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'HAIRY CARBON' DEVELOPED AT UB SHOWS PROMISE
Published on August 23, 1992
Author: By MIKE VOGEL - News Staff Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.
"Hairy Carbon" is new on campus at the University at Buffalo this year, but you won't find the name on the freshman class roll.
It's a substance being grown from conventional carbon material in UB labs, and it holds promise for better batteries and faster, smaller computers in the future. Researchers Debra Chung, Carl Lund and Xiaoping Shui developed the new material for longer-lasting lithium batteries in aerospace and biomedical uses, where it provides better electricalconductivity, capacity and chemical resistance than materials in use. It also could prove to be a better material to draw heat away from computer components, and a source of ultra-thin, sensitive probes in biomedical applications. Its name comes from its microscopic appearance, with a "hairiness" due to networks of tiny filaments each about 1,000 times thinner than a human hair. Each filament is about one-tenth of a micron thick, compared with strands about 10 microns thick in the conventional carbon fibers just coming onto the market. Molecular problem solved A complex structural problem that had stumped crystallographers for the past 10 years was wrapped up overnight by a University at Buffalo computer scientist running a new modeling program. Russ Miller, who had no previous training in crystallography, adapted the automated method to pinpoint the structure of two unnamed 100-atom molecules. The program ran for only 90 minutes on a parallel supercomputer before coming up with the answer. UB Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Hauptman's team devised the automated program based on mathematical algorithms and used it to solve the structure of a known molecule with more than 300 atoms, but the computer results announced at an American Crystallographic Association meeting in Pittsburgh mark the first time the method has "solved" an unknown substance. By determining just how molecules are put together, scientists hope to accelerate advances in drug designs and modify drug molecules to improve their effectiveness in treating specific medical disorders. Oregon forests are dying LA GRANDE, Ore. (Reuters) -- Nearly 5,000 square miles of forest in the Blue Mountains, which once beckoned pioneers traveling Westward on the old Oregon Trail, are dead or dying, the victim of insects, disease and drought. Tom Quigley, a U.S. Forest Service biologist, said the calamity affects up to 4 million acres of trees on four national forests -- nearly half the forested area in the region -- and is one of the largest ecological disasters in modern times. The Blue Mountains forests have fallen victim to insect epidemics and disease largely because of the way the forests have been managed for the past century. The Forest Service has suppressed wildfires and allowed the overlogging of native tree species, such as Ponderosa pine and larch, which are resistant to insect infestations, according to scientific report released by the agency. The problems of the Blue Mountains, while extreme, are not unique in the West. Quigley said nearly all of the forests of the interior Western states have milder forms of the pest problem and it is spreading westward across the Cascades. A plan to rescue chestnut, elm Genetic engineers say they have a plan to rescue the American chestnut, the huge spreading tree species which once dominated the landscapes of Eastern North America but which was virtually exterminated in the first half of this century by an imported fungus. The plan is to make a synthetic virus to infect the fungus that causes chestnut blight, converting the fungus to a benign form that does not kill the tree. The approach also could be applied to combating Dutch elm disease and fungal diseases of humans, according to Gil Choi and Donald Nuss of the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology in Nutley, N.J., who describe the plan in the journal Science. Bioengineered chrysanthemum AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- A Dutch firm plans to market Europe's first genetically engineered plant -- a chrysanthemum with transplanted genes that has turned it from pink to white. The variety named Floriant, developed for use in the vast Dutch glasshouse industry, could go on sale later this year. But environmentalists are trying to block it. They fear that genes from this and other more radically altered man-made plant varieties could spread into the environment, with unknown consequences.<
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