From fire protection to canines to foreign languages, NC State’s researchers and professors bring a range of expertise in their efforts to help the nation’s military.
“The work that research universities do to support our military has never been more important,” Chancellor Randy Woodson said at the opening this afternoon of the university’s Military Appreciation Day program at the Park Alumni Center. The events are part of the university’s yearlong celebration of NC State’s 125th anniversary.
ROTC cadets help NC State celebrate its 125th anniversary
Terri Lomax, vice chancellor for research and innovation, said the university is home to partnerships between the Department of Defense and the USDA that offer programs to military kids, including camps for children and financial advice for families.
And with a photo of Gen. Custer and his favorite companion animal on a screen behind her, Lomax noted that dogs have long had a place in the military. Today, the College of Veterinary Medicine is working with the government to select the breeds that can best be trained to detect IEDs and to identify the most accurate training methods.
And at the College of Textiles, researchers continue to use PyroMan, a full-size simulated model that helps textile engineers determine what kind of fibers best protect the human body from heat and flame.
“We can show where second- and third-degree burns are likely to develop,” said Roger Barker, the Burlington Chair in Textile Technology and director of the Textiles Protection and Comfort Center (T-PACC).
The college has also developed another set of models — PyroHand and PyroHead — to help researchers understand the effect of radiant thermal energy from IEDs on extremities.
Plans are in the works, he said, to develop a “dynamic” version of PyroMan that moves so that the effects of fire can be simulated in motion.
“Our mission is to serve and protect the men and women who serve in our military, and for that we are very grateful,” Barker said.
In addition to technical research, the university’s foreign language department is contributing to partnerships with the military. ROTC students are being given the opportunity to learn “critical language skills” in Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Urdu, said Dwight Stephens, director of the Integrated Research Learning Initiative. The training is designed to help the students understand other cultures and become “warrior-diplomats” who can participate in conflict resolution, he said.
Speaking of NC State’s history of military leadership, Woodson noted that the university counts more than 60 admirals and generals among its alumni — just behind the service academies and The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute.
NC State’s home page has a package of stories worth checking out on a couple of university research projects that will be aboard the Atlantis when the final space shuttle mission begins Friday.
The stories look at how researchers at NC State are helping to prepare for missions to Mars and beyond with research on microgravity’s effects on plants and animals.
One of the stories, for example, looks at how 30 mice will be traveling on the Atlantis to help researchers find ways to protect astronauts from bone loss during space travel.
Artist Joyce Lambert recently gave the Alumni Association a painting of Holladay Hall. It will hang in the Dorothy and Roy Park Alumni Center room named for Lambert’s brother, Lynn W. Eury ‘59. Eury sponsors multiple NC State endowments and served as co-chair of the fundraising campaign to build the alumni center. Hole No. 5 at the Lonnie Poole Golf Course is also named for him.
This is a National Science Foundation video about the amazing metal foam developed by Afsaneh Rabiei, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Read more about her work in the Autumn 2010 issue of NC State magazine.
The above photo is of an insect egg from a gallery produced by National Geographic Magazine that accompanies an essay written by Rob Dunn, an assistant professor of biology at NC State. In the Autumn 2009 issue of NC State magazine, Dunn wrote about the thousands of tiny species at work around us that we often don’t notice, even when those species are living on our own bodies and right under our noses. In this new essay for National Geographic Magazine, “The Beauty of Insects,” Dunn focuses in on insect eggs (and both the essay and the photos are fascinating):
They began simply, smooth and round, but over 300 million years, insect eggs have become as varied as the places where insects reign. Some eggs resemble dirt. Others resemble plants. When you find them, you might not know what you are seeing at first. The forms are unusual and embellished with ornaments and apparatuses. Some eggs breathe through long tubes that they extend up through water. Others dangle from silky stalks. Still others drift in the wind or ride on the backs of flies. They are as colorful as stones, shaded in turquoises, slates, and ambers. Spines are common, as are spots, helices, and stripes. More than biology, their designs suggest the work of an artist left to obsess among tiny forms. They are natural selection’s trillion masterpieces; inside each is an animal waiting for some cue to break free.
What you see in the accompanying photo gallery, Dunn writes,
are the eggs of a few small branches of the insect tree of life. Among them are those of some butterflies that face extraordinary travails to defend themselves against predators and, sometimes, against plants on which they are laid. Some passionflowers transform parts of their leaves into shapes that resemble butterfly eggs; mother butterflies, seeing the “eggs,” move on to other plants to deposit their babies. Such mimics are imperfect, but fortunately so is butterfly vision.
View the photo gallery and read all of Dunn’s essay here and here. Be sure to also check out this video in which the photographer explains how he got his shots of the insect eggs. And, you can read the essay that Dunn wrote for NC State magazine in Autumn 2009 here.
A lot of people today have smart phones, but would you wear smart clothes? Like, a business suit that wicks away sweat or underwear that burns calories or a T-shirt that tracks changes in blood pressure? According to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, smart clothes are coming and the research behind it is happening right here in the College of Textiles.
The quest for so-called smart clothes that react to changes in the body “is a fast-growing area of research” in the performance-fiber field, says Tushar Ghosh, a professor at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles. Professors and students there, in research funded by the National Science Foundation, are working on developing fabrics with sensors that can track changes in blood pressure, pulse rates, and other signs of stress, as well as signs that a wearer is falling down, Dr. Ghosh says.
Read the full story here, and check out the accompanying video report that explains how smart clothes work:
How would I illustrate abstract ideas about batteries not so easily filmed? I thought about Bill Nye The Science Guy and all those great Radio Lab shows. Both of those programs manage to turn complex science into engaging entertainment. Knowing that we didn’t have a budget for graphics I found some sidewalk chalk and remembered that any video project worth doing will always be a time-intensive affair — having fun and learning something about doing it better next time is all the reason you need.
Rob Dunn, assistant professor of biology at NC State and author of Every Little Thing, wrote an essay for our Autumn 2009 issue of NC State magazine about the “thousands of species . . . found on an average, living human body.” The most fascinating thing about those thousands of species: “Until very recently,” he wrote, we didn’t even realize they were there. Now Dunn and his research team are taking a look at another group of species that can be easy to miss during walks in the woods: ants and other forest insects. As reported in The News & Observer yesterday:
To forecast how ants and other forest insects might respond to a warming world, Dunn and his colleagues have spent the past two years building a dozen open-top enclosures in a part of the Duke Forest, an expanse of hardwoods and pines in Orange County.
account, Kelley delves into the history of Jim Crow laws. She appeared recently on WUNC’sThe State of Things to talk about Right to Ride, which has been described as “one of those marvelous books that will forever change historians’ ideas about an incident they thought they understood completely. . . .” Kelley spoke with NC State magazine contributor Jill Watral about her research.
How did you come to develop an interest in this particular period of history?
I was always interested in what happened between the great movements toward change, and Reconstruction is one of the great time periods where we see lots of things happen. The traditional Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s is another time period when wonderful things happened for positive ends for African Americans. But as an undergrad [at the University of Virginia], I thought, “Well, OK, that’s nice, but what happened in between? Did those people just not care about their circumstances? Or, do we just not know what happened? Or, was it because they weren’t successful? Or, because we don’t remember?” It’s been sort of these fundamental questions that I’ve had in the back of my mind as a student going through school, and as I read more, I became more interested in the turn of the century and the Plessy [v. Ferguson] case.
The Constructed Facilitles Lab is probably one of the more interesting (if not well-known) labs on campus. At this Centennial Campus building, students and researchers test full-size building, bridge and road parts. Companies that need to know how well their new building, product or bridge design will withstand weather, traffic or even earthquakes come here. We wrote about the CFL in the summer issue of NC State magazine and talked to its director and the lab manager about putting parts through the ringer:
“We tend to overload the structure here so we can be confident in the designs,” says Greg Lucier ’04, ’06 MS, a doctoral student and lab manager at CFL. “In almost all cases, we’ll take things all the way to failure.”
The steel bars the like ones in the beam above were used in the foundation of the Freedom Tower in New York City. You can watch a beam tested to failure in the video below:
NC State’s home page has a package of stories worth checking out on a couple of university research projects that will be aboard the Atlantis when the final space shuttle mission begins Friday.
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