Ti:Sapphire laser system is under beam commissioning for experiments combined with the SACLA’s x-ray beam for research objectives that require more peak power in the optical laser pulses with a few tens of fs. The optical laser system is designed to deliver two laser beams simultaneously with the maximum power of 0.5 PW in each into a target chamber located in an experimental hutch 6 (EH6) at BL2, which was recently commissioned as a SACLA’s 2nd hard x-ray beamline. A focusing capability using sets of compound refractive lenses will be applied to increase the x-ray fluence on the target sample. One of the most key issues for the integrated experimental platform is development of diagnostics that meets requirements both from the high power laser (e.g. resistance to harsh environments) and from the XFEL (e.g. adaptation to the available data acquisition system). The status and future perspective of the development including automatic laser alignment systems will be reported in the presentation. We will discuss the most promising and important new physics experiments that will be enabled by the combination of PW-class lasers and the world-class FEL’s x-ray beam.

Extreme environments often profoundly impact one’s cognition and subsequently the ability to make accurate and correct decisions. Although we are beginning to understand how these environments impact individual and team cognition, more specific work conducted in real extreme environments is needed to further understand this relationship. In this paper, we present data collected in the extreme environment of gas ballooning. Recently, the Two Eagles gas ballooning project set two absolute world records: longest duration in a gas balloon and longest distance in a gas balloon. During this project, our research team was able to collect cognitive abilities data and data on the effects of multiple stressors in the environment. We present the overall project along with some insights from the data. We also highlight lessons learned from attempting to collect data in an extreme environment.

Visualization of scientific frontiers is a relatively new field, yet it has a long history and many predecessors. The application of science to science itself has been undertaken for decades with notable early contributions by Derek Price, Thomas Kuhn, Diana Crane, Eugene Garfield, and many others. What is new is the field of information visualization and application of its techniques to help us understand the process of science in the making. In his new book, Chaomei Chen takes us on a journey through this history, touching on predecessors, and then leading us firmly into the new world of Mapping Scientific Frontiers. Building on the foundation of his earlier book, Information Visualization and Virtual Environments, Chen's new offering is much less a tutorial in how to do information visualization, and much more a conceptual exploration of why and how the visualization of science can change the way we do science, amplified by real examples. Chen's stated intents for the book are: (1) to focus on principles of visual thinking that enable the identification of scientific frontiers; (2) to introduce a way to systematize the identification of scientific frontiers (or paradigms) through visualization techniques; and (3) to stimulate interdisciplinary research between informationmore » visualization and information science researchers. On all these counts, he succeeds. Chen's book can be broken into two parts which focus on the first two purposes stated above. The first, consisting of the initial four chapters, covers history and predecessors. Kuhn's theory of normal science punctuated by periods of revolution, now commonly known as paradigm shifts, motivates the work. Relevant predecessors outside the traditional field of information science such as cartography (both terrestrial and celestial), mapping the mind, and principles of visual association and communication, are given ample coverage. Chen also describes enabling techniques known to information scientists, such as multi-dimensional scaling, advanced dimensional reduction, social network analysis, Pathfinder network scaling, and landscape visualizations. No algorithms are given here; rather, these techniques are described from the point of view of enabling 'visual thinking'. The Generalized Similarity Analysis (GSA) technique used by Chen in his recent published papers is also introduced here. Information and computer science professionals would be wise not to skip through these early chapters. Although principles of gestalt psychology, cartography, thematic maps, and association techniques may be outside their technology comfort zone, or interest, these predecessors lay a groundwork for the 'visual thinking' that is required to create effective visualizations. Indeed, the great challenge in information visualization is to transform the abstract and intangible into something visible, concrete, and meaningful to the user. The second part of the book, covering the final three chapters, extends the mapping metaphor into the realm of scientific discovery through the structuring of literatures in a way that enables us to see scientific frontiers or paradigms. Case studies are used extensively to show the logical progression that has been made in recent years to get us to this point. Homage is paid to giants of the last 20 years including Michel Callon for co-word mapping, Henry Small for document co-citation analysis and specialty narratives (charting a path linking the different sciences), and Kate McCain for author co-citation analysis, whose work has led to the current state-of-the-art. The last two chapters finally answer the question - 'What does a scientific paradigm look like?' The visual answer given is specific to the GSA technique used by Chen, but does satisfy the intent of the book - to introduce a way to visually identify scientific frontiers. A variety of case studies, mostly from Chen's previously published work - supermassive black holes, cross-domain applications of Pathfinder networks, mass extinction debates, impact of Don Swanson's work, and mad cow disease and vCJD in humans - succeed in explaining how visualization can be used to show the development of, competition between, and eventual acceptance (or replacement) of scientific paradigms. Although not addressed specifically, Chen's work nonetheless makes the persuasive argument that visual maps alone are not sufficient to explain 'the making of science' to a non-expert in a particular field. Rather, expert knowledge is still required to interpret these maps and to explain the paradigms. This combination of visual maps and expert knowledge, used jointly to good effect in the book, becomes a potent means for explaining progress in science to the expert and non-expert alike. Work to extend the GSA technique to explore latent domain knowledge (important work that falls below the citation thresholds typically used in GSA) is also explored here.« less

Understanding what students know about the scientific experiment is essential for their metacognition and their understanding of scientific inquiry. A total of 425 Indonesian high school students participated in this study. Using an open-ended question, this study examined science and humanities group students’ perception of a scientific experiment by their narrative explanations. Language network analysis method was used to measure and visualize their perception by examining the relationship between each word of response and its patterns underlying the network. After the process of network analysis, nodes “prove”, “observation”, “problem” “hypothesis” only found in science students group while nodes “new” “object” “try” “test” found in humanities students group. This result also perceived that science students group considered a scientific experiment as an inquiry process while humanities students were more likely into the discovery process. The result of this study could support how scientific experiment as a learning activity was taken differently in science and humanities class in high school.

Higher Education institutions have, in the framework of the Bologna Process, been called to re-define their degree programmes on the basis of the learning outcomes approach. This implies a change of paradigm moving from teacher-centred to student-centred education. The Tuning project was set-up in 2000 to develop — through a bottom-up approach — a methodology to achieve this shift. This methodology proved not only to be relevant for Europe, but also for other world regions, including the USA, where Tuning projects were launched from 2009. In 2010 both in the EU and the USA the need was felt to find out whether the intended modernization of learning was actually taking place and how this process was perceived by its main stakeholders. For this purpose a study was initiated, covering the period 2011 to the beginning of 2016, based on the two-pillar approach of quantitative and qualitative instruments. For the study a robust evaluation instrument was developed, consisting of surveys and in-depth interviews implemented by a research team at a selected group of Higher Education institutions, involving management, teaching staff, student counsellors and students. In this paper the outcomes of the EU part of the study are presented, cross referencing to some of the USA study results. The main outcome of the study is that in general limited progress has been made regarding the intended paradigm shift and that key expectations of the reform Process have not been met. This is both the case for Europe and the USA. Although, good practices have been identified, the actual implementation of the student-centred approach is not proceeding beyond a discourse on the paradigm shift and there is no certainty it will be achieved. For Europe there is also a worrying disconnect between the various tiers of the HE sector, ranging from Ministers to students, regarding the actual penetration of the student-centred approach and the education experience of the students. There has been a failure to engage with and convince academic staff about the necessity and advantages of this paradigm shift. Teaching staff are struggling to adjust to the new concepts and paradigm shift and are challenged by no longer being the “knowledge owners” but rather learning facilitators. It does not help that the vast majority of staff members have not undertaken professional development for HE teaching. Where staff development has taken place, it is too focused on process, rather than the concepts and benefits of a learning outcomes approach. The outcomes of the study should therefore be perceived as a wake-up call because without additional and continued support in particular for the teaching staff the reform process could fail.
 Published online: 01 June 2016

Simulation of fabrication variations in supernova hydrodynamics experiments

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has a diverse and cutting-edge experimental research program using short-pulse lasers. This program applies state of the art technologies in modeling and supercomputing, material science and target fabrication, diagnostics and experimental techniques, laser science, and laser facilities ranging from the small to the large scale. Some of these are on-site facilities, such as the Trident laser facility and the Roadrunner supercomputer, or off-site facilities, such as Omega and Omega EP. This research involves the intersection and cooperation of several scientific areas and disciplines, such as relativistic laser-matter interactions, advanced particle accelerator development, material science, material dynamics, the properties of warm-dense matter, fusion fast ignition, the development of x-ray sources, etc. This research serves many programs, sponsors and applications such as inertial fusion energy, defense research and threat reduction. Much of this research is carried out in collaboration with many institutions worldwide. This talk summarizes the program with an emphasis on its multidisciplinary nature, summarizes its many customers with an emphasis on the synergy of these capabilities to meet their needs, and highlights selected recent results with an emphasis on their scientific significance. Finally, this talk explains how these capabilities and their utility are being evaluated for the planned LANL signature experimental facility, MaRIE - Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes.

We review the national projects on quantum information science and technology in Japan over the past 30 years. The main funding agencies for this field have been the Japan Science and Technology Agency, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan. The total investment in the quantum information science and technology field from these funding agencies for the past 15 years amounts to US$250 million. A similar amount of investment has been put in parallel by industry. As a result, new science frontiers have been created, and some service prototypes, such as quantum key distribution systems and coherent Ising machines, have been delivered to user premises. Recently, Japan has launched new initiatives to advance quantum information science and technology to the next phase, and to make full use of them for the resolution of societal problems.

Nomad was deployed for a 45 day traverse in the Atacama Desert, Chile, during the summer of 1997. During this traverse, 1 week was devoted to science experiments. The goal of the science experiments was to test different planetary surface exploration strategies that included (1) a Mars mission simulation, (2) a science on the fly experiment, where the rover was kept moving 75% of the operation time. (The goal of this operation was to determine whether or not successful interpretation of the environment is related to the time spent on a target. The role of mobility in helping the interpretation was also assessed.) (3) a meteorite search using visual and instrumental methods to remotely identify meteorites in extreme environments, and (4) a time‐delay experiment with and without using the panospheric camera. The results were as follow: the remote science team positively identified the main characteristics of the test site geological environment. The science on the fly experiment showed that the selection of appropriate targets might be even more critical than the time spent on a study area to reconstruct the history of a site. During the same operation the science team members identified and sampled a rock from a Jurassic outcrop that they proposed to be a fossil. The presence of paleolife indicators in this rock was confirmed later by laboratory analysis. Both visual and instrumental modes demonstrated the feasibility, in at least some conditions, of carrying out a field search for meteorites by using remote‐controlled vehicles. Finally, metrics collected from the observation of the science team operations, and the use team members made of mission data, provided critical information on what operation sequences could be automated on board rovers in future planetary surface explorations.

Self-driving laboratories accelerate the application of the scientific method and the discovery process through high-throughput experimentation, intelligent perception and planning, and effective human-robot collaboration. However, detecting anomalies in events, object states, and environmental conditions remains challenging due to process uncertainty and environmental complexity. To support research in this area, we construct a dataset for process anomaly detection in scientific experiments. The dataset is collected from a fully automated Polydimethylsiloxane synthesis workflow involving collaborative robots. Images were captured from first-person views using end-effector cameras mounted on mobile and fixed robotic arms, covering 11 checkpoints and 14 distinct viewpoints. In total, the dataset includes 1,671 images and 2,788 image-text pairs. Each sample contains step-specific descriptions, anomaly labels, and region-level annotations. This dataset intended to support a range of visual anomaly detection tasks, including image-text classification, anomaly type recognition, anomaly localization, grounded captioning, and anomaly attribution analysis. It offers a practical resource for developing intelligent anomaly monitoring and automated decision-making systems in self-driving laboratory environments driven by visual perception.

Reviewed by: The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil's Search for Petroleum in Postwar America Richard Vietor (bio) The Offshore Imperative: Shell Oil's Search for Petroleum in Postwar America. By Tyler Priest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. Pp. xi+317. $39.95. This is not a history of Shell Oil, the semiautonomous entity of which the British-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell owned a slim majority. It might have been that, had the company not undergone radical restructuring and [End Page 494] management changes in the early years of this century. As a consequence, this is not a company history. Rather, Tyler Priest has used research he had already completed, from archives and interviews, to write an independent book on the technological and managerial development of Shell's offshore exploration and production operations in the Gulf of Mexico. The story starts with a small, land-bound oil company operating in California and then Texas, early in the twentieth century. Through the 1930s and 1940s, Shell companies produced and marketed petroleum products throughout the United States, struggling a bit to avoid criticism as a non American company exploiting U.S. resources. But Shell was invariably crude-short, importing product for its refineries and its successful retail marketing operations. In 1945, it established its Bellaire Research Center in Houston, a hive of geoscience, engineering, and geology which would shortly push Shell to the forefront of offshore technological development. In chapters 2 through 7, Priest tells a rich story of technological evolution, some of it plodding by solving small problems and fixing mistakes, and some of it encompassing breathtaking breakthroughs—even scientific epiphanies. First, Shell used sonographic, then seismographic, measurements to look for salt domes in Louisiana's coastal marshes. Then it ventured a few meters offshore, laying down wood mats and using army-surplus barges to block waves. The company bought leases for a few million dollars and by 1950 had discovered a field of 670 million barrels using submersible barges on which it built drilling platforms. From here, the science took off. Shell became a leader in seismic technology and measurement. Once the Tidelands controversy was settled in 1953, by a federal law designating federal waters beyond the three-mile mark, Shell and the other majors got increasingly serious and committed to offshore oil in the Gulf of Mexico. They began building semi-submersible drilling platforms capable of drilling in 300 feet of water . . . and they began bidding ever larger amounts for offshore tracts with potential, first $18 million, then $50 million, then $162 million. Eventually Shell would pay $316 million for sixteen tracts in a sale with bids of $2.8 billion. In the early 1970s, Shell mastered "bright spot" technology, a way of reading seismic data more effectively, to discover oil traps some thousands of feet below sea level. But the 1970s marked the end of "business as usual," as oil spills, environmentalism, OPEC price shocks, and the decline of U.S. reserves all put intensive pressures on Shell and the industry. Chapter 6, the title chapter, is my favorite. Here, Priest provides a discussion of Shell's riskiest challenges—its biggest platforms, biggest bids for offshore tracts, and some of its biggest failures. The Cognac platform, designed in three vertical stages that had to fit together perfectly and cost $800 million, ended up producing 72,000 barrels daily by 1982 in 1,000 feet of water! But at the same time, exploration in Alaska, California, the Baltimore Canyon, and Georges Bank were failures, costing more than $2 billion. [End Page 495] During this entire period (1945–2000), Shell really did put together an extraordinary research and development team at Bellaire. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, associate director of Bellaire, predicted that oil reserves in the United States would peak in 1970, which they did. Shell scientists and engineers broke dozens of records for depth of exploration and depth of production, seismic technologies, and sizes and designs of offshore platforms. And they were the low-cost offshore producer. While The Offshore Imperative is great at engineering and rich in personal stories and interviews, it could have been stronger in conceptual content. While Priest periodically ties events...

Consumers are regarded as kings, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of any business; without consumers, producers would be unable to generate profit. The world economy has developed and undergone many changes. There has been a paradigm shift from a product-centric approach to a consumer-centric one, aligning with the notion that “the consumer is king,” wherein business actors adopt approaches that prioritize consumers by addressing their needs and welfare—key determinants of business success. The consumer-centric strategy embodies the principles enshrined in Law No. 8 of 1999 on Consumer Protection. This study aims to explain the impact of implementing a consumer-centric strategy within the economy on business actors in Cileunyi Kulon through Community Service (Pengabdian Pada Masyarakat, PPM) activities. The service method employed involved initial legal research, followed by Participatory Action Research (PAR), engaging local entrepreneurs in active participation. The research team then optimized outcomes through mentoring activities. This PPM initiative resulted in a significant improvement in business actors’ understanding of consumer-centric strategies and their implications for consumer welfare.

The integration of state-of-the-art fibre optic sensing technologies with telecommunication systems has not yet been achieved. There are many challenges which need to be overcome to allow for a pan-continental research instrument, all of which requires international collaboration. Such international collaborations would allow for the creation of novel applications and research into Earth science, such as cetology and abiotic and biotic marine interactions, oceanography, seismology, volcanology, and soundscape monitoring, to name but a few.Over the past 5 years, research teams from National seismic and oceanographic infrastructures, together with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and partners from universities, research institutes and industry have pioneered sensing techniques to use submarine optical telecommunication fibres to monitor the Earth and its systems.Fibre sensing technology and collaborations created by developing these techniques have now reached a level where a new paradigm shift can occur. This presentation will discuss the SUBMERSE project (SUBMarinE cables for ReSearch and Exploration), which is creating and delivering a pilot research instrument which could serve as a blueprint for continuous monitoring upon many more existing submarine fibre optic cables in the future.The SUBMERSE project, which started in May 2023, is a Horizon Europe-funded, 36-month long initiative which is investigating the combined acquisition of SOP (State-of-Polarisation) and DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) data from live telecom cables, with the aim to then make that data available to researchers globally and F.A.I.R. The project team, consisting of 24 organisations, uses existing fibre-optic infrastructure deployed across multiple national research infrastructures to create a pan-European research instrument.Our presentation will discuss the latest field deployments of DAS and SOP technologies across 5 geographic locations on 3 cable systems, which are spread across the European continent and Atlantic Ocean. It will offer a first glimpse of the effects of running a DAS in the L-and C- Bands on a live DWDM telecoms system, in combination with SOP, in a submarine and terrestrial environment.The aim of the SUBMERSE project is to disseminate the data following FAIR principles through established community data centres. The main challenges we have faced relate to ensuring compliance to security restrictions and handling huge data quantities generated by DAS.  The approaches to down sampling, frequency filtering, and potentially time-and-space-gating will also be presented.  We will discuss the approaches taken for acquiring, streaming from remote sites, data staging, pre-processing and raw file retention. We will also highlight the tools and approaches that we have adopted to develop best practices for running such a multi-national, distributed, sensing instrument which must take these elements into account.Our work has shown that a pragmatic approach, with collaboration at heart, is needed to address these challenges. Without a strong commitment and collaboration between research communities and research infrastructure providers, the potential to lose valuable research data is high. This risk can be mitigated by focusing on datasets which are valuable to communities and ensuring the long-term availability of those data sets in a F.A.I.R manner.

Among over two million baccalaureate degrees conferred annually in the United States, business remain the most popular field of studies with over 19% of all graduates, followed by health professions and social sciences . Whereas only about 6% of BS degrees are awarded in engineering, the engineering enrollment has been growing faster overtaking psychology as the 4th most popular field of study. In the first decade of 21st century several national reports called on US government to increase investments in science, mathematics, and engineering education as a matter of national economic competitiveness. The increasingly complex technologies involved in new products based on interconnected and responsive hardware and software motivated development of new college curricula blending business and STEM education. Since 2008 blended engineering and business baccalaureate programs have been developed by at least 12 different universities in the US including Drexel, Lehigh University, Ohio State, Penn State, University of California Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, University of Tennessee Knoxville, University of Texas at Austin, Valparaiso University, Washington University in St. Louis. In this paper we will provide an overview and initial student outcomes assessment for a new Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) major offered at a Large Research University since Fall 2021. The IBE curriculum encompasses project-based courses starting from the first semester. The IBE students are introduced to real-life complex engineering problems through community-based design or vertically integrated research team frameworks. The IBE curriculum includes all the first-year science and engineering core courses required for other engineering majors. Additionally, the first year IBE students complete introductory accounting and microeconomics coursework. The engineering coursework continues in sophomore and junior years through electives and additional experiential learning courses. The paper discusses structure for the IBE program and initial evaluations along with the opportunities and challenges for addressing the learning objectives of the business and engineering degrees within the four-year curriculum.

It can be argued that the last true paradigm shift in the bioanalytical (BA) arena was the shift from high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet (UV) detection to HPLC with tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) detection after the commercialization of the triple quadrupole mass spectrometer in the 1990s. HPLC-MS/MS analysis based on selected reaction monitoring (SRM) has become the gold standard for BA assays and is used by all the major pharmaceutical companies for the quantitative analysis of new drug entities (NCEs) as part of the new drug discovery and development process. While LC-MS/MS continues to be the best tool for drug discovery bioanalysis, a new paradigm involving high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (uHPLC) is starting to make inroads into the pharmaceutical industry. The ability to collect full scan spectra, with excellent mass accuracy, mass resolution, 10-250 ms scan speeds and no NCE-related MS parameter optimization, makes the uHPLC-HRMS techniques suitable for quantitative analysis of NCEs while preserving maximum qualitative information about other drug-related and endogenous components such as metabolites, degradants, biomarkers and formulation materials. In this perspective article, we provide some insight into the evolution of the hybrid quadrupole-time-of-flight (Qq-TOF) mass spectrometer and propose some of the desirable specifications that such HRMS systems should have to be integrated into the drug discovery bioanalytical workflow for performing integrated qualitative and quantitative bioanalysis of drugs and related components.