NC State paleontologist Mary Schweitzer was on 60 Minutes on Sunday, in a story about her colleague Jack Horner. It’s a fascinating look at the work they’re doing on dinosaur bones and how it has shaken up their field.
The tricky thing about Schweitzer’s work is that she needs to get her hands on the insides of dinosaur bones, which means literally breaking the bones apart and sometimes dissolving pieces of them in acid. Most paleontologists won’t let her near their precious finds.
“Jack [Horner] is the only paleontologist out there who lets me dissolve his dinosaurs,” she told Stahl.
Tune in to 60 Minutes this Sunday. Lesley Stahl reports on Jack Horner, the Montana State University paleontologist, and the work he has done with NC State paleontologist Mary Schweitzer. She’s the researcher who has attracted attention for her discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils.
I am mindful of arguments coming from technological optimists who believe crop yields will continue to rise, that there is plenty of oil still left to find and that geo-engineering will solve global warming.
But I don’t think today’s doomsayers are a few voices in small corners of the scientific community. There is a real threat to worldwide food security over the next 10 to 40 years. The threat comes from global income inequality combined with projected global warming, which could cause tremendous declines in crop yields.
I don’t think biotech crops are evil and could be a big help, especially in developing nations. But I think we’d be naive to think these will solve all the world’s food problems going forward. Maybe they will but they probably won’t.
Roberts and a colleague from Columbia University published a paper in August that made some startling predictions about declines in crop yields due to global warming.
College of Design dean Marvin Malecha, who’s also president of the American Institute of Architects, spoke last Friday at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego, Calif., where he talked about the future of architecture, the dearth of art and design classes in some high schools and his own experience in a downturn:
“In the early 1970s, we went through a down cycle, and I was not able to get a job as an architect,” said Malecha, 60, who received his architectural degree at Harvard.
Instead, he worked for a company that supplied buildings with devices to protect against lightning strikes.
“It was a valuable skill, and I learned something about a component that goes into a building you have to think about,” he said. “My advice is to stay focused on your dreams, be persistent and find a job like lightning protection that keeps you close to the profession. We need housing, hospitals, schools, research labs; cities are going to need attention. All that comes from people trained in design — architects.”
College of Veterinary Medicine dean Dr. Warwick Arden, who’s also serving as provost, was on WUNC’s The State of Things today for a wide-ranging interview that touched on everything from the Easley scandal to NC State research to the proposed research lab in Butner to his childhood in Australia.
NC State students and faculty have made the news recently with their work. First, a Discovery Channel clip on a lunar rover developed by NC State engineering students, who modeled their design after a tumbleweed (unfortunately there’s no embed code for the clip). It’s a neat segment, and you get to see their prototype in action.
Next, a Salon.com story on a recent study by political science professor Steve Greene that found that “parenthood makes moms more liberal and dads more conservative.” men become more conservative when they become fathers but women become more liberal when they become mothers.
“Basically, women with children in the home were more liberal on social welfare attitudes, and attitudes about the Iraq War, than women without children at home,” Greene says, “which is a very different understanding of the politics of mothers than captured by the ‘Security Mom’ label popular in much media coverage. But men with kids are more conservative on social welfare issues than men without kids.” Men with kids did not differ from men without kids in their attitudes towards Iraq.
We thought it would be a good time to highlight a couple of military-related stories that have come across our desks recently. The first, from GoPack, tells of two cousins, First Lt. Christopher Young ’05 and Capt. Drew Wimsatt ’03, who both played football for the Wolfpack. Young, a Marine, was awarded the Bronze Star recently. Wimsatt, who flies Cobra attack helicopters, provided the flag that the Pack carried into Carter-Finley for the season’s first game.
Wimsatt believes his job is a lot like football. It’s all about preparation and training.
“You have to rely on the tactics we’re trained to use,” he said. “It’s a lot like football. You practice, you go through your two-a-days, you do all the preparation to get to that point. Then, when you are in a game, there is nothing to it. You do what you have been practicing to do.”
The other, from last week’s faculty/staff newsletter highlights the work of John Muth, an electrical and computer engineering professor and Navy reservist who was awarded a Bronze Star this spring and is back on campus.
For 12 months, the electrical and computer engineering professor negotiated Iraq’s violence and sticky politics as he led a team of 30 civilians, military personnel and translators providing advice and support to the nation’s Ministry of the Interior. The ministry will eventually take charge of all internal security in Iraq, allowing the Iraqi army to focus on external threats.
We’ve mentioned it before, but Goodnight Raleigh! is a fun blog that always has some interesting items about Raleigh’s past and present (like the twosets of pics of the NC State steam tunnels). One of its contributors, Karl Larson, who’s helping to lead the effort restore the Color Wall in D.H. Hill, has been researching that piece’s creator. Turns out NC State design prof Joe Cox had another work just right down the street at a BB&T branch. The bank’s still there, but the mural has been removed.
Forty-seven years ago next month, Branch Banking and Trust Company opened its “State College Office” at the corner of Hillsborough St. and Oberlin Rd. The ribbon cutting ceremony was held with great fanfare, with the mayor of Raleigh, the chancellor of NC State and the president of BB&T in attendance. Though the pick and shovel groundbreaking had occurred several months earlier, the bank’s opening “broke ground” in another, more significant way — it was the first Raleigh bank to feature a work of public art as an integral part of its design — a dazzling stained glass mural. “The mural represents the growing cooperation between artist and architect that is rapidly spreading throughout the country,” the N&O reported in an article on the event in 1962.
Today, we were pointed to two neat articles in the press that feature NC State experts and make for good Friday afternoon reading. . .
The first, from CNN, is about an expected battle in Congress over buying American when purchasing uniforms for the military. Producers visited the College of Textiles, where materials were tested, and talked with Roger Barker, a professor who studies the thermal protective performance of fabrics and clothing. If they ever put up the video from the piece, we’ll post it.
And from Wine Spectator, an article on the effort at NC State to decode the brettanomyces genome.
Brettanomyces, aka brett, can be a winemaker’s worst enemy. A yeast species that contaminates wine and corrupts the entire fermentation process, brettanomyces can lead to flavors best described as sweaty horse, manure, Band-Aid and burnt plastic. At lower levels, some find it pleasantly spicy, with cedar and earth undertones. But higher concentrations ruin a wine completely.
Zootoo Pet News recently interviewed Ola Harrysson, an associate professor of engineering, about his work in osseointegrated prosthetics. Unlike traditional prosthetic limbs, which can be removed, osseointegrated prosthetics attach to the bone.
The osseointegrated prosthetic becomes a part of the pet’s leg and in all cases the animal has been able to ambulate normally using the prosthetic. It is our hope that these animal patients will be able to live a normal life after the procedure and will be able to walk and run like any other pet. The owners still have to be very involved in the process for the procedure to be a success.
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