Sat, Dec 30, 2006
December 23, 2006 - January 1, 2007
OFFICES REOPEN TUESDAY, JAN. 2
Holiday Closedown in Effect
UNL is officially closed during the annual holiday shutdown period. Offices will reopen at 8 a.m. Jan. 2, 2007. However, many university buildings across campus will have special hours over the holiday break. Your best bet is to call ahead.
HOLIDAY SCHEDULE
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.
REACHES 1000 METERS
ANDRILL Project Breaks Antarctic Drilling Record
The Antarctic Geological Drilling (ANDRILL) Program drilled to a new record depth of 1,000 meters below the seafloor from the site on the Ross Ice Shelf near Scott Base in Antarctica Dec. 16. The depth made ANDRILL the most successful Antarctic drilling program in terms of depth and rock core recovered, breaking the previous record of 999.1 meters set in 2000 by the Ocean Drilling Program's drill ship, the Joides Resolution.
The operations team of 25 drillers, engineers and support staff are justifiably thrilled, ANDRILL Project Manager Jim Cowie said. Antarctica New Zealand, which managed the Cape Roberts Drilling Project, a highly successful predecessor to ANDRILL, is also managing the on-ice drilling operations and logistics on behalf of the ANDRILL partner nations -- Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States. more...
ANDRILL
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...
