A First-Class 'Forty-Niner'

"We worked like hell both in the classrooms and the labs-what labs we had, that is. Pretty soon, things began to move."

In 1995, Werner Baum recalled what it was like to start-from scratch and at a campus that had been co-ed less than two years-a meteorology program, and in a region of the country where none existed, no less. Fresh from a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago-and Navy duty in World War II-the 25-year-old Baum arrived in Tallahassee in 1949 along with 125 other new hires. Of a contingent of pioneer faculty fondly remembered as the "49ers," Baum said: "It was clear that it was a group with a missionary spirit. Living in Tallahassee (to many of us) was like living in a foreign country."

Musical Pacifiers

Johannes Brahms never had kids, but he well knew the wonder-working power his lullabies had over babies-something harried moms have known for centuries.

New research at FSU now pushes music's mysterious power into a potentially revolutionary dimension in modifying baby behavior. If all goes well, the year 2000 will see the commercial debut of the world's first musical pacifier, a device conceived by an FSU innovator in music therapy.

Safer Road Research

When cars collide with highway guardrails, far too often the results are tragic. In the past 30 years, an estimated 90,000 motorists have been killed or seriously injured by striking rails on U.S. highways, ironically installed to make driving safer.

Snapper Menace

In the pre-SCUBA days of the 1930s, a human pathologist from the University of Pennsylvania was lucky enough to find work doing research on fish in the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas. As he paddled through gin-clear waters over shallow reefs, he peered through a glass-bottomed bucket at a curious sight.

Beating the Pros at the Weather Game

Have weather scientists at FSU developed a way to predict the path of hurricanes better than what you hear on the evening news? A look at the track record of the '99 hurricane season suggests just that.

Beginning this past August, meteorologist Dr. T.N. Krishnamurti and his staff trained their computers onto 15 named storms in the Atlantic Ocean. Near the season's end in late November, the FSU team posted better numbers, in terms of percentages of more accurate calls on actual storm tracks, on most of them.