Focus on Research
Penn State Intercom......February 13, 2003

Faculty broadcast research to the
nation's television and radio audiences

By Celena E. Kusch
Outreach Communications

From sustainable agriculture to heart transplant technology, faculty research provides solutions to society's most pressing problems. Many researchers also communicate their findings through mass media outlets that quickly reach those who need the information most. For them, Penn State Public Broadcasting (PSPB), including WPSX-TV and WSPU-Radio, has become a valuable partner.

About 475 professors from all colleges work with PSPB to share their research with wider audiences.

Among them, Kristine Clark, director of sports nutrition, provided content for the WPSX "Creating Health" series. Recently she was host for the diabetes special, with Jan Ulbrecht, associate professor of clinical medicine, and Carla Miller, assistant professor of nutrition, also contributing to the program.

"As a nutrition professional, I am involved in shaping the messages that appear on 'Creating Health,'" Clark explained. "My expertise ensures that the information is scientifically sound, and my public broadcasting partners communicate the research in a way that everyone can use, regardless of education level."

She added, "Because I am a sports nutritionist, I don't go into the community to do diabetes workshops. Through 'Creating Health,' PSPB gives me an opportunity to take part in this huge-scale effort to help people learn and practice preventative health measures. 'Creating Health' promises to help a tremendous number of people -- potentially all of Pennsylvania and beyond. That's the power of television."

Dennis G. Shea, professor of health policy and administration, also has participated in PSPB health offerings, including both community call-in and interview programs.

"The call-in programs allow me to hear what people have to say about their health policy problems, such as prescription drug coverage for Medicare," Shea noted. "The next day I can run a computer program that allows me to see what coverage is available to different populations, and I can validate their problems with my research. Then I can go back to the people in government and offer solutions."

According to Tracy Vosburgh, WPSX director of programming and production, faculty members often partner with PSPB as part of grant-funded research projects.

"Many faculty members work with PSPB to broadly disseminate research to new and different audiences. Sometimes this work enhances or expands the traditional classroom via broadcast, the Web, DVD or VHS media, and sometimes it employs broadcast to inform a general audience about the outcomes of new research," Vosburgh said.

For example, Thomas A. Hale, liberal arts professor of African, French and comparative literature, worked with WPSX to write and produce "Griottes of
the Sahel: Female Keepers of the Oral Tradition in Niger." The documentary, based on recordings of female wordsmiths, was the first video ever produced about
griottes. The Smithsonian museum and other universities already have purchased it for their collections.

"Support from Penn State for my video served as a seed for the first scholarly article in the world to appear on the subject of these female bards from West Africa," said Hale. "The video and the article became the basis for a major section of my book, Griots and Griottes, Masters of Words and Music (Indiana University Press, 1998)."

The video and book also led to a three-year, $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under the grant, Hale is collaborating with co-principal investigator Aissata Sidikou-Morton, a professor at Princeton University, and a team of 15 scholars to collect and publish the texts of West African women's songs.

One of most widely viewed faculty productions, "Architecture and Children's Museums: Through the Looking Glass," highlights the research of Jawaid Haider, professor of architecture. Haider worked with WPSX production staff to develop this documentary on spatial design for children. The program has aired on more than 60 public television stations and has been seen by millions of people throughout the United States and around the world.

"Penn State Public Broadcasting has enabled me to reach people that are otherwise ignored and not the usual recipients of academic research. This has been very fulfilling," Haider commented.

A major PSPB audience is children. Fifty-five faculty members have partnered with "What's in the News" (WITN), a current events program for elementary and middle-school students, to communicate their research and provide new teaching materials to K-12 classrooms.

Recent WITN guests include Marvin Goldberg, Irving and Irene Bard professor and chair of the department of marketing; Fuyuan Shen, assistant professor of communications; and Charles Fisher, professor of biology.

Fisher stressed the importance of his PSPB partnerships. "The work I do and the work of most scientists cost taxpayers a lot of money, and I think we have a responsibility to show them what their money is accomplishing. A great way to do this is through their children," he explained.

"'What's in the News' offers a very real way to communicate our work directly to taxpayers," he continued. "Penn State Public Broadcasting is a great asset for faculty who are interested in outreach."

As WPSX moves into the era of digital broadcasting, a transition that will begin later this year, there likely will be more opportunities for faculty to use the expanded capacity to create new vehicles for disseminating faculty research.

Research reveals how an acid
dissolves, molecule by molecule

By Barbara Kennedy
Eberly College of Science

The most precise description ever obtained by experiment of exactly how an acid compound dissolves, molecule by molecule, has been completed recently by Penn State researchers.

In addition to shedding new light on this basic property of matter, the research is expected to have broad impacts across the fields of chemistry, biology and physics. The research team is led by A. Welford Castleman Jr., Evan Pugh professor of chemistry and physics and the Eberly Family distinguished chair in science.

This new knowledge is based on experiments in which Castleman's lab used water molecules as a solvent to dissolve the acidic molecule hydrogen bromide.

"We chose to work with hydrogen bromide both because it is a good model of a typical acid and because it is of particular research interest for its role in understanding a range of situations, especially ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere and proton motion in water, which is important in a number of biological processes," Castleman explained.

Hydrogen bromide (HBr) is one of the compounds whose dissolution in the upper atmosphere contributes to the formation of the ozone hole, and Castleman's research sheds light on issues related to why such reactions occur at a rate much faster than expected.

"While every student of freshman chemistry hears acid dissociation and solvation in water talked about, it is only in the past few years that we begin to understand how this works at the microscopic level, and Castleman's work is an important contribution along that route," said James T. Hynes, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the French national science foundation's director of research in the Department of Chemistry at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. "While the public is aware of ozone depletion in the Antarctic stratosphere -- the 'Ozone Hole' -- significant ozone depletion also is occurring elsewhere. A striking example of this is the rapid and essentially complete ozone depletion that occurs in the spring in the Arctic, near the Earth's surface. The acid dissociation of HBr on water ice particles is thought to play a critical role in this process."

Although the dissolution of acids is one of the most fundamental chemical processes, its precise mechanism has remained a mystery for decades. Theoretical predictions about exactly how the molecules rearrange when an acid dissolves have not been verified by experiments because the reaction, which normally occurs in a liquid, happens so rapidly that scientists have not been able to study it.

Castleman's team overcame the experimental difficulties by taking "snapshots" of reactions that occurred in a vacuum chamber into which they injected separate gas-like streams of water and hydrogen-bromide molecules and observed the reactions that occurred at their intersection using incredibly fast lasers.

"Our femtosecond lasers emit very short pulses of laser light on the order of 10 to the minus 15 seconds, which is as fast as molecules vibrate," said Sean M. Hurley, a pos tdoctoral scholar in Castleman's lab and a co-author of the research. "We probe reactions between molecules as fast as they happen, which enables us to detect each step, and we use a time-of-flight mass spectrometer to detect the molecular products that the reactions produce."

"This more precise understanding of how the process behaves on a molecular level could aid scientists in improving control over chemical reactions, enabling them to better achieve the desired result," Hurley said.

In addition to Castleman and Hurley, other members of the research team includegraduate students Troy E. Dermota and Darren P. Hydutsky.

RESEARCH NEWS IN BRIEF

Distant quasars discovered

An international team of scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, including two Penn State astronomers, announced the discovery of three of the most distant quasars, including the most distant quasar known.

The discoveries relied on observations by one of the world's largest optical telescopes -- the 9.2-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope -- which is partially owned and operated by Penn State. The astronomers report that the three quasars are hundreds of times more luminous than the Milky Way galaxy and are probably powered by black holes that are more than a billion times the mass of the Sun. The radiation recorded from the quasars last year left the objects when the universe was just 800 million years old. For the full story, visit http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Schneider1-2003.htm.

Stereotypes can affect memory

Research by a Penn State media studies expert reveals that memory of crime stories with the suspects' pictures reflects racial stereotypes, and African-Americans are especially likely to be mistakenly identified for perpetrators of violent crimes, an issue being discussed nationally by community and law enforcement groups. "When readers were asked to identify criminal suspects pictured in stories about violent crimes, they were more prone to misidentify African-American than white suspects. The same readers, to a far lesser degree, tended to link white offenders more with non-violent crime," said Mary Beth Oliver, associate professor of communications and co-director of the Media Effects Laboratory at Penn State. Oliver noted, "Essentially, people's 'mismemories' of violent crime news seem to implicate all black men rather than the specific individuals who are actually pictured."

PENN STATE RESEARCH HERITAGE

Professor Haskell Brooks Curry (1900-82) was a pioneer of modern mathematical logic. His research in the foundations of mathematics led him to the development of combinatory logic. Later, this seminal work found significant application in computer science, especially in the design of programming languages.

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