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.
US News & World Report recently recognized Gen. Ray Odierno ’86 MSE as one of America’s Best Leaders for 2009. He’s the commanding general of Multi-National Force-Iraq and, as Time wrote in late 2008, “helped develop the military’s surge strategy — which contributed hugely to the reduction of violence in much of the country.” He also led the soldiers who captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in late 2003. US News writes:
Odierno has also scrutinized the career of George Marshall. “He understood fighting” as well as politics. “Those qualities were something I wanted.” In Iraq, he applies them. “The military solution cannot solve our problems,” he says. “It must be a civil-military solution.”
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.
A segment on tonight’s 60 Minutes looked at the “buy America” clause in the stimulus package through the lens of the steel industry. In the piece, Caterpillar CEO and chair Jim Owens ’68, ’70 MT, ’73 PHD talked about the challenges he believes his company and others could face:
“If we have a ‘buy America’ clause, other countries are going to have a ‘buy China,’ ‘buy Europe,’ ‘buy Brazil’ clause, and they’re going to discriminate against our exported products,” Owens predicted.
The segment, which is after the jump, originally aired in February.
CBS’s 60 Minutes recently talked with Jonathan Kuniholm ’02, ’03 MID, MS for a fascinating piece on advances in prosthetics technologies. Kuniholm, who lost his right arm to a roadside bomb in Iraq, is doing some amazing work in the area at Duke University. In the segment, Kuniholm controls the movement of a prosthetic hand simply by thinking about it. Fast forward to 10:24 to see him. And read NC State magazine’s Spring 2008 article on him.
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