Sir Harold W. Kroto, one of the corecipients of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, joined FSU as a Francis Eppes Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in October.
Kroto spent most of last spring as a visiting professor on campus, giving a highly popular series of public lectures, visiting area schools to promote science education and teaching a graduate class on interstellar chemistry. He comes to FSU from the University of Sussex in England, where he taught for 37 years.
Kroto said his move will allow him to "not only open up some new research avenues" but "also maintain the considerable momentum that (his research has) built up over the past 10 years in my international educational outreach work."
An ardent advocate for science education, Kroto devotes much of his time and energy to promoting careers in science among young people. "He'll be a very visible guy" on campus, said Alan G. Marshall, a professor of chemistry, in an interview with Chemical & Engineering News. "The plan is for him to give at least one lecture to every freshman at Florida State during their career, so they'll get a chance to see him."
Kroto's Nobel Prize was based on his co-discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a form of pure carbon better known as "buckyballs." The extraordinary molecule consists of 60 carbon atoms arranged as a spheroid, in a pattern exactly matching the stitching on soccer balls. The configuration reminded Kroto of the geodesic domes designed by the late inventor/architect Buckminster Fuller, hence the name "buckminsterfullerines."
Kroto is the second Nobelist (with J. Robert Schrieffer of the National Magnetic Field Laboratory) now serving on the FSU faculty. Others to serve at FSU were Konrad Bloch, human sciences; James Buchanan, economics; Paul Dirac, physics; and Robert Sanderson Mulliken, chemical physics.
In 2001, Kroto won the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award. The award is given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom.
U.S. troops in Iraq don't have to worry about getting strafed or bombed by enemy warplanes-their foes seem to be doing just fine using homemade bombs to kill and maim them on almost a daily basis.
One terrorist had rigged stuffed animals filled with explosives by the side of the road. When an Army Humvee passed, the device exploded, wounding seven men inside.
For much of this year, such attacks happened almost daily. Since the start of the Iraq war, most of the fatalities and injuries to American and coalition troops suffer have been from remote-detonated bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, not from firefights.
"The casualties are from flying debris-75 percent of injuries are from explosions, not from being shot," said James Thagard, an assistant visiting professor in the FAMU/FSU College of Engineering. Particularly vulnerable are soldiers' extremities that most types of body armor don't cover.
Thagard and Okenwa Okoli, within the college's Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies, have developed a composite manufacturing process that can be used to create lightweight body armor that protects the legs, arms and head of a soldier fighting an urban guerilla war. Metal is typically used for such protective gear, but now lightweight composites-blends of various materials-can be used in place of heavier metals, Thagard said.
"We are the only research lab doing this type of composite manufacturing," he said.
Their process involves injecting liquid resin between two layers of flexible tooling that is then formed over a mold in a vacuum. FSU has a patent pending on the technique. Thagard said the process is an attractive solution to producing high quality, affordable, environmentally friendly composite materials.
R&D Magazine, the publication with the largest circulation in the field of applied research, declared the method one of the year's most technologically significant advances. This summer, an independent panel of 25 engineers and scientists bestowed a 2004 R&D Top 100 Award to Thagard and Okoli for their invention.
Census as History
Historians transferring a set of 19th century censuses of Guadalajara, Mexico, to CD-Rom found an interesting tidbit. In the 1850 census, all the residents of a certain street seemed to be single women with large broods of children.
The find spoke volumes about the type of business run in the neighborhood. "Well, prostitution is the oldest profession," said Tamara Spike, a graduate student working on a special census project within the history department.
The numerous-and apparently fatherless children-of Guadalajara's Calle de Tentacion-or Temptation Street-evoked just one of the many clues to life 154 years ago in Mexico's second largest city. FSU historian Rodney Anderson leads the Guadalajara Censuses Project, aimed at computerizing the town's census data into a user-friendly format for demographers, historians and the general public.
"We're building a bridge between the humanities and social sciences by using statistics to reveal a people's history," Anderson said.
Anderson and a team of graduate students examined nine Guadalajara censuses from 1791 to 1930. The starting point is in an era when census taking was first recognized as a useful tool. In the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson advocated a more detailed survey of society to inform public policy. Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) used 1830 censuses to analyze crime and mortality and advanced statistics as a social science.
In Mexico, Guadalajara is much like Chicago in the United States, a gateway to the country's west and north, Anderson says. In the 19th century, it became an important political, economic and religious center, and remains so today.
"One of the things that jump out at you when you start looking at this data is how mobile people were," Anderson said. "Thirty percent of the city's population will leave and be replaced by newcomers from one census to the next. That was not something we expected to see."
The census recorded where people lived, names and ages, heads of household, occupation and race. The documents reveal a society where race and economic class were somewhat fluid. The digitized format enables researchers to quickly chart the rise and fall of the economic fortunes of individuals.
"Apparently, because it was socially advantageous, people started changing races," Anderson said. "In the 1791 Census, 27 percent of the population was Mulatto, (a mix of African and European). Thirty years later less than 1 percent claimed that designation. They became Mestizo (a mix of Indian and European)."
Anderson expects the first phase of the project, supported by the grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to be available on CD-Rom this December. It will include a guide crafted for users with little background in statistics.
For more information on the project, visit the Guadalajara Censuses Project Web site at www.fsu.edu/~guadalaj/ .
Magnet Milestone
Weighing as much as a fully-loaded tractor-trailer truck, and taller than a house, a magnet at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory set a new world record this summer for the production of a magnetic field for chemical and biomedical research.
A team of engineers led by Denis Markiewicz, Tom Painter, Iain Dixon and Jim Ferner spent 13 years developing and manufacturing the tools needed to ramp up a magnet to that level.
On July 21, the superconducting, ultra-wide bore, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) magnet reached a milestone measurement of 900.31 megahertz, which translates into 21.1 Tesla, the standard unit used to measure magnetic power.
A single Tesla is 10,000 times stronger than the magnet found in ordinary consumer products, like an electric can opener, clips to keep bags closed and refrigerator magnets.
The proposed Superconducting Super Collider, which was at the top of the research community's wish list in the 1980s but finally scrapped by Congress in 1993 was to have magnets with a 6-tesla field.
"This is the crown jewel of the laboratory's NMR spectroscopy and imaging program. It positions us as an international leader in the development of high-field superconducting magnet technology for magnetic resonance applications," said Greg Boebinger, director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at FSU.
The magnet's ultra-wide bore (105 mm or 4.1 inches) will permit a much greater range of scientific experiments than is possible in standard bore magnets. For example, it enables scientists to expand research on large biological structures, including doing non-invasive imaging of live laboratory animals.
Tough Nut Fix?
Cashews, peanuts, walnuts, almonds and other nuts are the leading cause of severe reactions to food. These allergies, which can be fatal, are hard to avoid for the three million Americans who are susceptible to them.
The problem has been that there's no way to be sure that processed foods are nut-free. Tree nuts such as almonds and walnuts are used in many foods, including barbecue sauces, cereals, crackers and ice cream. Nuts also show up in many African, Chinese, Indonesian, Mexican, Thai and Vietnamese dishes. Items prepared in bakeries and ice cream shops often come in contact with nuts.
"Improper labeling and cross-contamination during food processing pose serious threats to sensitive consumers and often lead to expensive recalls," said Shridhar Sathe, a professor of food science at FSU.
Now, the food industry may have a new tool to fight the problem. Research by Sathe and Kenneth Roux, an FSU professor of biological science, in collaboration with Suzanne Teuber, associate professor of medicine at UC Davis, has led to a new, very powerful method for detecting traces of nuts in processed food.
The researchers initially set out to destroy specific proteins in cashews, walnuts and almonds. But roasting, pressure-cooking, blanching, frying, microwaving, even irradiating the nuts proved futile.
But the very invincibility of the allergy-causing proteins gave researchers a clue to how to accurately detect them in processed foods. The researchers were able to convert standard lab tests used for detecting allergens in unprocessed almonds, cashews and walnuts to a highly sensitive detection assay when the nuts were processed or added into processed foods. The technique holds out the hope that the food industry can offer safer products to nut-sensitive consumers.
"Development of specific, robust, sensitive and reproducible assays for tree nut detection will help protect sensitive consumers who must rely upon accurate labeling, as well as food industry and regulatory agencies who monitor the presence of trace quantities in both food and feed," said Sathe. He cautioned that "continued and vigorous research is now urgently warranted" to expedite preparation of the techniques for commercial use.
T.Rex the Trencherman
Talk about your fast-growing teenagers.
A teenage Tyrannosauraus rex didn't miss too many meals-to say the least. Scientists now say that especially during their teen years, these notorious flesh-eaters that died out 65 million years ago packed on the weight at astonishing rates.
Details of T. rex's dining habits were discovered by a team of dinosaur biologists-including FSU's Greg Erickson and Peter Makovicky of Chicago's Field Museum-and published in the Aug. 12 issue of Nature.
The researchers examined cross sections of bones from 20 tyrannosaurs that ranged from two to 28 years of age, and established the great lizard's accelerated development during its teen years.
Like trees, dinosaur bones are marked by growth rings, with a new one appearing every year. The researchers verified their results by comparing the dinosaurs' bones to those of modern-day alligators and lizards, whose rings are similar.
Erickson concluded that the monstrous T. rex grew more than 4.5 pounds a day during its teenage years. At maturity, the carnivorous lizard was a six-ton eating machine, half a ton bigger than the largest elephant, and had few rivals in the prehistoric kingdom.
"If kids grew like that and had an adolescent growth spurt at a rate like T. rex, they'd wind up 12 feet tall before they were 20," Erickson said.
Actually, the prehistoric predator's growth rate is comparable to that of the modern-day elephant, he said. But while elephants have a lifespan of more than 70 years, T. rex lived no more than 30 years.
"We now know that T. Rex lived fast and died young," said Erickson. "We have cracked the growth code for one family of dinosaurs."
Erickson speculates that the lizard's explosive growth spurt helped give the beast an evolutionary advantage during the 5 million or so years when it ruled the dinosaur world.
The FSU paleobiologist has spent much of his career exploring how some dinosaurs got so big. The first dinosaurs to roam the Earth some 225 million years ago were about a yard long and weighed between 50 and 100 pounds, he said. T. rex came along about 150 million years later.
Although the animal ranked among the largest flesh-eating dinosaurs that ever lived, when compared to many of its vegetarian cousins, T. rex was a runt. Fossils from a group of herbivorous dinosaurs known as sauropods, some of which were T. rex contemporaries, suggest these were the biggest creatures that ever existed. Some scientists speculate that the largest sauropods may have stretched more than 140 feet long and may have weighed upwards of 220 tons.
About 21 Centuries ago this bronze likeness of Pegasus, a winged horse from Greek mythology, rode a sinking warship to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Originally fixed to a crossbeam on the port side of the ship, the pose reflects Pegasus' warlike character. The artifact was recovered by an international team of underwater archaeologists investigating shipwrecks off the southern coast of Turkey. Cheryl Ward, an assistant professor in FSU's anthropology department, served as director of maritime surveying for the project.
