Best Selling Books by Scott Martin

"Four Questions" tells the story of Heath Hawkins, a small-town newspaper reporter in rural Virginia. His everyday life is mostly uneventful, but after an encounter with a mysterious entity in his dreams, Heath starts to uncover the truth behind a number of mysteries, and most importantly, comes to terms with a longstanding mystery of his own. Ultimately, he finds the pursuit of truth, while rewarding, can be costly.Readers will find "Four Questions" a pleasing mix of murder mystery and the supernatural, with a touch of romance and memorable small-town characters.

Hope -- Sacrifice -- Unity A century-and-a-half in the future, humanity has ventured into space, encountering strange alien races and diverse new worlds. Yet in the dawn of this new age, Earth is assaulted by a menace from its past -- twisted, once-human creatures called Aberrants. Humanity''s greatest defenders -- men and women gifted with formidable psychic powers -- -- stand against this horrific threat. Armed with psionic abilities and biotechnological enhancements, and aided by mysterious aliens, these guardians hope to fend off the invasion and protect humanity from its own twisted reflection. The source on Orgotek and the Trinity universe''s North America.

Inertial confinement fusion is one of two primary approaches to the production of fusion energy for power generation. Due to the high cost of experimentation for large scale systems such as Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (Laser IFE), the ability to accurately simulate the expected performance using properly validated models is of critical importance. The evolution of the chamber environment from target injection through the generation of fusion energy is a critical issue for the success of Laser IFE. In the research presented, the output of a radiation hydrodynamics code is used as the initial condition for evolving the chamber gas dynamics up until a subsequent target injection. To perform these simulations, our group has developed a 2D/3D-Axisymmetric Navier-Stokes fluids code that includes an additional radiation source term. The work presented here has been to extend this code to include the effects of multiple gas species and higher order mechanisms such as diffusion from the Dufour and Soret effects. Validation of the numerical method is demonstrated in the case of separation of Helium and Xenon gas in a shock wave. It is also shown that the code uses reasonably accurate transport coefficients for He:Xe mixtures based on curve fits produced by the ChemKin preprocessor. Numerical simulations of the Laser IFE configuration using the augmented system track the mixing of the Xe gas in the chamber with cold Xe gas from jets on the wall. Simulations using cold He:Xe mixture jets of varying composition are also investigated.

Fragile-X Syndrome (FXS), caused by transcriptional silencing of the fmr1 gene, is the leading cause of inherited intellectual disability. Comorbidities of FXS such as autism are typically linked to excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) imbalance and amygdala dysfunction yet the role of the amygdala in FXS is poorly understood. Principal excitatory neurons (PNs) of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in the Fmr1 knockout (KO) mouse model of FXS display a hyperexcitable phenotype (decreased action potential threshold) that may partially underlie amygdala dysfunction in FXS, but the etiology of this phenomenon remains unknown. Tonic GABAA mediated transmission can powerfully affect cell and network excitability and regulate synaptic plasticity so could therefore underlie hyperexcitability in the Fmr1 KO BLA and/or provide a potentially relevant therapeutic target to rescue that hyperexcitability. Accordingly, we designed whole-cell patch clamp studies to test the hypothesis that tonic transmission is deficient in the Fmr1 KO BLA and as such, likely participates in the maintenance of PN excitability and synaptic E/I balance. We show that tonic transmission is comprised of both δ- and α5-subunit containing GABAA receptors and is reduced in Fmr1 KO PNs. Furthermore, the δ-specific agonist THIP rescues the decreased firing threshold observed in Fmr1 KO PNs. Moreover in both genotypes, α5-subunit blockade enhances the amplitude and kinetics of relatively distal synaptic events indicating that these receptors preferentially modulate dendritic compartments of these cells. Examination of synaptic balance with evoked synaptic conductance experiments reveal altered feedforward inhibition in Fmr1 KO PNs that reflects a change in E/I balance related to altered excitatory response kinetics and is consistent with sharpened neuronal tuning. This state is replicated in WT PNs by α5-subunit blockade. Therefore our data suggest that deficient tonic GABAA transmission in the FXS BLA contributes to cellular hyperexcitability and synaptic E/I imbalance in PNs, and may represent a therapeutic target for treatment of amygdala-based symptoms in FXS.

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Our research group studies the adsorption of semiconductor quantum dots to self-assembled monolayers on metal oxide films and the interfacial electron transfer reactivity of these materials. This thesis will focus on understanding how the properties of the monolayer-functionalized titanium oxide (TiO2) film and the cadmium selenide (CdSe) quantum dots themselves affect the saturation surface coverages of these quantum dots. We performed equilibrium binding experiments to characterize the adsorption of mercaptoalkanoic acids (MAAs) onto nanocrystalline TiO2 films and CdSe onto these functionalized films. As the chain length of the MAAs increased, the maximum surface coverage of MAAs on TiO2 remained constant at 10-8 mol/cm2, and the surface adduct formation constant remained constant at around 104 M-1. However, the surface coverages of TOPO-capped CdSe on MAA-functionalized TiO2 films, varied with the MAA chain length. The longer chained MAAs showed a surface coverage of 10-6 mol/cm2 while those of chain lengths of 8 carbons or less showed a surface coverage an order of magnitude lower. We believe that the structure of the CdSe capping agent might play a role in this trend where the alkyl chain length of MAA must be equal to or greater than the capping agent for significant coverage of the CdSe. Further experiments using other capping agents such as amines bore out this affinity of quantum dots for surfactant-functionalized TiO2 films.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of strain in the accumulation of crystalline defects created by ion irradiation. Previous studies state that strained Si1-xGex is more easily amorphized by ion irradiation than unstrained, bulk Si in a periodic superlattice structure; however, the reason for preferential amorphization of the strained Si1-xGex layer in the periodic structure of strained and unstrained layers is not well understood. In this study, various ion irradiations will be carried out on SiGe strained layer superlattices grown on (100)-orientation bulk Si by low temperature molecular beam epitaxy. The samples under investigation are 50 nm surface Si0. Ge0.2/bulk Si and 50 nm surface Si/60 nm Si0. Ge0.2/bulk Si. Defects will be created in both surface and buried SiGe strained layers by medium and high energy light ion irradiation. The amount of permanently displaced atoms will be quantified by channeling Rutherford backscattering spectrometry. The amorphization model, the path to permanent damage creation, of bulk Si and surface strained SiGe will be investigated. The strain in surface and buried Si0.8Ge0.2 layers will be measured by comparison to bulk Si with Rutherford backscattering spectrometry by a novel technique, channeling analysis by multi-axial Rutherford backscatter- ing spectrometry, and the limitations of measuring strain by this technique will be explored. Results of this study indicated that the amorphization model, the number of ion collision cascades that must overlap to cause permanent damage, of strained Si0.8Ge0.2 is similar to that of bulk Si, suggesting that point defect recombination is less efficient in strained Si0.8Ge0.2. Additionally, a surface strained Si0.8Ge0.2 is less stable under ion irradiation than buried strained Si0.8Ge0.2. Repeated analysis by multi-axial channeling Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, which requires high fluence of 2 MeV He ions, proved destructive to the surface strained Si0.8Ge0.2 layer.