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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (June 7, 2000)
Wednesday, Ju Page 2 Wednesday,Jm TECHN THE BATTALION Photograph collection shows artistic union of physics and aestheti Stuart Hutson The Battalion If the hand is faster than the eye, imagine taking a photograph of a speeding bullet. Capturing the previously unseen moments was the life's work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Harold "Doc" Edger- ton until his death in 1990. Edgerton, who invented the first electric flash bulb and strobe light, developed a method of photography which uses a strobe light to photograph events that take place in as little time as less than one-millionth of a second, such as a bullet piercing a balloon or a hum mingbird flapping its wings. A collection of Edgerton's work can cur rently be seen in Texas A&M's J. Wayne Stark University Center Galleries. The method isolates an object or event in a pitch dark room and then exposes a camera's film and the object or event to a single or series of flashes. This produces images that previ ously had been unphotographable by cameras which had a maximum shutter speed of one - thousandth of a second. "A lot of what he showed was very coun- terintuative," said Catherine A. Hastedt, cura tor of the gallery. "Most people don't expect to see the side of an appie that a bullet enters ex plode just like the side it leaves. Most people would expect it to implode." Originally using the method to analyze the movement of engine parts, Edgerton set the frequency of a strobe light's flashes to corre spond to a position that should be occupied by an engine's part (such as a fan or piston) at each flash time. If the part moved at an irreg ular speed, the irregularity would be seen as a blur on the film. "He was really the first person to take this technology and photograph events that people had only been able to guess about before," Hastedt said. "This information was used as a boost to the efficiency of the machines." Edgerton then went on to use the method to capture the motion and use of sports equip ment by athletes. By capturing "phases" of motion and pictures of the exact time of im pact, he was able to analyze how the equip ment and athlete worked together for a max imum effect. "He ended up taking some pictures of some of the most popular athletes of the '30s and '40s," Hastedt said. "But it was a trick taking a photograph of the athlete and object at the same time while they were both in the dark. He came up with some pretty ingenious things like tying wires to a football to trigger the flash at just the right time." Capturing the motion of animals was also an interest for Edgerton. Using the strobe light, he studied the aerodynamic properties of the wings of owls in flight and, for the first time, caught a picture of the "helicopter type" action of a hummingbird's wing. "These pictures often won him a feature in National Geographic," Hastedt said. "He actu ally showed sides of nature that you would never think would happen — like a cat's tongue curling down instead of up when it is lapping milk." During World War II, Edgerton was em ployed by the U.S. government to phot the individual stages of a nuclear bo: ploding — from the initial mushroomd the impact of the shock wave afterward "Edgerton actually started a bus: w hich the only thing he did was short nuclear bomb exploded," Hastedt sai; pictures resemble cartoons, buthedidiis that he was employed until theU.S.s; treaty that banned all above-groundte Hastedt said that visitors to theexhi: appreciate both the physics andaestk sociated with Edgerton's photographs! him, the pictures were always beaut: their ability to bring understanding. "If they want to call it art, they car, art," Edgerton once said. "But tome, about electricity." Reactor research benefits mankind Stuart Hutson The Battalion Most people depend upon the stable qualities of matter to do their daily work such as build houses, do homework and drive cars. But, at Texas A&M's own Nuclear Science Center, physicists are discovering ways to use the unstable nature of matter to benefit all of mankind. Boasting a nuclear fission reactor that can generate a megawatt of electrical power, the facility has generated ad vancements that range from methods for analyzing centuries old relics to injectable radioactive isotopes used to treat forms of cancer. "Using the core (of the reactor), we can generate technol ogy that you wouldn't believe," said Dan Reece, director of A&M's Nuclear Science Center. The nucleus of an atom consists of positively charged pro tons and chargeless neutrons. Normally, two protons repel one another just as two positive magnet ends would. How ever, when two protons get close enough, a mysterious force deemed by scientists as the "strong force" overpowers the repulsion and causes the two particles to attract one another. During nuclear fission, an extra neutron is added to an already large nucleus (in this case. Uranium 235), causing the nucleus to become so large that the protons on two op posite sides of it are no longer under the attraction caused by the strong force because they moved too far apart. The protons pull away from each other, causing the nu cleus to break into two new nuclei, three neutrons and ener gy in the form of heat. Then the emitted neutrons may interact with another un stable nucleus, resulting in another fission, or they may be absorbed by a stable nucleus during a process called irradi ation causing the atom to become an isotope with different properties. One of the most widespread uses of the irradiated mate rial generated by the reactor is the generation of dialysis membranes for medical use. To produce a dialysis membrane, a thin sheet of plastic is irradiated, giving the atoms in the sheet the ability to be arranged in such a way as to support the insertion of mi croscopic holes which allow dialysis — or the filtering of certain items from a liquid. Dialysis often replaces the functions of a kidney by separating waste products from a person's blood. "I would say that approximately one-third of the world's material for dialysis membranes are produced here," Reece said. The center is also using radioactive material to examine archeological artifacts. Recently, the remnants of a ship used during La Salle's 1600's exploration of much of the western United States were analyzed at the center using a technique that coated the rem nants with an irradiated plastic, preserving them long enough for analysis. "This boat had been sitting under water long enough that as soon as it was pulled up, it would have just crumbled to dust otherwise," Reece said. The reactor has a system of tubes similar to those found at drive-through teller stations at banks which allows mate rials to be placed into a container, taken to the center of the reactor core for irradiation and then delivered back to a lab for analysis. Reece said the system of tubes is often used to analyze materials for very small amounts of a particular substance. *s? 0 * o .Jry ✓ ' ^ T7T \ v a vis" Q Steps of fusion: 1) a neutron joins a large nucleus; 2) the added neutron causes protons to repel each oth er; 3) the nucleus splits, leaving two nuclei, three neutrons and energy; 4) the resultant neutrons are absorbed into another nucleus. Irradiating certain substances makes them highly de tectable because they react more noticeably during analysis techniques. "Someone in Houston killed their next door neighbors by poisoning them with arsenic," he said. "Fortunately, ar senic is deposited by the body after death in your nails and hair. So, someone in the chemistry department used (the tubes) to send a sample of hair and nails through the core, which made the arsenic detectable to one part per trillion. So, they were able to show conclusively how the guy killed the neighbors." Vims lab appro Maureen Kane The Battalion The design for a state of the art laboratoiytol at the University of Texas Medical BranchatGf (UTMB) was approved Thursday by theUniffl Texas System Board of Regents. Construction on the 12,000-foot, $7. : Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) laboratory is expeo gin in the spring of 2001. According to the Center for Disease Cot Prevention (CDC), BSL4 is the classificationtc: ing viruses that are highly virulent, often deaf for which there are no licensed drugs. Thislf quires the highest safety control. The lab will be the first on a university camp one of only two BSL4 labs in the state of Texas The lab area will occupy 2,000 square feet maining area will contain high-tech equipmem stroy any microbes before they can escape Dr. C.J. Peters, a virologist for CDC in direct the research at the facility. Peters is thed CDC's Special Pathogens Branch and hasstufl outbreaks in South America and Africa, headed that contained the Ebola virus outbreak in Rest and has directed viral research in federal labor: Alana Mikkelsen, a UTMB spokesperso: UTMB is the best location for the lab. "We have a world-class center for tropical^ There are lots of researchers studying Hepatitisi 1 tavirus, and other diseases that occur or are re' ing," Mikkelsen said. * If* fi© fiexets aSetftt ecnd. 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