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Monday, October 9, 2006

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Total Clips: 8

	Date	Outlet
Hidden treasure of Alabama's Black Belt	10/09/2006	Huntsville Times
If ivory-billeds survived, why were they said to be extinct?	10/09/2006	Huntsville Times
AU architects get to practice in park	10/09/2006	Huntsville Times
Irradiation cuts food safety risks	10/09/2006	Birmingham News
Book selection now part of promotion at AU	10/09/2006	Opelika-Auburn News
Rants and Raves: Cahaba bill well warrented	10/09/2006	Montgomery Advertiser
A blueprint for energy efficiency	10/09/2006	Birmingham News
Auburn professor's high-powered microscope shows all	10/08/2006	Montgomery Advertiser


Hidden treasure of Alabama's Black Belt 10/09/2006 Huntsville Times Ryan Hickman		Return to Top
This story features the work of AU's Rural Studio. Perry Lakes Park structure offers visitors close-up view of some of its 206 species MARION - A five-minute drive from Kalico Kitchen's stone parking lot in Marion out to Alabama 175 - a stitch of road between Highways 5 and 14 in Perry County - sits a weathered wooden sign. Approaching it too quickly or paying more attention to the nearby fish hatchery might make the road into Perry Lakes Park an afterthought. And blowing past the park's location would mean missing one of the prizes of Alabama's Black Belt. The 170-acre hidden treasure is not only one of the state's sanctuaries of mature hardwood trees but has become a prime destination for bird watchers since a 100-foot canopy tower was erected and opened to the public in April. The tower, built by four Auburn University architectural students from the school's Rural Studio program - including Huntsville native and Grissom High School graduate Paul Howard - provides a rich view of the one of the poorest counties in the country. The structure reaches above the forest's canopy and with its 100-foot apex is the largest elevated bird watching structure of its kind in the country. According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey in 2001, 46 million Americans were considered bird watchers, including 18 percent of residents in Alabama. The sport is consistently cited as one of the fastest-growing recreation activities in the country. Not only has the tower, highlighted as one of the Top 100 attractions by the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel, intrigued regional birding groups like the Audubon Society of Birmingham, but the rich array of species and varying heights to observe them has lured international birders to Perry Lakes Park. "There are people coming from all over the world - Britain, Germany, Argentina - because of this birding tower," said Dr. Thomas Wilson, Judson College biologist, environmental activist and general overseer of the park. Rare birds With nine platforms plateauing up to the top of the Perry Lakes Park Canopy Tower, bird watchers are offered views at the differing strata of the forest filled with oaks, slippery elms and swamp tupelos. Because the biodiversity of a forest is based vertically, Wilson says, the opportunity to rise into the canopy allows bird watchers an intimate view of wildlife unmatched from the forest's floor. Perry Lakes Park claims 206 birds on its list of species, including the prothonotary warbler, the signature bird of Perry Lakes Park. The park boasts a number of rare warblers in addition the prothonotary - the worm-eating warbler, Swainson's warbler, Kentucky warbler and Louisiana waterthrush. "Every neo-tropical species that's supposed to be here is here," Wilson said. Another allure for bird watchers at Perry Lakes is a bald eagle's nest on the edge of the Marion Hatchery woods, perched in a tree not far from the road entering the park. Although the modest park is owned by the state and leased out to the county, there is no operating budget. Wilson and his Judson College Earth Team, which includes 20-year-old Buckhorn High School graduate Angi Gullard, undertake all of the maintenance of the park.
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If ivory-billeds survived, why were they said to be extinct? 10/09/2006 Huntsville Times John Ehinger, Birdwatching column		Return to Top
Just when enthusiasm was fading over the 2004 sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker in eastern Arkansas, hope has surged again with a report that the once-thought-extinct bird has been seen in the Florida Panhandle. The sightings, along the Choctawhatchee River north-northwest of Panama City, were reported by ornithologist Geoff Hill of Auburn University and a team of researchers in the journal Avian Conservation and Ecology. The evidence is substantial: numerous sightings, sound recordings of both the "double rap" and the kent call. The recorded sounds number in the hundreds. In addition, the team found apparent nest holes and peeled bark strongly suggestive of ivory-billed activity. Persuasive photographs? Not yet. For more information, you can read the entire article at www.ace-eco.org. If you're really interested, you can apply for a job as a field technician, as efforts are being mounted to produce an unambiguous photograph and other evidence. Information can be obtained from team member brianrolek@gmail.com. The Florida report has been followed by sightings from other areas, one of the most promising of which has come from the Pearl River in Louisiana. Meanwhile, searches are under way (or planned) in South Carolina, Texas and other states. It seems a good bet that some ivory-billeds have survived. It remains to be seen how many. So why were they missed all these years? Maybe they weren't. Since the 1940s, a number of people of various skill levels have reported seeing the birds, and even some photographs have been offered. Until 2004, none of the reports was considered credible. While mistaken identification no doubt accounted for most of the reports, it probably didn't account for all of them. I have to wonder: Were all the sightings dismissed because the bird was considered extinct? And was it considered extinct because there had been no "credible" sightings? Did the scientific community unwittingly create a Catch-22 situation? If so, I hope they - and we - learn from this. Netting migrants In May 2005, I wrote about John Carpenter, a graduate student at Alabama A&M University, and others who were studying the threatened cerulean warbler in North Alabama. Last Sunday, I talked with Carpenter and two other A&M graduate students, Zach Felix and Jill Wick, at Monte Sano State Park. They had put out mist nets early that morning to see what neotropical migrants might be in the woods. It was slow going. After a couple of hours, they had snared only one wood thrush even though they had deployed seven nets. The effort was undertaken in part to find out if the area was worth further study each fall. Carpenter, whose cerulean warbler research continues, said another graduate student, Lisa Gardner, was using mist nets in the Walls of Jericho and had recorded and banded some 90 birds. The mist nets resemble badminton nets. They are 20 to 40 feet long and suspended a few feet off the ground between aluminum poles. The netting is black nylon, which, against the forest background, is all but invisible to both birds and people. Once a bird is caught in the net, it's identified, weighed and sexed, and fitted with a tiny band on one leg. Then it is released. If the band is recovered, the information is conveyed to the Bird Banding Laboratory of the U.S. Geological Society for comparison with the information from the original banding. You don't have to be a scientist to be bird bander, but you have to know the birds and obtain a license, as well as agree to abide by some strict rules. Bird-banding in the United States is more than a century old. Over the years, it has yielded valuable data about birds' life spans, flight speeds, populations, and migration routes and dates. I don't think extensive banding of songbirds has occurred in this region of North Alabama for some years, but if it is re-established, it would be a valuable contribution to what we know about the birds that pass through in the spring and fall. John Ehinger's Birdwatching column appears monthly on the Outdoors page. E-mail: john.ehinger@htimes.com
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AU architects get to practice in park 10/09/2006 Huntsville Times Ryan Hickman		Return to Top
The Perry Lakes Canopy Tower is the fourth architectural structure in a string of projects in Perry Lakes Park by Auburn University's Rural Studio architecture program. Rural Studio, started in 1992 by activist architect Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee and Auburn professor D.K. Ruth, immerses architectural students in projects throughout the Black Belt region of the state's southwest. Not only do students get a practical application of what they learn in the classroom, but they also follow Mockbee's notion that architects should take the lead in promoting social and environmental change. The Park Pavilion was Rural Studio's first Perry Lakes project in 2002. The park reopened that year after closing in the 1970s because of thefts from the nearby Marion Fish Hatchery. The public outdoor recreation area serves as a covered pavilion for picnics and special events and as outdoor classroom for Judson College. Clearly the most abstract architecture in the park came in 2003 with the Perry Lakes Park Facility. Three separate bathroom structures evoke emotions similar to public art - confusion, intrigue and trepidation about their ultimate goal. Just steps from the loose stone parking area, the "mound toilet," build atop a septic mound, has a metallic finish on its exterior. The wooden beams inside the funky outhouse angle downward to a natural air opening for a sight path from the steel chamber facing out into the woods. The "long toilet" has two wooden walls narrowing out from the altar to a single tree in the same angle as outstretched arms touching together at the fingertips. Four 50-foot wooden walls enclose the "tall toilet" for a upward perspective from the throne. An oversized door with a hefty metal pole to fasten it shut keeps the only view inside from the high-altitude opening to the trees. In responsible architectural fashion, all the conceptual comfort stations are wheelchair accessible. The following year, a foursome of Rural Studio students engineered the Perry Lakes Park Walking Bridge, a three-part cantilever bridge extending across a creek. The bridge has become a gateway to the new birding tower.
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Irradiation cuts food safety risks 10/09/2006 Birmingham News Jean Weese		Return to Top
The recent coast-to-coast outbreak of deadly E. coli that killed three people and sickened almost 200 others not only was tragic but also was unsettling for what it revealed about the state of U.S. food processing technology and distribution in the 21st century. Don't misunderstand. As a food scientist, I would be the first to acknowledge the colossal strides in food processing and safety within the past century - advances that likely would astonish even Upton Sinclair, whose gripping account of food processing more than a century ago inspired many of these advances. But like most scientific achievements - arguably all of them to one degree or another - these have come at a potentially heavy price. In the case of food processing, the burden for food safety has been shifted almost entirely away from the consumer and onto the backs of food processors. Convenience: The main benefit we consumers will derive from these innovations is convenience - more products that are precooked and packaged before they reach us. Increasingly, we'll have little else to do besides removing the wrappers from these products and gobbling them down immediately or enduring the mild inconvenience of microwaving so they can be consumed warm. Safe, convenient and cost- effective? Yes, without a doubt. But that may come at a potentially heavy price. These products may be infinitely safer in general terms, but they are also more vulnerable to the effects of human error during processing. To put it another way, even as the overall risks of food-borne illness decline, there will still be those rare instances when one mistake during processing could lead to the sickening of hundreds, if not thousands, of consumers - a rather unsettling fact that was driven home with horrifying reality following the spinach outbreak in September. Equally disturbing is that more than a century since the publication of Sinclair's "The Jungle," food processors, despite many notable achievements, still have not found a way to ensure that raw meat or poultry products or even cooked products are free of potentially deadly pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella. Even so, we do have what is arguably the next best thing - irradiation, one of the safest, most convenient food safety technologies, but one that is still egregiously underutilized and needlessly misunderstood. Studies have shown time and again that with some produce, it's simply too hard to kill bacteria with antiseptic sprays because the skin is too hard. Cantaloupe is a prime example. The rough, uneven skin of the cantaloupe provides a near ideal safe haven for bacteria. My own research at Auburn University has revealed that bacteria even can survive in strawberries that have been washed and dunked in solutions that contain 200 parts per billion of chlorine, considered one of the strongest of antiseptics. Irradiation, on the other hand, is a microorganism's worst nightmare, killing the pathogens all the way through the product, far beyond the surface. Ridding produce completely of harmful bacteria is a greater concern than ever before among retail food managers, especially in light of the fact that deadly E. coli can survive even within produce - all the way to the roots of the leaves. Irradiation is also sorely needed in an era when Americans increasingly are eating at a global table, choosing among foods that were imported from every corner of the world. A simple process: Irradiating products involves a very simple process. The products are taken into a room and exposed for a short time to gamma radiation to kill the microorganisms. What remains after treatment is a product that looks, tastes and feels the same way it did before it was treated but that is completely free of any potentially harmful bacteria. Interest in irradiation appears to be increasing. Several years ago, some researchers and I placed strawberries in grocery stores under visible signs indicating that they had been treated with irradiation. The knowledge did not stop consumers. An hour had not passed before every one of them was sold out - a strong indication that consumers will readily accept irradiation, if given the chance.
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Book selection now part of promotion at AU 10/09/2006 Opelika-Auburn News Amy Weaver		Return to Top
In his 20-year career, Dr. Carl Pinkert has been promoted a few times and received tenure twice, but no other university he's been at recognized the career achievements like Auburn University. This year marked the first time AU faculty who received promotion and/or tenure were asked to select a book that was "special" to them. Glenn Anderson, assistant dean for collection development of the AU Libraries, said he deliberately left the request open to interpretation to get a variety of answers and it worked. The staff at the Ralph B. Draughon Library received about 40 requests for everything from childhood favorites like "The Little Prince" and "The Little Engine That Could" to scholarly works and textbooks to two versions of the Holy Bible. Nearly 70 faculty members were promoted or received tenure this year. "It really shows the depth and diversity of the university," said Library Dean Bonnie MacEwan of the variety. MacEwan had been a part of a similar program at Penn State University, where she worked before coming to Auburn last year. "It was hands down my favorite activity at Penn State," she said. MacEwan called promotion and tenure significant events, but they generally go unnoticed at Auburn. Besides receiving a letter from the university, there is no formal campuswide recognition ceremony. That all changed when the Provost agreed with MacEwan’s idea. The library staff took the selected books - most of which they had and some they had to order - and added book plates to show how each is in honor of the achievement of the specific professor. Each book is then placed back in the stacks for public consumption. "The idea is there is something permanent," MacEwan said. A ceremony was also held to publicly recognize the faculty members and let others view the book collection. Each book was accompanied by an explanation from each faculty member. "They are researchers but also teachers," MacEwan said. "They shared a piece of themselves the same way they share a piece of themselves with their students." Dr. Scott Enebak, who is now a full professor of forest pathology in the School of Forestry, had no difficulty selecting "Advance of the Fungi" by E.C. Large. It taught him so much as an undergraduate forestry student about how fungi transformed history, like in Ireland with the potato famine, he changed his career plans to plant pathology. He never regretted the decision and even promotes the text to his students. Even if they only read a few chapters, he said it’s worth it. Pinkert, who came to AU only a couple months ago to be named the new associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Veterinary Medicine, opted to pick "Transgenic Animal Technology: A Laboratory Handbook," his own work. "That covered everything I was involved in for the past 20 years," he said. "I thought it was appropriate." Besides, by picking it, Pinkert assured that the main library now has a copy of it. Pinkert has never experienced a recognition event like Auburn's. He said he appreciated the opportunity to meet colleagues in other disciplines and see what they selected. "What a welcome!" he said. "The strong sense of family made it that much more special." Dr. Kristi Kelley, who was promoted to associate medical professor in the Harrison School of Pharmacy, struggled with her selection. She didn't want to use a pharmacy textbook and no pleasure books were special enough. Her decision was made for her though when "The Little Engine That Could" came up during a conversation with family members while she was on maternity leave. Not only is the story entertaining and inspiring but relatable, especially if you not only survived the challenges of pharmacy school but is also advancing in your career. "Being promoted was a big deal for me," Kelley said. "It was nice to recognized for that." The decision process was easy for Dr. David Han, who was promoted to assistant professor of agronomy and soils in the College of Agriculture and also received tenure, either but once he looked back at his childhood, there was an obvious choice. "There were so many books that influenced me," he said, but "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" was the first book he read for school that he remembered reading again for pleasure. Han was unable to attend the ceremony but is pleased the university has agreed to make it an annual event. He hopes to get a second chance when he is promoted to full professor.
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Rants and Raves: Cahaba bill well warrented 10/09/2006 Montgomery Advertiser Editorail Page		Return to Top
AU ornithologist Hill's search for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is mentioned in this roundup of "Rants and Raves. RAVE: For recently passed federal legislation that will over time expand the size of the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge to about 7,400 acres. The Cahaba is a genuine state and national treasure. It is home to dozens of rare and endangered species of animals and plants. Efforts to expand the refuge on an eight-mile stretch of the Cahaba in Bibb County are a sound investment in the preservation of ecological diversity and natural beauty. RANT: For the stubborn -- and dangerous -- reluctance of many men to frankly address male-specific health issues such as prostate disease. A recent symposium at Tuskegee University noted the dramatically higher incidence of prostate cancer among black men. It may not be the most appealing subject, guys, but it's important to be aware of this health concern. Not talking about it won't protect you, and could kill you. RAVE: For the admirable spirit of community displayed at a gathering last week at Birmingham-Southern College. Earlier this year, two BSC students and a former student were charged in connection with a series of fires that destroyed nine rural churches. The school established a fund to help the churches rebuild. A restoration celebration dinner was held last week that drew members of the burned churches and various contributors to the rebuilding fund, as well as BSC students and faculty. Good will is a powerful force. RANT: For the slow response to calls for donations to the National Slavery Museum under construction in Fredericksburg, Va. With large corporate donations so far not forthcoming, comedian Bill Cosby has launched a campaign calling on individual Americans to contribute $8 toward the completion of the museum. Former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder, the grandson of slaves, has been championing the museum as an acknowledgment of an important element in American history. Why $8? For one thing, it's affordable. Also, however, Wilder noted that the figure 8 resembles the shape of shackles when written vertically, but resembles a symbol of infinite freedom when written horizontally. RAVE: For the removal of the last shrimp boat hurled aground at Bayou La Batre by Hurricane Katrina last year. The last boat got back on the water recently, thanks to the support of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, the private-sector relief funding led by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. More than two dozen uninsured shrimp boats were flung inland by the storm at Bayou La Batre, the hub of Alabama's seafood industry. RANT: For the egregious spending by the Legal Services Corp., the agency that is supposed to provide legal assistance to poor people. An audit found incidences of $70 lunches at directors' meetings, costly rental of hotel space when the agency's headquarters had meeting space, first class and business class air travel in violation of travel policies and other expenditures that are especially offensive in an organization that is supposed to be looking out for the interests of the poor. RAVE: For the entirely fitting rejection by the state Department of Transportation of an extremely high bid for widening and resurfacing Interstate 65 through Montgomery. The work certainly needs doing, but the lone bid of $167.5 million was more than $100 million more than the department's estimate. Something is seriously amiss. It's hard to imagine that ALDOT's estimate could be that far off. RANT: For the naysayers who sneer at every claim that the fabled ivory-billed woodpecker may not be extinct, despite the efforts of a team led by an Auburn University ornithologist that has found many indications that the magnificent bird is living in the Choctawhatchee River basin in Florida. Photographic evidence is still lacking, but Geoff Hill and his team have made more than a dozen sightings and recorded hundreds of distinct sounds associated only with the bird. Hill is highly regarded in the ornithological community, so we're betting the photographic evidence will be forthcoming soon, even with all the obstacles to obtaining it. RAVE: For students at Montgomery's Taylor Road Academy, who are recycling in every classroom. The emphasis on recycling is commendable. Impressing the habit of recycling on youngsters bodes well for the future. Recycling isn't difficult; it just takes a certain mindset to do it.
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A blueprint for energy efficiency 10/09/2006 Birmingham News Mark Hall		Return to Top
How does a comparatively poor developing nation trump the United States and other wealthy Western countries? By creating a blueprint to attain energy efficiency and sticking to it through thick and thin. Using such a blueprint, Brazil embarked on a long, arduous path toward energy independence more three decades ago. After many fitful bumps and starts along the way, its determined quest for energy self-sufficiency finally has paid off. Brazil is now one of the world's leaders in renewable energy resources, with roughly 60 percent of its sugar production invested in ethanol. While renewable energy supplies only 6 percent of the national energy demand in the United States, ethanol alone accounts for 13.5 percent of Brazil's energy use. Ethanol fuels nearly half of Brazil's automobiles - a share that is increasing steadily, thanks to the advent of flex-fuel vehicles, which run on gasoline, ethanol or a mixture of both. That's not to say that the path to energy self-sufficiency hasn't been grueling and, at many points along the way, frustrating. Despite the government's relentless push toward energy efficiency, a huge spike in world demand for sugar in the 1980s led to a temporary lapse in ethanol production as Brazilian mills ramped up sugar production to meet this demand. As recently as 2002, ethanol-powered vehicles, a common sight in the 1980s, had dwindled to only 3 percent of the market. Now, producers are confident that if they can keep the cost of ethanol at less than 70 percent of the cost of gasoline, as many as 9 out of every 10 cars sold in Brazil will be flex-fuel. By 2010, Brazil hopes to produce twice the amount of ethanol it is producing now. There is a lesson here for Americans - simply trying to avoid the Sirens of cheap gas prices and staying the course won't be enough. All levels of government must continue to help us stay focused on the prize. President Bush's energy bill, which calls for 7.5 billion gallons of renewable energy each year, is a good start, but more is needed - particularly, more measures designed to protect the biofuels industry while it is still in its vulnerable infancy. Part of this should include steps to ensure that renewable energy prices remain high enough to attract investors - something only governments can provide at this point. Several states have taken another vital step by implementing measures that require diesel fuel to contain at least 2 percent biodiesel. This not only creates more market incentives for potential investments, but also it sends a clear message that the government is not going to pull the rug out from under innovators and investors at a critical state in the biofuel industry's development. Policymakers and Americans in general also should bear in mind that renewable fuels make up a very big and complicated picture. Indeed, current biofuels may only represent the first step toward energy independence and should be viewed as bridge technologies that will help us gain a measure of self-sufficiency until more lucrative technologies can be developed. Feedstocks, such as corn, may evolve into long-term energy sources, or they may turn out to be only short-term solutions until other more efficient technologies prevail. What are some of these potentially lucrative technologies? Many researchers are particularly excited about the use of algae, which can be bred and developed specifically for energy needs. But here are other exciting technologies on the horizon, notably biomass derived from the cellulosic material of trees, switchgrass and other crop residue. These second generation biofuels may be closer than we realize. For example, scientists recently announced that they had completed genome mapping of a poplar tree, black cottonwood or Populus trichocarpa, which offers huge potential as a biofuels source. The poplars, which grow 12 feet a year, mature in as little as four years and can reach as high as 100 feet. Scientists are hopeful that the knowledge they've gained through gene mapping will enable them to undertake dramatic improvements in plantation productivity associated with the tree, possibly even rivaling the strides made from the green revolution in agriculture. More recently, Honda Motor Co. announced that it has co-developed the world's first practical process for producing ethanol out of cellulosic biomass, representing a potentially huge stride toward using nonedible plant materials as fuel. The new process would allow large volumes of ethanol to be produced from widely available waste wood, leaves and other sources typically described as soft biomass. Meanwhile, Auburn University's David Bransby has emerged as a world leader in the adoption of switchgrass and other cellulosic materials as bioenergy alternatives. Indeed, Bransby believes it's not unreasonable to hope that, by 2025, as much as 35 percent of energy in the United States will be produced by farmers. Bransby, like so many other biofuel experts, still believes the critical ingredient for success will be government incentives - incentives that will put the nation's growing biofuels industry squarely on the path toward energy independence. Mark Hall is an Alabama Cooperative Extension System regional agent with statewide responsibility for educating farmers and other clientele about the merits of biofuels. E-page: hallmah@auburn.edu.
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Auburn professor's high-powered microscope shows all 10/08/2006 Montgomery Advertiser Bob Lowry		Return to Top
AUBURN -- The death of a cancer cell under the microscope was sudden, dramatic and conclusive. An experimental drug, marked by the tiniest of gold particles, was injected into a single cancerous cell from a rat. Immediately the gold bits swept the drug around the cell wall until it collapsed and died. This was one of the first images produced by an advanced high-resolution microscopic system invented by an Auburn University scientist and being marketed now by a private Auburn-based company. Vitaly Vodyanoy, a professor in the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology in Auburn's College of Veterinary Medicine, invented the device, patented as CytoViva. Vodyanoy, a native of Russia, began working on the device in 1992 to support his research on other projects. He said he designed and built the first model because no other microscope could meet his research needs for observing fine cellular detail of specimens in real time. "I needed the light to see it in real time," said Vodyanoy, who has a Ph.D. in biophysics from the Agrophysical Research Institute in Leningrad. "I couldn't find the technology I needed. All of a sudden, I came up with this idea. "I actually built a prototype 12 years ago to use in my laboratory for other research projects," he said. "There were no commercial microscopes available that could provide enough optical resolution." Vodyanoy surmised it would be too expensive to reinvent the microscope, so he developed a high-powered, high-resolution dark-field optical device that can be attached to any microscope. "It extends light microscopy, offering a unique view of live cells and cell processes while they are occurring," Vodyanoy said. Auburn sold the rights to manufacture the device to Aetos Technologies Inc., headed by chairman and CEO Thomas R. Lawrence. The university holds a 45 percent stake in Aetos Technologies, and Vodyanoy also shares in the sales. CytoViva is manufactured by Optics 1 Inc. in Manchester, N.H., and marketed, so far, to researchers in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first sale was to the American Society for Cell Biology. The state-of-the-art precision research instrument is capable of observing living biological or physical specimens in fine detail and in real time. The resolution obtainable with Vodyanoy's microscope is about four to five times higher than the resolution possible using the best available optical microscopes. Markets for the CytoViva include the medical fields, university research facilities, government, and commercial markets such as chemical, materials and pharmaceutical industries. The cost for the device can range from $10,000 to $50,000 depending on options such as high-end cameras. The instrument "enables the observation of living cells in extremely fine detail and in real time, a capability that is not available among the best optical equipment on the market today," Lawrence said. It allows scientists to view both fluorescent and nonfluorescent samples simultaneously. Another important advantage of the device is that samples viewed through the microscope need not be frozen, dehydrated, stained or manipulated in other ways. The instrument, which is adaptable to most major research and clinical microscopes currently on the market, including Nikon, Olympus, Leica and Zeiss, could have important implications for researchers, from looking for cures for diseases to building stronger materials. "The device allows a researcher to achieve a level of resolution far superior to the standard light microscopy," Lawrence said. "It helps the researcher recognize what he's looking at. But, more importantly, it allows him to track additives that he might put in the sample such as a new medicine going into the live sample. He can track it with the fluorescence and actually watch it work live." Lawrence isn't predicting any major scientific breakthroughs anytime soon with the CytoViva. "The way research works is it's a series of small victories over time. There's very rarely that gee whiz moment that changes the world," he said. "Basic research goes on in thousands of institutions across the world by thousands of investigators. I think our instrument is a tool in the ongoing search for knowledge. "We will help people hit singles. We will be a workhorse, not a breakthrough instrument." Charles Ludwig, president of Aetos Technologies' CytoViva division, said applications of the technology already have extended beyond traditional biological research to include nanotechnology and materials science-based researchers. The CytoViva division has sales representatives based in Auburn, Manchester, N.H., and Philadelphia. Byron Cheatham, director of sales, said the hottest area for sales of the CytoViva is in nanotechnology. "One of the things done at the basic research level is to see if nanoparticles can be used to deliver cancer drugs, for example, directly to tumor cells and not affect the healthy cells," he said. "Tumor cells are more porous and certain sized nanoparticles will penetrate those cells but not the healthy cells. "A significant amount of basic research is going on in that area. Our device is unique in that it allows the researcher to observe the nanoparticle and it allows them to observe them in real time with the live cell that they're trying to understand these reactions with." Aetos Technologies was cited in September by R&D Magazine for developing one of the top 100 most technologically significant products for 2006. Vodyanoy and representatives from Auburn University and Aetos Technologies will be honored by R&D Magazine on Oct. 16 in Chicago.
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