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Volume 6, Issue 41
Jan 12, 2007
Circulation: 18,120
Editor: Beth Keithly

Friday FYI

Newsletter from the The Office of Global Strategies and International Relations - U. T. Dallas

University News

Gene D. Block Named New UCLA Chancellor

Acting on the recommendation of University of California President Robert C. Dynes, the UC Board of Regents appointed accomplished biologist and University of Virginia provost Gene D. Block as chancellor of the UCLA campus on December 21.

The appointment was made during a special meeting of the regents and Block will take office on or before August 1, 2007.

Block was selected following a nationwide search that produced a pool of approximately 100 candidates. In making his recommendation to the board, Dynes was advised by a committee comprised of regents, faculty, students, staff and alumni.

Since 1978, Block has served in an impressive progression of roles at the University of Virginia, including vice president and provost for the past five years, vice president for research and public service, vice provost for research, founding director of the university's National Science Foundation Center for Biological Timing, and director of the Biodynamics Institute. As provost, his priorities have included:

Norman Abrams, a professor emeritus of law at UCLA, has been serving as acting chancellor since Albert Carnesale, UCLA's chancellor since July 1, 1997, retired in June. Dynes thanked Abrams for serving as acting chancellor until Block takes office.

Block's major research interests are cellular physiology of biological clocks, and chronobiological aspects of aging. He has published extensively on matters concerning sleep-related biological research, and his inventions include a non-contact respiratory monitor for the prevention of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and a speaking aid for movement restricted patients.

He has been recognized by numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation Pioneer Award and the Commonwealth of Virginia Outstanding Public Service Award. His current board service includes the National Institute of Aerospace board of directors, the Specialized Neuroscience Research Program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, the Institute for Shipboard Education (Semester at Sea), the University of Virginia Patent Foundation, Spinner Technologies, Inc., and the Carilion Biomedical Institute. His memberships in scientific societies include the Society for Neuroscience, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. In addition to research support from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Block directs an NIH graduate training program aimed at increasing the pipeline of scientists from underrepresented groups.

As UCLA chancellor, Block will oversee an institution internationally known forthe breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. UCLA enrolls approximately 38,000 students and features a renowned faculty.

Block will receive an annual salary of $416,000, which represents an increase over former chancellor Carnesale's salary of $323,600, along with the following additional items:

In recognition that Dr. Block will be forfeiting one year of paid sabbatical leave earned at the University of Virginia, he will receive a credit of six months of paid administrative leave, to be taken immediately following at least five years of service as chancellor and to be paid at the chancellor's rate of pay in accordance with UC policy, assuming good standing with the university.

Block holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, and a master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon.

[ FYI Index ]

Gov. Schwarzenegger Proposes $95 Million for Research, Innovation, Green Technology

Governor Schwarzenegger announced that he will propose nearly $95 million in the state budget to create the Governor's Research and Innovation Initiative. This initiative provides funding for major projects that will grow California's economic strength in key innovation sectors, including cleantech, biotech and nanotech. The proposal also reaffirms California's position as a world leader in advanced research and innovation that creates jobs while preserving the environment.

As a part of his proposed budget that will be unveiled in January, the major components of the Governor's Research and Innovation Initiative include:

  1. Helios Project

    The Governor's budget provides $30 million in lease revenue bonds for the Helios Project, a groundbreaking initiative by the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to create sustainable, carbon-neutral sources of energy. The Helios Project will produce the next generation of super-efficient solar energy technology that will help reduce greenhouse gases and our oil dependency. The Helios Project's four goals are 1) generate clean sustainable alternatives to hydrocarbon fuels; 2) develop new energy sources; 3) improve energy conservation; and 4) reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The $30 million will be used to build a new energy/nanotechnology research building for the Helios Project.

  2. Energy Biosciences Institute
    The Governor's budget provides $40 million in lease revenue bonds to the University of California for UC Berkeley or UC San Diego in the event that either wins a global competition for the British Petroleum (BP) Energy Biosciences Institute grant. These campuses were among only five universities in the world that were invited to compete for this $500 million grant to build and operate an Energy Biosciences Institute, which will be dedicated to long-term research into the production of alternative fuels. The Institute will focus on converting biomass materials into fuels, converting fossil fuels to energy with less environmental damage and maximizing oil extraction from existing wells in environmentally sensitive ways. To accelerate California's movement towards a clean fuel future, the University of California will dovetail the Institute's work with the Helios Project.

  3. California Centers for Science and Innovation
    The Governor's budget provides $19.8 million (General Fund) for the California Institutes for Science and Innovation (CISI). CISI is a multidisciplinary research effort by the University of California-working in partnership with private companies-in the areas of information technology, biomedical research and nanotechnology. With their express goal of sustaining California's global growth and competitiveness, these pioneering institutes bring the world's finest researchers together to find solutions to our greatest medical and technological challenges and position California at the forefront of research, innovation and jobs. Since inception, they have generated more than $1 billion from private and federal sources, dwarfing the state's $400 million initial investment. Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president-elect of the National Academy of Engineering said the San Diego Center "has collected the best team of research professionals anywhere in the country." The $19.8 million will be used for the institutes' operating costs.

  4. Petascale Supercomputer
    The University of California leads the world in high-speed computer technology and is poised to debut the next generation of supercomputers. The Governor's budget provides the first $5 million increment in state matching funds to enhance the University of California's bid to build a $200 million Petascale computer. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC San Diego are in the running for the Petascale computer. The Petascale computer, named for the speed at which it can process information, will be the most powerful computer in the world. It will provide an enormous competitive advantage to California businesses and universities, helping to attract the best students and faculty from around the world. The Governor's commitment of these funds will significantly enhance the University of California's bid for this groundbreaking project.

[ FYI Index ]

Developer of World Wide Web, Father of Biomechanics, and Exceptional Educators Win Highest Engineering Honors of 2007

The engineering profession's highest honors for 2007, presented by the National Academies' National Academy of Engineering (NAE), recognize three achievements that have revolutionized how people use information, opened new frontiers of medical research, and guided promising engineers into leadership roles.

Timothy J. Berners-Lee will receive the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize -- a $500,000 annual award that honors engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society -- "for developing the World Wide Web."

Yuan-Cheng "Bert" Fung will receive the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize -- a $500,000 biennial award recognizing engineering achievement that significantly improves the human condition -- "for the characterization and modeling of human tissue mechanics and function leading to prevention and mitigation of trauma."

Harold S. Goldberg, Jerome E. Levy, and Arthur W. Winston will share the Bernard M. Gordon Prize -- a $500,000 award issued annually that recognizes innovation in engineering and technology education -- "for the development of a multidisciplinary graduate program for engineering professionals who have the potential and the desire to be engineering leaders."

The prizes will be presented at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20.

The Charles Stark Draper Prize

Timothy J. Berners-Lee imaginatively combined ideas to create the World Wide Web, an extraordinary innovation that is rapidly transforming the way people store, access, and share information around the globe. Despite its short existence, the Web has contributed greatly to intellectual development and plays an important role in health care, environmental protection, commerce, banking, education, crime prevention, and the global dissemination of information.

Berners-Lee demonstrated a high level of technical imagination in inventing this system to organize and display information on the Internet. He devised a number of innovations:

Berners-Lee demonstrated brilliant vision by choosing to make the Web with public domain software that is scalable, so that it can always perform efficiently. Furthermore, the Web's open architecture permits other inventions to build on its unpredictable and limitless potential uses as needs arise.

Berners-Lee proposed his concept for the Web in 1989 while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He launched it on the Internet in 1991 and continued to refine its design through 1993. He persevered over widespread skepticism during these years.

Berners-Lee is now a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a professor of computer science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. In addition, Berners-Lee continues to guide the evolution of the Web as founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an open, international forum that develops standards for the Web.

The Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize

Yuan-Cheng "Bert" Fung is known as the "father of modern biomechanics" for pioneering the application of quantitative and analytical engineering principles to the study of the human body and disease. His accomplishments and insights have directly contributed to designs, inventions, and applications that save lives, mitigate the severity of soft tissue injury, enhance the recovery and functionality of injured soft tissue, and improve the effectiveness and longevity of prosthetic orthopedic devices.

Fung, a professor emeritus of bioengineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), became interested in the mechanics of the human body after spending 20 years making significant contributions in aeronautics. In the early 1960s, while still a professor at the California Institute of Technology, he began applying his understanding of stress and strain to the study of blood vessels and cells. In 1966, Fung joined UCSD to establish one of the first bioengineering programs in the country and to fully devote himself to studying the mechanical aspects of the body.

Fung's theories on the mechanical properties and functions of blood cells and capillary blood vessels have led our understanding of microcirculation, endothelial biology, and atherosclerosis. His "sheet-flow" theory provided a quantitative description of pulmonary circulation, hypertension, edema, and respiratory distress syndrome. Problems related to severe thorax impact injuries have been solved by Fung's "stress wave propagation" theory. Morphometric data worked out by Fung on coronary blood vessels, pulmonary vascular tree, and intestines have proved invaluable for theoretical analyses. His quantitative methods for characterizing stress-strain behavior of human tissue -- now known as quantitative biomechanics -- have led to fundamental advances in understanding how tissues interact with dynamic environments.

Dramatic vehicle safety enhancements of recent years are directly attributable to Fung's concepts of soft tissue response to impact, its rate of stress-strain relaxation, and its response to pressure change. He explained his insights and models in numerous papers and in the classic, enduring reference, Biomechanics: Mechanical Properties of Living Tissue (Springer Verlag, 1981), which is credited with improving vehicle design and crash safety. Fung's research has also been used to develop products that protect against explosive compressions, such as personal body armor for military forces and emergency responders.

More recently, Fung directly contributed to tissue engineering through the development of engineered products for treating burns and severe tissue injuries and the development of engineered blood vessels. Furthermore, the application of his theories of biomechanics to orthopedic devices has significantly improved the functional management of soft tissue injuries such as ankle sprains. New research and applications built on Fung's theories will continue for many years to come.

The Bernard M. Gordon Prize

The masters of science program in engineering management at the Gordon Institute of Tufts University is specifically designed to produce engineering leaders. This unique program for practicing engineers with industrial experience emphasizes project management skills, product innovation and development, communication, and team leadership. In addition, the program includes courses on relevant advanced technical topics and the human factors that influence relationships with colleagues, employees, and business management personnel.

The Tufts engineering management program combines interdisciplinary, modular classes and experience-based learning. Students move in teams through the curriculum modules, consistent with the dynamics of an industrial environment and providing first-hand understanding of each others’ capabilities, limitations, knowledge, and skills. The program heavily emphasizes practical, real-world projects. All students complete individual projects at their workplace, such as the design and manufacture of high-fidelity audio speakers or the development of a gas turbine engine. Teams of students must also complete a consulting project known as the practicum. Practicums have been held with pharmaceutical, biotech, industrial, and consumer electronic companies, among others.

Conceived and funded by Bernard M. Gordon, the Gordon Institute was established with the efforts of Harold S. Goldberg, Jerome E. Levy, and Arthur W. Winston. Its first class graduated in 1987. Goldberg shepherded the concept through the evaluation and acceptance phases and obtained a charter. Goldberg and Levy led the development of the curriculum and recruited faculty; Goldberg was instrumental in the development of engineering project methodology courses. Winston, current director of the Gordon Institute, worked with Goldberg and Levy to define the mission, curriculum, and policies of the school, and to prepare it for accreditation. He was also responsible for developing and teaching advanced technological methodology for product development.

Winston led the transition to joining with Tufts University in 1992 and the program's concurrent transformation from a one-year, full-time program to a two-year program with Friday and Saturday classes. This change made the program more attractive to working engineering professionals and to organizations that might sponsor students. Since 1992, enrollment has increased sixfold, and most of its students are attaining their goals in engineering management.

[ FYI Index ]

University of Chicago Names Donald Levy Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories

Donald Levy, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, has been appointed the University’s Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories, President Robert Zimmer announced. The appointment was effective Jan. 1.

As Vice President, Levy will work closely with President Zimmer, Provost Thomas Rosenbaum, Deans and the Directors of Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to advance research at the University and the laboratories.

As Vice President, Levy will play an important role in representing the University and projecting its research accomplishments. He will have responsibility for promoting research activity and related matters of university-wide policy, while supporting Deans with their sponsored research efforts. He also will oversee the Office of Technology and Intellectual Policy (UChicagoTech) and the Office for Partnerships and Technology.

Levy joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1967. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a former Chairman of the Chemistry Department, and he played an important leadership role in planning the new Gordon Center for Integrative Science. A physical chemist, Levy was a leader in developing and using supersonic jet cooling to study the structure of molecules.

Levy is editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics. His awards include the E. Bright Wilson Award in Spectroscopy and the Ellis Lippincott Award from the Optical Society of America. He received his B.A. from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

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UCLA’s J. Fraser Stoddart Adds Knight Bachelor to His List of Honors

UCLA professor J. Fraser Stoddart, director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences, has been named Knight Bachelor for services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.

In addition to personalities from popular culture, such as Paul McCartney and Sean Connery, who have been honored with the title of knight bachelor, Stoddart joins a formidable list of eminent scientists that includes Alexander Fleming, Alexander Todd and Harold Kroto, respectively the discoverers of penicillin, the building blocks of DNA and the C60 molecule.

Stoddart is ranked by Thomson Scientific as the third most-cited researcher in chemistry for the period from January 1996 to August 2006. He has published more than 770 communications, papers and reviews, and has delivered more than 700 invited lectures around the world.

He is one of the few chemists to have created a new field of chemistry over the past quarter century by introducing an additional bond — the mechanical bond — into chemical compounds. Stoddart pioneered the use of molecular recognition and self-assembly to create mechanically interlocked compounds called catenanes (which consist of two or more interlocked rings, as in the links of a chain) and rotaxanes (dumbbell-shaped components with at least one ring threaded in a manner reminiscent of an abacus).

Although in the first generation of these exotic molecular compounds, the components, which move relatively between two states, were indistinguishable, in the second generation, bistability was introduced, resulting in the making of the world's tiniest on/off switches, measuring roughly 1 cubic nanometer in volume. Since then, these molecular switches have been incorporated at high densities into molecular random access memory (RAM) circuits.

The scope of Stoddart's research has broadened over the years — under the umbrella of activities he calls "molecular Meccano" (a reference to the children's model-construction kit) — as a result of introducing the two-state molecular switches into devices where actuation becomes the key to their operation. He has, for example, designed and constructed nanovalves that consist of moving parts in the form of numerous switchable rotaxane molecules attached to a tiny sphere of porous glass roughly 500 nanometers in diameter. The channels in the porous glass are long, but they are only a few nanometers in diameter, just big enough to allow small molecules to enter. These nanovalves, which are much smaller than living cells, are capable of crossing cell membranes and are now being adapted for use as highly targeted drug-delivery systems for cancer cells, as well as for harvesting the contents of such cells, after the fashion of a lunar-landing vehicle collecting samples of dust from the surface of the moon.

Stoddart's former graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, inspired by his imagination and creativity, now occupy senior positions in universities, government laboratories and industries throughout North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Australia.

Stoddart came to UCLA in 1997 from England's University of Birmingham, where he had been a professor of organic chemistry since 1990 and had headed the university's School of Chemistry since 1993. In 2005, he received an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Birmingham, and he received the same honor from the University of Twente in the Netherlands in December 2006.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1942, Stoddart received his bachelor of science (1964) and Ph.D. (1966) degrees from the University of Edinburgh, where he worked with British chemist Sir Edmund Hirst. In 1967, he moved to Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, where he was a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow and then, in 1970, to England's University of Sheffield, where he was first an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) research fellow and then a faculty lecturer (assistant professor) in chemistry. He was a Science Research Council senior visiting fellow at UCLA in 1978. After spending a three-year "secondment" (1978–81) at the ICI corporate laboratory in Runcorn, England, he returned full-time to the University of Sheffield, where he was promoted to a readership (associate professorship). He moved to the University of Birmingham in 1990.

Stoddart was awarded a doctorate of science by the University of Edinburgh in 1980 for his research into chemistry beyond the molecule. He was also the recipient of the University of Edinburgh's Alumnus of the Year award in 2005, presented annually to a former student for exceptional achievement in arts, science, business, public service or academic life. Previous winners include British politician Lord Steel of Aikwood, novelist Ian Rankin and two-time Olympic medalist Katherine Grainger.

Stoddart is a fellow of the Royal Society (1994), the German Academy of Natural Sciences (1999), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005) and the Science Division of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006). He serves on the international advisory boards of numerous journals, including the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Angewandte Chemie, and Chemistry, A European Journal.

[ FYI Index ]

NSF Provides $14 Million to Advance Research in Comparative Genomics of Economically Important Plants

Scientists will find improved ways of studying the structure, function and evolution of the genomes of economically important plants, thanks to $14 million in new awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Resources to be developed include genomic sequences, genetic markers, maps and expressed sequence collections. These are much-needed tools for researchers working in areas as diverse as genome evolution and plant breeding.

Awardees will address scientific questions including the role of polyploidy in genome evolution, the genomic basis of speciation, and the relationships between cultivated plants and their weedy relatives.

Many crop plants have large, complex genomes that in some cases are "polyploid" - containing multiple genomes. Polyploidy is widespread in plants and animals, and can lead to dramatic changes in gene content and genome organization that are only just beginning to be understood.

A project led by researchers at Iowa State University will develop sequence and map resources to study polyploidy in cotton, while researchers at the University of Missouri will look at the impact of polyploidy on plant form in Brassica species, which includes plants such as canola and Brussels sprouts. Other projects at the University of Georgia and the University of Arizona will develop sequence resources to study genome organization in wheat and rice.

The outcomes from these projects will allow researchers to understand how extra copies of genes function in these plants, and how genomes from different sources can work together in a single plant.

The ever-growing collection of genome sequences is shedding light on the variation between individuals within a species. For example, in a forest of trees or a field of corn, there may be many versions of a particular gene, each with minor sequence differences. These sequence differences can sometimes have dramatic effects on growth and development.

Projects based at the University of California at Davis and Cornell University will catalog variants in pine trees and in maize, respectively, to allow researchers to link genetic variation with changes in gene function. This information could have applications in plant breeding.

More than half of the world's most cultivated crops have relatives that are invasive weeds, competing with the crop for nutrients and water and leading to reduced yields.

One example is red rice, a weedy form of rice that reduces the yields of cultivated rice by as much as 80 percent and contaminating harvests with its small red-coated grains. A project led by researchers at Washington University St. Louis will examine the regions of the red rice genome associated with weediness to find out whether it originated from the domesticated crop or if it was introduced as a weed from Asia.

A related project led by investigators at Michigan State University will investigate differences in gene expression in weedy and cultivated radishes to uncover which genes are associated with invasiveness.The outcomes of these projects could lead to a great understanding of how plants become weedy and invasive, and yield possible avenues for better selective control of weeds, scientists believe.

[ FYI Index ]

State Gives Yale $7.8 Million for Stem Cell Research

Yale School of Medicine is receiving $7.8 million from the state of Connecticut under the first installment of grants from the Stem Cell Research Fund.

Between now and 2015, the state of Connecticut Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee has committed to allocate $100 million to encourage stem cell research in Connecticut.

Haifan Lin, director of Yale's stem cell program noted that the funding will allow Yale to build a human embryonic stem cell core and a dedicated genomic core to serve stem cell researchers on campus and across the state.

The Yale proposals that were funded include nearly $4 million for an integrated study of neural differentiation of human embryonic stem cells. A team of four investigators will oversee it: Michael Snyder, principal investigator and professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology; Lin, stem cell program director and professor of cell biology; Dr. Sherman Weissman, professor of genetics; and Weimin Zhong, associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.

They will also establish a state-of-the-art genomics and bioinformatics core as a part of the Yale stem cell program's core facilities to serve the researchers at Yale and in the state of Connecticut.

Lin is also the principal investigator on a $2.5 million grant to establish a human embryonic stem cell core facility in the Amistad Building, which will open next spring. This core facility, proposed with Dr. Diane Krause, associate director of the stem cell program and associate professor of laboratory medicine and pathology, will serve as a central repository to expand, validate, maintain and distribute both federally approved and independently developed human embryonic stem cell lines to scientists at Yale and throughout Connecticut. In addition, it will train researchers at Yale and statewide in the use of human embryonic stem cells for their research.

Krause also received an $860,000 grant to study the role of the leukemia gene MKL in developmental hematopoiesis using human embryonic stem cells. Her laboratory will study MKL in normal blood development and in the emergence of leukemia. A better understanding of how this leukemia emerges during fetal development will allow for the identification of new targets for anti-leukemia drugs.

Yingqun Joan Huang, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, is the principal investigator on a $200,000 grant to study the function of the Fragile X mental retardation protein in early human neural development. Fragile X syndrome is the leading heritable form of mental retardation and is associated with a variety of learning disorders and behavioral problems. The disorder is caused by the loss of the gene for fragile X mental retardation protein, FMRP.

Huang said his laboratory will study the molecular mechanism of the disease in early stage neurons derived from human embryonic stem cells. Erik Shapiro, assistant professor of diagnostic radiology, is principal investigator on a $200,000 grant to develop magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques for tracking stem cell migration. The procedures pioneered by Shapiro's laboratory permit the detection of single cells in living subjects.

Eleni Markakis, assistant professor of psychiatry, received a grant of $184,407 to study directed isolation of neuronal stem cells from human embryonic stem cell lines.

Markakis hopes to better characterize the cellular components of human embryonic stem cell cultures and simplify the isolation of neuronal stem cells in particular, making them easier to study.

[ FYI Index ]

Delegation from Israel’s Technion to Visit UT Dallas; Joint Nanotech, Life Sciences Symposium Planned

A high-level delegation from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s premier science and technology institute and one of the world’s leading universities, visited The University of Texas at Dallas Jan. 10-11 as part of an effort to establish research and educational ties between the two institutions.

During the visit, the universities conducted a joint public symposium on nanotechnology and the life sciences and will enter into an agreement to pursue common interests, which will include collaborative research projects and student and faculty exchanges.

The Technion visitors will include President Yitzhak Apeloig, Nobel laureate and Professor Aaron Ciechanover and Professor Uri Sivan, director of the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute.

The joint symposium, featuring presentations by experts in nanotechnology and the life sciences from both schools, was be held Jan. 11 from 1:30 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. in the UT Dallas Conference Center, Room 1.112.

Apeloig opened the symposium with a talk titled “Technion – The Powerhouse Behind Israel’s High-Tech Industry.” Others scheduled to make presentations include Ciechanover and Sivan from the Technion and Goodman and two UT Dallas colleagues -- Dr. Ray Baughman and Dr. Anvar Zakhidov of the UT Dallas NanoTech Institute.

Presenting sponsors of the visit by officials of the Technion include ALON USA of Dallas and its parent, ALON Israel, and EFW, Inc. of Fort Worth. Other sponsors include the Dallas office of Jones Day, the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce, the Jewish Federation of Dallas, the Metroplex Technology Business Council and STARTech Early Ventures.

The Technion, founded in 1924 in Haifa, enrolls approximately 12,500 students. Technion graduates comprise the majority of Israeli-educated scientists and engineers, constituting over 70 percent of the country’s founders and managers of high-tech industries. In addition to being a global leader in science and technology education and research, the Technion is home to a renowned medical school.

[ FYI Index ]

Astronomers Discover a Quasar Trio

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland announced Monday the discovery of the first known triplet of quasars. The discovery of the trio, about 10.5 billion light-years from Earth, is based in part on observations at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Quasars are extraordinary luminous objects in the distant universe, believed to be powered by supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies. A single quasar could be a thousand times brighter than an entire galaxy of a hundred billion stars, and yet this remarkable amount of energy originates from a volume smaller than our solar system. About a hundred thousand quasars have been found to date, and among them several tens of close pairs, but this is the first known case of a close triple quasar system.

"Quasars are extremely rare objects," says S. George Djorgovski, a professor of astronomy at Caltech and the leader of the team announcing the discovery at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "To find two of them so close together is very unlikely if they were randomly distributed in space. To find three is unprecedented."

The distant quasar LBQS 1429-008 was first discovered in 1989 by an international team of astronomers led by Paul Hewett of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. Hewett and his collaborators found a fainter companion to their quasar, and proposed that it was a case of gravitational lensing.

According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, if a large mass (such as a big galaxy or a cluster of galaxies) is placed along the line of sight to a distant quasar, the light path will split, and an observer on Earth will see two or more close images of the quasar.

The first such gravitational lens was discovered in 1979, and hundreds of cases are now known. However, several groups over the past several years cast doubts that this system is a gravitational lens, and proposed instead that it is a close physical pair of quasars.

What the Caltech-Swiss team has found is that there is a third, even fainter quasar image associated with the previously known two. The discovery was made using the W. M. Keck Observatory's 10-meter telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. These data were combined with measurements obtained at the European Southern Observatory's 8.2-meter Very Large Telescope, at Cerro Paranal, in Chile.

There is no trace of a possible lensing galaxy, which would be needed if the system was a gravitational lens. The team has also documented small, but significant differences in the properties of the three quasars. These are much easier to understand if the three quasars are physically distinct objects, rather than gravitational lensing mirages. Combining all these pieces of evidence effectively eliminated lensing as a possible explanation.

If galaxy interactions were responsible for the quasar activity, having two quasars close together would be much more likely than if they were randomly distributed in space. This may explain the unusual abundance of binary quasars, which have been reported by several groups. "In this case, we are lucky to catch a rare situation where quasars are ignited in three interacting galaxies," says Ashish Mahabal, one of the Caltech scientists involved in the study.

Discoveries of more such systems in the future may help astronomers understand better the fundamental relationship between the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the super-massive black holes in their cores, now believed to be common in most large galaxies, our own Milky Way included.

This work is described in a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The other authors are postdoctoral scholars Dominique Sluse of EPFL, Eilat Glikman of Caltech, and David Thompson of the University of Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope Observatory.
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