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Greeneville Tobacco Market Prepares For Its Final Season
Michael Walden, agricultural and resource economicsPushing New Industry: Group Touts Medical Devices
biomedical engineering and business programsNew security checks weighed
UNC systemFour Charged In Car Break-In Spree
Four people were charged in a string of car break-ins in Raleigh, Cary and on the NC State University campus.Student recovering from meningitis
Student recovering from meningitis
Artist's
mastery of color is worth an Asheville trip
George Bireline, College of Design
New book
for NCSU sports lovers
Bob Cairns, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Wake
Habitat director resigns
Mike Levi, retired associate state leader of N.C. Cooperative Extension
No
deliverance in divorce
Barbara Risman, sociology and anthropology
Dinosaurs
Under the Knife
Mary Schweitzer and Jennifer Wittmeyer, marine, earth and atmospheric science
Duke
Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid
Brian
Burney, graduate
student
Student recovering from meningitis
Nov. 5, 2003
News & Observer
By SARAH AVERY
© Copyright 2004
A UNC-Chapel Hill freshman was in fair condition Thursday recovering from a case of bacterial meningitis that shot fear through two state college campuses last week.
Jonathan Davis, 18, was hospitalized Oct. 27 at UNC Hospitals and is recovering. Davis had grown sick the previous weekend when he attended a party at a home near the N.C. State University campus in Raleigh and then went to the Wolfpack football game before returning to his Granville Towers dorm at UNC-CH.
Meningitis is highly contagious, and once it was diagnosed Oct. 28, health officials in Wake and Orange counties pressed to get antibiotics to anyone who may have come in contact with Davis. The infection spreads through saliva in sneezes or coughs, in shared beverages and cigarettes, or with kisses.
NCSU Student Health reported Thursday that it gave out 1,100 doses of the antibiotic Cipro to people who feared they may have come in contact with Davis. UNC-CH Student Health Service officials administered 1,119 doses of Cipro.
No other cases have been reported, but a scare occurred Tuesday night when another UNC-CH student was taken to UNC Hospitals, triggering fears that the student also had meningitis. The patient's illness was "inconsistent with meningococcal disease," said Rosemary Summers, Orange County Health Director, in a prepared statement.
"No prophylaxis or other measures are indicated for persons who may have been in contact with this student," Summers said. "To date, we still have only the one meningococcal case and no evidence that anyone else has been infected."
The early signs of meningococcal meningitis are similar to many other acute illnesses and include headache, fever, sensitivity to light and a stiff neck. Anyone who experiences the symptoms is urged to see a doctor. The infection is deadly if left untreated.
Nov. 5, 2003
Charlotte Observer
By RICHARD MASCHAL
© Copyright 2004
The best of the fall color is over in Asheville, but there's another reason to visit the city besides the changing leaves.
The Asheville Museum of Art today opens a retrospective on George Bireline, one of the best artists North Carolina has ever had.
Born in Peoria, Ill., he taught for years at N.C. State University's School of Design in Raleigh. The artist, who died in 2002, showed an astonishing versatility, a point captured in the exhibit's title: "George Bireline: The Many Roads Taken."
He began as a color field painter, known for colorful abstractions. His work became more figurative and eventually expressionistic.
His subject matter included, as the museum press release says, "life and death, faith, environmentalism, pollution, the decaying urban landscape and include incisive conceptual portraits."
"Some of his paintings are as much objects as paintings, incorporating shaped canvases and sculptural elements."
It's not just that Bireline changed or did a lot of things, but that he did all of it so well.
Above all, Bireline was a wonderful colorist whose paintings sing.
Gallery owner Lee Hansley, quoted in the press release: "George never encountered a color he couldn't use in his painting ... the constant unifying thread is the trademark Bireline color."
Bireline is in the Mint Museum of Art's collection. Unfortunately, both paintings are in storage.
The Asheville show is up through Feb. 6. The museum on Pack Square downtown is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. Sunday and Friday until 8 p.m. $5-$6. (828) 253-3227, www.ashevilleart.org.
Four Charged In Car Break-In Spree
Nov. 4, 2003
NBC-17
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Four people were charged Thursday in a string of car break-ins in Raleigh, Cary and on the North Carolina State University campus, authorities said.
Jason L. Graham, 19, and Lynnwood S. Davis, 22, were each charged with five vehicle break-ins, credit card fraud and possession of stolen property, while David A. Blue, 19, is charged with vehicle break-ins at N.C. State.
Erica Dennis Locklear, 20, is charged with conspiracy and possession of stolen property. Authorities said she housed the stolen merchandise and allowed the other suspects to stay with her.
The break-ins were basically crimes of opportunity in which the suspects would pick a neighborhood, walk around and glance inside cars to see what might be lying inside, said Sgt. Jon Barnwell, of the N.C. State campus police. The suspects would then smash a car window, grab what they wanted and be gone in a matter of seconds, he said.
A stolen credit card broke the case open.
Barnwell said Raleigh police knew a card was used in a location with a video camera, so campus police worked to obtain footage from the camera. That was used to identify one suspect, which led to other arrests, he said.
Greeneville Tobacco Market Prepares For Its Final Season
Nov. 4, 2003
The Greeneville Sun
By BOB HURLEY
© Copyright 2004
A successful, long-running institution is gearing up for its final season in Greeneville.
The Greeneville Tobacco Market, which dates from the 1800s, will fade into memory after the sale of the 2004 crop now coming to warehouse floors.
“It is a new game and a new day,” said Dallas Ottinger, a burley grower from near St. James and manager of the Co-Op Tobacco Warehouse, on West Main Street.
“There will be no warehouse auction system as we have always known it after this year,” he said.
“There will be no price support program after we sell the crop now coming to town. The good old days are gone, and I’m not sure that anyone knows where we are going from here.”
Warehousemen such as Ottinger began receiving the 2004 crop this week in preparation for the market’s final opening on Monday, Nov. 15.
Farmers will be able to continue to grow tobacco in 2005, but sales will be made directly and privately to tobacco companies without benefit of the price support system that has been in place for them since 1933.
In early October, President Bush signed historic legislation that ends the federal tobacco price support program that enabled tens of thousands of Tennessee families to pull a living from the land during the past seven decades.
Supporters of the bill, which became known as “the tobacco buyout” during several years of intense debate, have hailed its passage as “the last chance to rebuild a failing industry.”
But local growers and warehousemen are not so sure.
“Mostly, what I’m seeing is long faces among tobacco growers,” said Johnny Powers, manager of the Planters Tobacco Warehouse on the Asheville Highway. “Most of us are not sure what we’ve got now that we’ve got it,” he added.
Milton Macon, manager of Star-Growers Tobacco Warehouse, on West Main Street, said growers continue to face uncertainty in the wake of the buyout’s passage.
“There are still more questions than answers,” Macon said this week as he began marketing preparations. “It is a wait-and-see game.”
As for what to expect when sales begin on Nov. 15, warehousemen and industry leaders say the 2004 crop is as good as the one produced in 2003, or perhaps a little better.
“This crop looks better than the 2003 crop,” Ottinger said. “It is darker in color, and that’s what the cigarette companies are wanting.”
Paul Denton, of Knoxville, extension tobacco specialist at the University of Tennessee, says the yield is also up slightly from a year ago.
“The quality appears to be a little better than the 2003 crop,” Denton said, “and with the estimated yield per acre up from last year, we should be seeing better marketing conditions for growers.”
‘A Lot Of Unknowns’
While the historic buyout legislation is expected to dramatically reduce the number of growers who will be actively producing the crop beginning in 2005, Denton says there will be increased risks and uncertainties for those who remain in the business.
“There are a lot of unknowns out there,” Denton said. “There will indeed be more grower risks because there will be no price supports, and the companies who buy the tobacco directly from farmers will tell them exactly the kind of tobacco they are wanting to buy.”
The buyout has been the hottest topic of conversation to come to Greene County farms in generations.
“A way of life that we’ve always known is ending,” Ottinger said. “There are a lot of mixed emotions out here on the farm because we all know there will be a much smaller number of people growing tobacco from now on, and we don’t know about the prices that the companies will be willing to pay.”
Carroll Sasscer, a long-time tobacco grower from Orebank and a retired executive with the former Austin Tobacco Company, says some new terms have come with the passage of the buyout legislation.
“Up to now, we have had a tobacco market,” Sasscer said. “From now on, there will be ‘a tobacco business,’ and there is a lot of difference in the two.
“Since the 1930s, farmers have not had to sell their tobacco, so to speak. They just brought it to town, placed it on a warehouse floor, and it was sold for them by a system that worked remarkably well for generations.”
A Way Of Life
Sasscer and others have long contended that the importance of tobacco as a cash crop cannot be overstated in the history of rural counties such as Greene.
“Like it or not, tobacco is the crop that kept Greeneville going for a very long time,” he said.
“Tobacco not only fed and educated our children, but it bought tractors and pickup trucks, built homes, schools and churches while providing for a way of life that produced some outstanding people who are now leaders in this community and beyond.”
Officials in some tobacco-growing states say the buyout legislation will reduce the number of tobacco farmers by up to 75 percent.
“Is this a big deal? Yes, it is,” according to Dr. Mike Walden, of Raleigh, N.C., extension economist at North Carolina State University. Walden made the statement in a column that has been widely circulated the past few days in tobacco-growing regions.
“It will change the economies of many rural communities,” he said. “The tobacco buyout will help but not transform our rural way of life. We must still address the issues of education, work retraining and infrastructure.”
Tennessee’s share of the buyout amounts to $767 million over the next 10 years, according to figures from the Tennessee Farm Bureau. The Tennessee figure is relatively small compared to the amount that neighboring states will be receiving.
Growers in North Carolina, for instance, will get $3.8 billion over the next 10 years, which is 40 percent of the $10.1 billion bill signed by President George W. Bush. Kentucky growers will get $2.5 billion over the next 10 years.
Dr. Will Snell, of Lexington, Ky., extension tobacco economist at the University of Kentucky, said the buyout, while injecting billions into rural communities of the South, will forever change the landscape of tobacco farming as it has been known.
“Up to 75 percent of the current tobacco growers and quota-owners will quit growing tobacco altogether,” Snell said in a recent interview with the Associated Press.
“As with any major and controversial piece of legislation, not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome,” Snell said.
“Our farmers are disappointed the buyout dollars were reduced from earlier proposals, but the alternative was to watch quotas and the value of this asset dwindle away.”
Dr. Bob Miller, a nationally-known tobacco researcher who lived in Greeneville for years before moving to Kentucky in the 1990s, says the day of the small tobacco farm is indeed gone with the passage of the buyout.
“The days of the little tobacco farmers are ‘gone with the wind,’ so to speak,” Miller said by telephone earlier this week from his office at the University of Kentucky at Lexington.
“There will be fewer growers, and they will be forced to grow good tobacco,” Miller said.
“Gone also are the days when companies were forced to buy whatever tobacco was placed on warehouse floors, no matter how poor it was in quality.
“The people who grow tobacco from now on will grow quality tobacco or they won’t grow it at all, and that’s just the reality of where we are in the tobacco business today.”
Pushing New Industry: Group Touts Medical Devices
Nov. 5, 2003
LocalTechWire
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Andrew DiMeo is among a growing number of executives and entrepreneurs who believe that North Carolina’s biotech, life science and university infrastructure can be used to grow a strong medical device industry.
To further that goal, DiMeo will moderate a panel discussion on Nov. 15 at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s next BioTech Forum titled “The Drug-Device Intersection: Combination Devices and NC’s Life Science Future. He also helped launch a new organization called the North Carolina Medical Device Organization. DiMeo has a strong background in Biomedical Engineering and medical device product development.
To better explain the ideas driving the medical device initiative, DiMeo recently agreed to answer a series of questions from the CED’s Robert Albright.
Andrew, what exactly is a combination product?
Combination products can be defined as those comprised of two or more regulated components that are physically, chemically or otherwise mixed as a single entity, or, two or more separate products packaged together. The combinations can be drug/device, device/biologic, drug/biologic, or drug/device/biologic. Some examples of combination products include: drug-eluting stents, heparin-coated catheters, antibiotic bone cements, bio-artificial skin, orthopedic implants with growth factors, insulin injector pens, metered dose inhalers, transdermal patches, and diagnostics requiring a drug or biologic.
How is the FDA regulation of combination products similar or different to the regulation of pharmaceuticals, devices, or other biotechnology?
The primary similarity is that the same three agencies used to regulate biologics, drugs, and devices are used for combination products, the CBER, CDER, and CDRH respectively. The difference is in the assignment of the product. The FDA has an office of combination products that determines what agency a product will be assigned to. The office uses a proposed rule issued this past May that in affect determines the mode of action of a combination product that provides its most important therapeutic action. For example, a drug eluting stent is regulated as a device because the primary mode of action is opening the artery, while the secondary action is inflammation prevention with the drug.
Are there certain types of products that are “hot” right now and seeing a lot of research or activity?
There are many hot research areas, including binding technologies and combination diagnostics. One field that I find particularly interesting is regenerative medicine, also known as tissue engineering. These products have a lot of promise, from biomaterials that carry drugs to bio-artificial organs, blood vessels, and tendons.
What role do you see medical devices having in the Triangle’s future? How is this related to combination products?
The Triangle region has well-organized and vibrant pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. I believe medical devices are an important component of the Triangle’s future, as well as the surrounding urban areas, offering potential business opportunities in research, development, and manufacturing. By strengthening the regions medical device sector, this potential can be maximized. In addition, a stronger medical device sector may set the stage for the region to be a combination product leader through collaborations across the device, drug, and biologic sectors.
What do you see as this area’s greatest strength and weakness relating to medical devices and combination products?
The current organization of North Carolina’s medical device sector is not up to par when compared to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors. This weakness is something that is currently being addressed. On the flip side, North Carolina has a multitude of strengths that ultimately contribute to the overall economy. Just scratching the surface from the Research Triangle region reveals some powerful examples. This area has many emerging companies developing new devices as well as technologies to improve device and drug/biologic combination.
In addition, Duke, UNC, and NC State all have premier Biomedical Engineering and Business programs. The students emerging from these programs are future researchers and business leaders who will continue to advance the local life science community.
Ultimately, I believe the greatest strengths are the commitment to entrepreneurial spirit, the research ongoing at local and statewide universities, and the quality of the state’s workforce.
To learn more about the forum, see: secure.cednc.org/programs/industry_forums/biotech_forum/register.htmls
NC Medical Device Organization: www.ncmedicaldevice.org
New book for NCSU sports lovers
Nov. 4, 2003
News 14 Carolina
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
If you love N.C. State sports, there's a new book you may want to check out.
Bob Cairns is the author of "V & Me: Everybody's Favorite Jim Valvano Story."
The book features stories from more than 100 famous athletes and sports figures, including Dick Vitale and John Wooden.
Cairns held his first booking signing at Quail Ridge Books and Music Wednesday.
Cairns had been an employee for North Carolina State University for 27 years.
Nov. 5, 2003
News & Observer
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
RALEIGH -- Greg Kirkpatrick, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Wake County, resigned this week to pursue interests in consulting, writing and teaching, the organization said in a prepared statement.
Mike Levi, a former Wake Habitat board president, becomes the agency's interim director. Levi is a retired associate state leader of the N.C. Cooperative Extension based at N.C. State University in Raleigh.
Kirkpatrick has led the agency since 1998. In six years, Wake Habitat has built 165 homes, quadrupled net assets from $2 million to $8 million and has built key relationships with government officials, corporate leaders and religious communities, the news release said.
Last year, Wake Habitat was named an affiliate of the year -- one of three nationwide -- for its rapid growth in housing construction over the past several years, including 50 houses built in 2003. The agency expects to complete its 300th home by the end of next year.
Kirkpatrick will serve as a consultant to Levi during the search for a new executive director.
Nov. 5, 2003
Associated Press; Charlotte Observer
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
CHAPEL HILL - A safety task force is ready to recommend several new screening checks for applicants to the 16 University of North Carolina system schools.
But the task force -- formed after the killings of two UNC Wilmington students earlier this year -- warned that the measures would hardly be foolproof in pinpointing students with dangerous tendencies.
The group is expected to send a report to system President Molly Broad in the coming weeks as part of an effort to improve safety on the state's public campuses.
The panel's admissions subcommittee wants campuses to spend more time checking into applicants' pasts for signs of criminal behavior.
Some of the ideas reviewed during a meeting Tuesday included checking incoming students against 10 years of expulsion and suspension records at all UNC campuses and checking students against a national database to see whether they attended other colleges.
In addition, proposals included comparing home-schooled students to the statewide public schools database to see if they were expelled.
The procedures could be burdensome to college admissions offices and high school counselors, but offer the best chance to protect students, said Leslie Winner, UNC's vice president and general counsel.
"It's sort of a needle in a haystack we're looking for," she said, "but it's a pretty sharp needle."
In the Wilmington cases, the student suspects in the two slayings lied about their criminal pasts on their applications. Most campuses now ask applicants whether they have ever committed a crime other than a minor traffic offense.
The task force may recommend criminal background checks for some students whose applications raise red flags.
As part of its study, the task force is analyzing the records of more than 100 UNC system students with criminal offenses in the past three years.
Meanwhile, some campuses already are exploring new ideas for keeping students safe. East Carolina University staff members have begun testing key-chain panic buttons. The devices would summon campus police, who could immediately locate students through global positioning technology.
Where the Democrats go from here
Nov. 5, 2003
Christian Science Monitor; The Green Bay News-Chronicle, WI
By Liz Marlantes
© Copyright 2004
WASHINGTON - As dispirited Democrats take stock of across-the-board electoral losses and begin an inevitable bout of soul-searching and recriminations, they might take comfort in reflecting on the position of Republicans in 1976.
President Gerald Ford had just lost the White House to Jimmy Carter, and with memories of Watergate still fresh, many Republican officials worried that their party faced permanent marginalization. Some even suggested changing the party's name, believing "Republican" had become a political albatross.
"People were writing the obituary for the Republican Party," says Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and author of "The Losing Parties."
Four years later, with President Carter plagued by long gas lines and the Iran hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan swept into office and launched a new period of GOP dominance.
The point isn't that Democrats have nothing to worry about. This week's defeats - spanning the White House, seats in both houses of Congress, and state legislatures - came despite the party's best-funded and best-organized effort in history. Although the country remains divided, Republicans have clearly expanded their electoral majority, with Democrats facing a growing challenge among certain regions and demographic groups.
But while the losses hold sharp implications for the future direction of the Democratic Party - and will probably shape which candidate it chooses for its next nominee - history shows that often a party's chance of recapturing the White House and rebounding in Congress is dictated less by what it does than by events and how the party in power handles them.
"Democrats clearly need to reassess what they're about and what they're doing," says Mr. Klinkner. "But what it's really going to come down to is what kind of job Bush does over the next four years," he says. "And in that sense, the Democrats are going to have to be reactive."
Certainly, the election results point to a number of serious problems for Democrats. President Bush made small but potentially significant inroads into the Democratic base, gaining a higher percentage of Hispanic votes than in 2000, and reducing the gender gap by winning over more women. He made gains among Catholic and Jewish voters, and even performed better in urban areas, the Democrats' stronghold.
Regionally, the Democrats' strength now seems almost entirely confined to the coasts and pockets of the Midwest. The party is currently without a national leader, having lost its Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle. Democrats were also defeated in every Senate race in the South, suggesting that the party faces growing challenges in trying to compete in that part of the country.
This year, Sen. John Kerry essentially ceded the entire South, aside from a brief flirtation with North Carolina when he put Sen. John Edwards on the ticket, and a last-minute visit by former President Bill Clinton to Arkansas. The Kerry campaign saw more promising territory for picking up electoral votes in the Southwest - states such as New Mexico and Colorado, both of which Kerry wound up losing narrowly. Some Democrats argue this region still represents a better fit for the party as it seeks to expand its base of support. But others say Democrats can't expect to win the White House if they can't compete in the South.
"It's very hard for a Democrat to win when you write off the South completely," says Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.
If Kerry had managed to carry Ohio, Professor Abramowitz notes, he could have pulled it off. But the strategy left little room for error. And Kerry may have come up short in Ohio, despite the state's economic woes, for the same reason he lost across the South - an inability to connect with culturally conservative voters on values.
Polls showed many voters considered "moral issues" a top concern, equal to terrorism or the economy, and 8 out of 10 of those voters chose Bush. Kerry tried to downplay issues such as abortion and gay marriage in the campaign, but with initiatives banning gay marriage passing in 11 states, the issue may well have hurt him.
At the same time, some observers suggest that Kerry's positions on those issues may have mattered less than the fact that he simply seemed culturally alien to many rural and lower-income voters - as does the Democratic Party as a whole.
Significantly, one of the few demographics where Democrats seemed to expand their hold was among highly educated voters, even as Republicans gained ground among the less-educated.
"In the Southern states, there's a kind of antielitism which you would think, economically, would make these people pro-Democrat, but it's a cultural antielitism," says Andy Taylor, a political scientist at North Carolina State University. "Kerry personified the type of person that this philosophy does not like - an aristocratic, northeastern intellectual."
But while this may leave Democrats searching for a Southern or working-class standard-bearer for 2008 - possibly giving a boost to Senator Edwards, or raising questions about Sen. Hillary Clinton's chances, should she decide to run - many experts say the Democratic Party's failures in this election actually had far less to do with their image than with mechanics. Despite the biggest Democratic turnout effort in history, the party still came up short on the ground.
Some observers suggest that the Democrats may have been at a disadvantage by having much of their turnout operation manned by third-party groups, rather than one centralized effort coordinated through the party. Many of those groups also relied more on out-of-state workers, who may have had a harder time connecting with local residents.
* Amanda Paulson and Patrik Jonsson contributed to this report.
Nov. 5, 2003
Record-Searchlight, CA
By Karen Guzman
© Copyright 2004
Asteely sky, heavy with ominous clouds, threatens to drench this Raleigh, N.C., neighborhood.
Mike Jannicelli isn't fazed. He parks outside a roadside coffee shop and strides for the door.
When you're 52, raising a blended family of teenagers and regretting the errors of your past, rain is nothing to fuss about.
"I wanted to make this one work definitely," Janicelli says.
"There were things that I was accepting that no guy in his right mind would," he said of his defunct previous marriage.
The soft-spoken Air Force veteran is remarried now, but he has walked a long road back to stability. And he has his hands full these days helping raise his new wife's 16-year-old twin sons and a 12-year-old son.
He's satisfied. "But another side of me is saying I'm too old for this mess, trying to keep a marriage relationship together and a family together," he says.
Four years ago, Jannicelli, like many other middle-age men, found himself suddenly divorced.
Some say they never saw it coming. Others struggled too long to hold a bad thing together. At a time in their lives when they'd hoped to be kicking back in an empty nest, these guys were nestless.
A recent study by AARP suggests men suffer more in divorce, and it's often their wives who want out. The advocacy organization for the over-50 crowd surveyed 1,147 divorced men and women between the ages of 40 and 79. Some findings: 66 percent of women asked for a divorce, while only 41 percent of men did.
More women reported embracing their new single status. Older men, the study indicates, don't do "alone" well.
This comes as no surprise to Barbara Risman, chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and a professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.
"Men depend on their wives as their primary social support network," Risman says. "They are much less connected emotionally to other people. They find themselves very lonely and often marry again very quickly."
A particular type of man is hardest hit, and he's often the one who says he was blindsided by his wife's desire to leave.
"Most of these men are not tuned into the emotional content of their relationships," Risman says. "They are often totally flabbergasted that their wives are unhappy."
A self-described Type-A careerist, Greg Sweet says he often worked 18- to 20-hour days as vice president of a communications firm.
"I came out to find a moving van in front of my house. That's how I found out," he says.
Sweet, of Raleigh, realizes now that his marriage was beset with problems, some of which he exacerbated. "All the signs were there that she was unhappy," he says. "I'm sure had I not had my head buried in my business, I could have seen that and dealt with it."
The marriage lasted only one year. But Sweet, 45, took valuable lessons away from it and says he and his ex are good friends today. She could not be reached for comment.
"I'm much more aware," he says. "I look at what it is I've done to create a situation if there's a problem."
Financially self-sufficient women, without children at home, are more likely to opt out of an unsatisfying relationship, Risman says. "She's probably stayed in a marriage that wasn't satisfying for a long time for reasons that have to do with family," she explains.
Women aren't rejecting the institution of marriage, Risman says. They just want good ones. So do men, even after a divorce.
Jannicelli met his current, and third, wife online. His first marriage also ended in divorce. He has two adult children and visitation rights with an adopted daughter.
After his last split, he considered staying solo. He toyed with the idea of returning to an old job -- driving tractor-trailers.
"I thought maybe that's what I was destined for, get back in a cab of a truck and skirt across the country," he says. In the end, he stayed put. "I decided I was gonna stay local and stay in touch with my daughter and try to get on with things."
Jannicelli is grateful for another chance.
"After all I've gone through, I'm glad at where I'm at now. It's a constant learning experience."
Nov. 5, 2003
Science Magazine
By Erik Stokstad
© Copyright 2004
With high-domed skulls built like battering rams, dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs
look for all the world as if they must have butted heads. Paleontologists imagined
the males sparring for mates as bighorn sheep do, and the idea was bolstered
by radiating bony structures that apparently strengthened the head against
impacts. But did they actually knock noggins?
To find out, Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley, and John
Horner of Montana State University in Bozeman did something that would give
most museum curators the heebie-jeebies: They sawed open the skulls to examine
the fossilized bone tissue. The answer was trapped within the domes, Goodwin
says, and histology--the study of tissues--was the only way to get it.
Preserved in the bone, as in many fossils, was a beautiful record of the original tissue, down to the level of individual cells. That's beyond the resolution of computed tomography scanners. By studying pachycephalosaurs of various ages, Horner and Goodwin determined that the radial structures were ephemeral features associated with fast-growing bones of juveniles. There was no sign of stress to the skull bones, they reported in the spring issue of Paleobiology. "I didn't see any evidence that they head-butted," Goodwin says. However, he and Horner did find bundles of so-called Sharpey's fibers, which anchor ligaments and also thick pads of keratin to bone. Horner and Goodwin speculate that this may have secured a crest to the top of the head, perhaps for display.
More and more paleontologists are putting their fossils under the knife--the rock saw, actually--to gain new insights into their biology. "The microstructure includes a tremendous amount of information," says Armand de Ricqlès of the Université Paris VII. After removing a slice of bone, they glue it to a glass slide and then grind it until it is transparent. Studying this "thin section" of bone tissue with microscopes can explain the origin of strange structures, such as the thick heads of pachycephalosaurs and the plates of stegosaurs, and help test hypotheses about their function. "I get quite excited about the potential of using bone microstructure to flesh ancient animals out and make them more real," says Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Paleohistology is already shedding light on the question of how sauropods and tyrannosaurs attained their gigantic sizes and other evolutionary patterns. It can tell adult animals from juveniles, and it provides the only way to determine how old extinct animals were when they died and how quickly they grew--key questions for studying their population biology and ecology. "We're on the cusp of being able to learn a lot about the biology of these animals--things we thought we'd never be able to tease out of the bones," says Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens. This week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, paleontologists unveiled a bumper crop of histological studies, from a possible determination of the sex of a Tyrannosaurus rex to identification of an island of dwarf sauropods. "This field is about to explode," says paleobiologist Gregory Erickson of Florida State University, Tallahassee.
Diverse tissues
Paleohistology has a long history. For 150 years, paleontologists have
used the technique to classify ancient fishes. But not until the early
20th century did
they begin to compare the microstructure of various fossil land animals. Studies
by Rodolfo Amprino of the University of Turin, Italy, led to an observation
in 1947 that is now called "Amprino's rule": The rate of an animal's growth
strongly influences the type of tissue deposited in its bones. A rapidly growing
bone has many blood vessels. Its characteristic "fibrolamellar" texture
is marked by quickly deposited fibers and holes that are then filled by bony
structures called primary osteons. In contrast, a bone growing more slowly has
a texture called lamellar-zonal with fewer blood vessels and a finely layered
appearance.
Dinosaurs typically have bone tissue that more closely resembles the quickly growing bones of large birds and mammals than the slow, lamellar-zonal tissue of reptiles. In 1969 and in later papers, de Ricqlès suggested that the dinosaur bone tissue might indicate fast, continuous growth and an active metabolism like that of mammals and birds. This idea played an important role in the "renaissance" that changed the perception of dinosaurs from sluggish reptiles to active, possibly warm-blooded animals. Tissue type turned out not to be a simple indicator of metabolism, but it does indicate the general pace of growth.
Bone tissue offers another way to understand the growth of ancient animals. Bones sometimes lay down dark lines, called lines of arrested growth (LAGs), which represent periods when growth slowed or stopped for a while. LAGs are common in amphibians and reptiles, but modern birds typically lack them because they complete their growth in less than a year. In 1981, Robin Reid of Queen's University of Belfast reported that dinosaurs showed the lines, too. By counting them like tree rings, paleontologists can infer how many years a bone has grown, and by extension how long the dinosaur lived. This technique of skeletochronology is now widely used by biologists studying modern reptiles and amphibians thanks to Jacques Castanet and others in de Ricql`es's laboratory in Paris, which has trained many paleohistologists.
Interpreting fossils can be tricky. For one thing, an animal's body continually dissolves primary bone--to extract calcium or to repair microfractures--and then deposits secondary bone, erasing the bone's early history. To account for missing LAGs, researchers must make assumptions about their spacing and about bone deposition rates--no simple task, because in living animals, deposition rates vary widely from species to species and even between bones in the same individual. Temperature and diet affect bone growth, too.
One solution is to look at many specimens of various ages, so that juvenile bone fills in the missing picture for adults. "As long as I have enough individuals and a diversity of bones, I can reconstruct what was going on," says Kristi Curry Rogers of the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. By counting LAGs, researchers can assemble a series with individuals of various ages. Then, using techniques for estimating an animal's mass from the size of its bones, they plot how various types of dinosaurs typically grew over time. Most growth series are partial, but the hadrosaur Maiasaura is known from embryo to adult.
When growth curves were published in the 1990s, they revealed startling facts about dinosaurs. In a 1999 Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper, for example, Curry Rogers showed that the giant sauropod Apatosaurus reached full size--25 meters long--in just 8 to 11 years, not the decades that had long been assumed. "People would have laughed!" says Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley. The quick growth rate complicates a long-standing puzzle: How did sauropods, with their relatively small mouths and simple teeth, manage to get so big, particularly during the Jurassic, when only cycads and other plants of meager nutrition were growing?
Researchers have also established a general pattern for dinosaurs, compared to other groups. In a pair of 2001 Nature papers, two groups--Padian's team and Erickson and colleagues--used different techniques to plot growth curves for several dinosaur species. Both concluded that dinosaurs grew faster than reptiles. The larger dinosaurs packed on weight at a pace comparable with that of mammals, but none grew as blindingly fast as modern birds do. Growth curves also show that, like birds and mammals, dinosaurs grew fast when young, then slowed down and stopped growing as adults. By contrast, nondinosaurian reptiles such as crocodiles grow more slowly.Growth curves have been used to investigate how dinosaurs evolved various patterns of growth. In August, Erickson and several co-authors reported in Nature how T. rex evolved to its formidable size, relative to other tyrannosaurids (Science, 13 August, p. 930). Rather than extend its growth phase, T. rex accelerated its adolescent growth spurt--packing on up to 2 kilograms a day. Sauropods show similar changes, according to a paper by Martin Sander of the University of Bonn, Germany, and colleagues, in press at Organisms, Diversity & Evolution. "That's not information you can get from gross anatomy," notes Allison Tumarkin- Deratzian of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. "The only way you can pin down accelerated rates of growth versus extended period of growth in the fossil record is by looking at histology."
Giants and dwarfs
As a rule, dinosaurs and other vertebrates evolved to get bigger through
the ages. But the bones show that some bucked the trend. At this week's
SVP meeting,
Sander and Octavio Mateus of the Museum of Lourinha in Portugal and colleagues
announced that small sauropods discovered in Germany are not juveniles but "the
first unequivocal case of dwarfing for any dinosaur." The 10 individuals
range in size from 1.8 to 6.2 meters long--much smaller than the 23-meter-long
brachiosaurids to which they are closely related--but the tightly spaced
growth lines in their bone tissue clearly show that they were full grown.
The growth curve, based on seven leg bones, suggests that the dwarfs may
have been sexually mature at as young as 2 to 3 years of age.
The dwarfs lived about 150 million years ago, on an island about half the size of New Zealand. So they could provide new data about the relationship between land area and the maximum size of animals. Curry Rogers and colleagues are working on the histology of other possible "island dwarf" sauropods, titanosaurs from Argentina and Romania.
Birds are another group that reduced their body size relative to their dinosaurian ancestors, and histology is helping researchers figure out how that happened. By comparing their tissue with those of the most birdlike dinosaurs, Padian and others have argued that they shrank by shortening the amount of time they spend growing most rapidly. (Most birds reach full size within a few weeks.) "It's a very smart idea," says Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. So even though they grow at a faster rate than dinosaurs, they end up smaller--which would have been a key step toward evolving the ability to fly.
Following up on research begun by de Ricqlès in the 1970s, Chinsamy-Turan is also looking at the beginnings of another fast-growing group: the mammals. Research on their therapsid ancestors shows that some of these so-called mammallike reptiles were still growing like reptiles, while others show some distinct evidence of more mammalian growth patterns. Now she's looking at Mesozoic mammals from the Gobi desert. "I have begged and really pleaded" to get access to these rare specimens, she says, to compare them to modern mammals.
Paleo-exotica
Sometimes zeroing in on ancient bones turns up exotic results. At the SVP meeting,
Horner, and Mary Schweitzer and Jennifer Wittmeyer of North Carolina
State University in Raleigh, described tissue, never reported from a dinosaur before,
from the femur of a T. rex. The tissue has a random structure and is much
richer in blood vessels than surrounding tissue. The researchers propose
that it functioned like tissue that female birds use to store calcium for
making eggshell. If so, it would be the first time paleontologists have determined
gender--and reproductive status--from a dinosaur bone. Some skeptics, however,
think the tissue structure might be the result of injury or disease.
Histology can also be used to test hypotheses about the function of bizarre structures that no longer exist in the world. Stegosaurus plates have long attracted attention, and a prevalent idea is that they were used to regulate body temperature. Horner, Padian, de Ricqlès, and Russell Main, now a graduate student at Harvard University, decided to test that idea. After making thin sections of stegosaur plates and the smaller scutes of related dinosaurs, the team discovered that Stegosaur plates had evolved simply by expanding the keel of scutes. "We saw nothing special about the stegosaur plates" that would be an adaptation for thermoregulation, Main says. Moreover, structures originally described as blood vessels probably weren't. The plates were probably used instead for species recognition, the group proposes in a paper in press at Paleobiology.
Indirectly, bone histology can even shed light on long-vanished animals' behavior. Curious about whether baby hadrosaurs would have stayed in the nest or struck out on their own after hatching, Horner's team looked at the bone tissue of Maiasaura embryos, as well as embryos of alligators and ratite birds. "We didn't have much evidence until we looked at the histology of the bones," Horner says. Unlike the ossified bones of alligators and ostriches, the tissue at the end of the hadrosaur limb bones consisted of calcified cartilage, suggesting that hatchlings couldn't walk immediately. They reported these findings in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2000.
Walking, running, jumping, flying: Bones actively respond to the stresses of these and other physical activities. On the one hand, this can complicate the interpretation of bone tissue when researchers are trying to establish growth rates. But because physical activity affects bone, it may also be possible to extract that history from bone tissue, for example by studying the orientation of the strutlike trabecular tissue inside bones, which is often oriented perpendicularly to the major axis of strain. "It's tricky and requires a certain amount of interpretation," cautions John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College in London. "There's still a lot of work that needs to be done in modern animals to see how strain impacts bone remodeling."
A good amount of that work is going on. For example, Main is studying goats to determine how biomechanics affects their bone histology. He hopes to find signals that could enable fossils to reveal posture, among other details. Other researchers are seeking similar clues in alligators, crocodiles, and birds. "Modern animals are some of the great unsung heroes of dinosaur paleontology," says Curry Rogers.
Better known heroes are playing a key role too, especially when they are abundant. Horner, for example, continues to mine a rich deposit of hadrosaurs, with individuals of all ages and sizes. "We're cutting hundreds and hundreds of slides," says Horner, who has a technician working on histology full-time. Once his group and others nail down what's normal for bone tissues, they may be able to probe the many influences that affect bone, extracting information about sexual dimorphism, climate, gait, and much else. "We've just begun to scratch the surface," says Chinsamy-Turan.
Duke Robot Climbs to Victory in Madrid
Nov. 4, 2003
PhysOrg.com; Slashdot
By staff report
© Copyright 2004
Wall-climbing autonomous vehicle wins robotics competition at international conference
A wall-climbing, book-sized autonomous vehicle made by a Duke University team drove up a challenging vertical course to win first prize in an international competition Sept. 22-24 in Madrid.
The student competition was part of the seventh annual International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots.
Jason Janet, an adjunct professor in Duke’s electrical and computer engineering department and faculty advisor on the robotics project, said the Madrid competition shows the growing importance of climbing robots."Robots that climb walls and cross ceilings can go where humans can’t," Janet said. "They can do security and safety jobs like looking for bombs or finding cracks in a support beam or the wing of a jumbo jet."
The Duke team’s leader was Brian Burney, a staff member at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and graduate student at North Carolina State University. The other team members were Pratt School undergraduates Kevin Parker, Andrew Meyerson and Julien Finlay.
"Our robot Wallter was the only one that could start flat on the floor and climb the wall on its own, go over a barrier across the wall or stop itself after crossing the finish line," Burney said.
Added Meyerson, "As the smallest, fastest and most novel robot, Wallter was one of the most popular exhibits. I was interviewed for Spanish national television for a story about the conference featuring the Duke robot."
According to Burney, the Duke vehicle set itself apart when it rolled to the foot of a metallic wall, reared up on its hind wheels, and used a "tornado in a cup" to hug the wall and start its ascent.
The "tornado" is generated by a patented device from Vortex HC, LLC of Morrisville, N.C., said Janet, who is vice president of development at the company. The device uses air currents swirling in a cylinder, about the size of an upside-down tuna can, to exert suction on a wall or ceiling. An impeller in the cylinder spins like a propeller but recirculates captive air rather than sucking air in one end and blasting it out the other.
"It’s a tornado in a cup, but no ordinary tornado," Janet said. "Two vortexes swirl simultaneously, one in a spiral and the other in a toroidal path, like a donut. The forces generated hold the vehicle to the wall and yet allow free movement because the cup never touches the surface."
Parker said the Madrid competition required performing five tasks: starting on the metal competition wall and climbing as high as possible; climbing after the addition of randomly placed obstacles; crossing a barrier placed on the wall; starting from the floor and then climbing; and stopping after crossing the finish line.
"We faced stiff competition from German and Italian teams," Parker said. "The robot from the University of Catania was amazingly good at detecting and avoiding all the obstacles. Our robot brushed against a couple of obstacles, but it was the only one that completed all five tasks."
Janet said the Duke team combined the "tornado in a cup" technology with an original control system. "A human operates Vortex’s commercial robots by remote control," Janet said. "The students added sensors and wrote software that enables their robot to operate on its own."
Parker said they added ultrasonic and infrared sensors across the front and programmed a tiny computer, called a microcontroller, to navigate based on information from the sensors. Ultrasonic sensors detect objects by bouncing sonar-like sound waves off them. Infrared sensors, used in television remote controls, detect light outside the range of human vision.
Burney provided an initial basic design for the Duke vehicle, Janet said. Meyerson and Parker, both biomedical engineering students, focused on writing software and incorporating the sensors.
When tests showed the centimeter-high barrier broke the hold of the Vortex technology, Janet called in Finlay to solve the problem of crossing the barrier without falling off the wall. Finlay is a mechanical engineering student and a veteran of the team that produced Duke’s prize-winning autonomous underwater vehicle Charybdis.
Finlay said he tried to design a solution that would work with or without the metal wall at the competition.
"We tried adding treads," Finlay said. "We tried a wheelie bar to keep the rear end of the robot flat against the wall and prevent the front from lifting up. Unfortunately, the results were disappointing. Time was running out so we had to add magnets and take advantage of the metal."
According to Finlay, the magnets were successfully tested only one day before the team flew to Spain.
In Madrid, Meyerson and Parker had to adapt the robot’s software for the competition wall. "The traction was different from what we were used to," Meyerson said.
With software tuned and magnets added, Wallter crossed the centimeter barrier without difficulty in practice runs. However, in the first competition runs, Wallter slipped down the wall when attempting to cross."
There were 15 minutes of pure terror and panic," Parker said. "We didn’t know what was wrong." Burney said, "We finally realized we had the brackets for the magnets on wrong.
The magnets were upside down, and the magnetism was too weak that way."With the magnets positioned correctly, Wallter negotiated the barrier, reached the top of the wall, and won the first prize of about $250.
The team left Madrid triumphant but exhausted from coping with the competition while keeping Spanish hours without the siestas, said Meyerson. "Restaurants don't open for dinner until nine and a meal takes hours," Meyerson said. "Everyone stays out until four a.m. and that’s without even trying to go clubbing."
Janet said Duke’s future robotics efforts include teaming with a group from Carnegie Mellon University for the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge to design a full-sized autonomous land vehicle and continuing the development of autonomous underwater vehicles.
In addition, computer science professor Ronald Parr and graduate student Austin Eliazar are developing software that enables a mobile robot to map its surroundings as it moves and simultaneously locate itself on the map. Such "simultaneous localization and mapping" is a longstanding challenge in robotics research.
The Duke wall-climbing robot was funded by a grant from the Lord Foundation.Janet said the Vortex technology was developed by Vortex HC on a grant from the DARPA Microsystems Technology Office.