Mon, Dec 18, 2006
December 18, 2006
DEADLINE JAN. 5
MLK Day Planning Committee Sponsors Essay Contest
In recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, the MLK Day Planning Committee at UNL is sponsoring an essay contest. They invite UNL students to share their experiences and perspectives regarding the impact that the Civil Rights movement has had on them while growing up. The theme for the essay contest was inspired by the piece All Deliberate Speed, created as part of the Lincoln Arts Council "Stories of Home" project.
The deadline for the essay contest is January 5, 2007, and all currently enrolled UNL undergraduate or graduate students are eligible to participate. For more information on the contest, visit the MLK Week 2007 website.
ANOTHER BREAKTHROUGH
Self-Assembling Nano-Ice Discovered at UNL
Working at the frontier between chemistry and physics, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Xiao Cheng Zeng usually finds his reward in discovering the unexpected through computer modeling. Zeng and his colleagues regularly find new and often unanticipated behaviors of matter in extreme environments, and those discoveries have been published several times in major international scientific journals. Their findings, though, have been so far ahead of existing technology that their immediate practical impact was essentially nil -- until now.
Zeng and two members of his UNL team recently found double helixes of ice molecules that resemble the structure of DNA and self-assemble under high pressure inside carbon nanotubes. This discovery could have major implications for scientists in other fields who study the protein structures that cause diseases such as Alzheimer's and bovine spongiform ecephalitis (mad cow disease). It could also help guide those searching for ways to target or direct self-assembly in nanomaterials and predict the kind of ice future astronauts will find on Mars and moons in the solar system. more...
MARY RIEPMA ROSS MEDIA ARTS CENTER
Jesus Camp, Half Nelson Show at the Ross
UNL's Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center presents Jesus Camp and Half Nelson. Both films will be showing through December 21.
Jesus Camp, which is directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (The Boys of Baraka), follows Levi, Rachael, Tory and a number of other young children to Pastor Becky Fischer's Kids on Fire summer camp in Devil's Lake, North Dakota, where kids as young as 6 years-old are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God's army. The film follows these children at camp as they hone their prophetic gifts and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ. The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.
In Half Nelson, high school teacher Dan (Ryan Gosling) and quiet teenager Drey (Shareeka Epps) are two lonely souls who wander the planet looking to attach some semblance of meaning to their chaotic lives. Dan teaches Drey in a dilapidated school in Brooklyn, New York. Their relationship is unremarkable until Drey discovers Dan collapsed and clutching a crack pipe in a grimy toilet cubicle in the high school gym. It is from this pivotal moment that director Ryan Fleck builds a tentative friendship between these two unlikely allies, creating one of 2006's most arresting films in the process.
More information is available at the Ross website.
MRRMAC | JESUS CAMP | HALF NELSON
