It was on November 18, 1936, that the two sections of the main span were joined in the middle. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Fred Brusati. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

When it opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest suspension bridge ever built, constructed in one of the world’s most challenging settings. For the men who poured the concrete, and drove in each steel rivet, it was a life changing experience.

In many ways, Fred Brusati was typical of the kinds of men who worked building the Bridge. His parents had emigrated from Milano, Italy to Montana, where Fred’s father worked as a copper miner. After Fred was born in 1911, his parents moved to San Rafael.

Fred spent a year in high school, then went looking for work.

“One day I heard they were going to start the Golden Gate Bridge,” he told interviewer Harvey Schwartz in 1987, as part of an oral history project conducted by Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University.

“And I says well, I’ll try it. I never been up 746 feet but I’ll try it anyhow.”

Tough work, in tough times

Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

It was the middle of the Great Depression. Mary Currie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate Bridge District, says getting a job on the Golden Gate Bridge was like winning the lottery.

“The men would line up and wait for a chance to get a job, literally hoping someone would hurt themselves so they’d be the one to get the job.”

Slim Lambert, a cowboy from Washington state, was hired as a roustabout. He helped build a temporary railway to carry equipment across the bridge span, making about 10 dollars a day.

“Things were a lot different in those days,” he told Schwartz.

“You hardly ever slowed down to a trot. If you went to the restroom and stayed more than 30 seconds, the boss would come see what was wrong with you. Lots of men were fired right on the spot, if the boss thought they were malingering a little bit. There was men waiting right there for a job.”

Construction challenges

The Marin tower of the Golden Gate Bridge under construction in 1933. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge marked the first time anyone had built a suspension bridge support with a tower in the open ocean. The conditions, above and below the water, were harsh.

Divers faced powerful currents as they helped anchor the massive concrete bridge support onto the ocean floor.

And up on the towers, workers stuffed newspapers in their jackets to keep warm.

Martin Adams, born in Arkansas in 1912, called the bridge “the coldest place I’ve ever worked.”

“You put all the clothes on you had and worked, worked hard, or you’d freeze.”

Cold was the least of their concerns. Bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie says workers on the bridge didn’t just fear death. They expected it.

Workers on the main cable of the Golden Gate Bridge. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

“At the time, the industry standard was that for every million dollars spent, there would be a loss of life,” says Currie.

The bridge was estimated to cost $35 million. But structural engineer Joseph Strauss, who headed the project, was determined to keep workers safe. Hard hats were required. And Strauss insisted on one feature that Mary Currie says was at the time completely novel: A safety net.

“It was a $130,000 expense at the time, which was considered an exorbitant expense. But he really fought for it and was able to get the board of directors to permit it.”

Over four years of construction, the safety net saved the lives of 19 men. They called themselves the “Halfway to Hell Club.”

For nearly four years, the Golden Gate Bridge project seemed charmed with an almost perfect safety record. And then, one day, everything changed.

For the roadway construction, Strauss insisted on the addition of the $130,000 safety net. From the holdings of the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, Used with Permission, www.goldengate.org

The collapse

The task that day, on February 17th, 1937 was to remove a wooden scaffold that had been built underneath the bridge platform. To reach it, workers had hung a temporary catwalk. Each time they stripped off a section of wood, workers would move the catwalk another few feet.

“And as they started to move it,” recalled Martin Adams, who was standing nearby, “that’s when it went down. 9:20 in the morning, it went down.”

The catwalk hadn’t been attached properly. It broke off and plunged into the ocean, dragging the safety net with it.

Dummatzen's family after their son's death. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU

Fred Brusati was working nearby when he heard someone shout that the catwalk had fallen. He rushed over to the side and saw a man clinging to a piece of steel. Brusati and a few others threw the man a rope, and hauled him up to safety.

“The man had a pipe in his mouth,” recalled Brusati. “He didn’t drop the pipe or nothing. He just started to walk toward San Francisco and I never did see him back there again.”

The real tragedy was below. Twelve men had fallen 220 feet into the water. One of them was Slim Lambert.

“People ask me what went through your mind? The only thing that went through my mind was survival. I knew that to have a prayer, I had to hit the water feet first.”

But when Lambert hit the water, his legs tangled in the safety net.

“That’s the only time I panicked during that whole thing,” said Lambert. “I was caught in the net and the net was headed for the bottom.”

Fred Dummatzen. Photograph courtesy of Labor Archives and Research Center, SFSU.

Lambert plunged so deep that when he surfaced he was bleeding from his ears. Bridge debris was everywhere.

“I got a couple of planks together for my self first, and then I saw Fred thrashing about. So I got him.”

Fred Dummatzen was 24 years old. Lambert pulled him up onto the planks and waited.

“I heard this power boat coming in. Put put put.”

It was a crab fisherman, coming in from sea. Lambert says there was so much junk in the water, he worried the driver would pass right by.

“He took another look around and his eye hit me. What I relief. I figured, by gosh, we’re gonna make it.”

Dummatzen died on the crab boat. But Lambert and another man, 51-year old carpenter named Oscar Osberg, survived the fall. Today, there’s a plaque on the south western side of the bridge at the entrance to the west sidewalk dedicated to the ten men who died that day.

Mary Currie says the workers she’s talked to don’t really remember the cold, or the danger. They felt lucky to be there.

At a time when the rest of the country was struggling to get by, six Bay Area counties agreed to spend what seemed like a fortune on a suspension bridge longer than any the world had ever seen.

“It was the people who had to rise up and see this as a symbol of hope, imagination, stick-to-itiveness,” says Currie. “They saw this bridge as something that would change their lives.”

And that, she says, was a pretty gutsy thing to have done.

The Golden Gate Bridge turns 75 on May 27th.

When QUEST first started production on the television story, “Amateur Rocketeers Reach for the Stars”, I had no idea that the amateur or experimental rocketry was so popular today. Before the producer of the story, Chris Bauer, pitched the idea, if someone had mentioned rocket-building to me, I probably would have imagined a young boy putting together a cardboard rocket and propelling it into the sky with some baking soda and vinegar.

Photo credit: Christopher Bauer

I certainly would not have conjured the images of high school students (boys AND girls) working in a lab together for weeks on end to design, build and program rockets that can reach the edges of space in order to do real scientific research. This is exactly what the some of the folks featured in Chris’s story are doing with the Rocket Mavericks program.

The official name of the organization is Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation and on the spectrum of civilian rocket building, they are all the way to the hard-core technical end. According to their website, the group strives “to enable the common man to build vehicles and conduct space exploration missions independently, launching the personalization of access to space.”

One of the main things that Rocket Mavericks director Tom Atchison is focused on is creating the next generation of rocket scientists by establishing the Explorers Program in high schools in order to inspire students to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines and careers. And from the looks of concentration and excitement on the faces of the kids who are featured in our story, there’s no doubt that Atchison is succeeding in his mission to inspire these kids through rocketry.

But the other end of the rocketry spectrum and everything in between is just as exciting to learn about. Rocket clubs abound throughout California and the United States. One of the Bay Area rocket clubs featured in our story is LUNAR (Livermore Unit National Association of Rocketry). Like other rocket clubs, LUNAR is “a group of a few hundred model rocket enthusiasts of all ages, genders and cultural backgrounds who gather to learn rocketry, teach rocketry, exchange modeling techniques and of course, fly model and high-powered rockets.”

Photo credit: Christopher Bauer

According to his call sheet for the shoot that day, producer Chris Bauer traveled to a rocket launch site in the “Middle of Nowhere, California” to document the LUNAR club shooting off all kinds and sizes of rockets. One of my favorite shots in the story is that of a young girl running through a fallow field with her rocket that’s designed to look just like a giant pink crayon. That shot really points out to me that there’s something for everyone in rocketry.

Find a rocket club near you:

Rocketry.org: Comprehensive online amateur experimental rocketry resource

National Association of Rocketry

Tripoli Rocketry Association

Stu Weiss uses hemispherical photography to analyse the forest canopy in the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, Paicific Grove, CA. Image: Joshua Cassidy

Weiss uses a technique called hemispherical photography to analyze monarch butterfly overwintering habitat. While facing north, he aims his digital camera directly up towards the forest canopy. The camera is affixed with a 180° fish-eye lens that produces an image of the sky partially blocked by the trees. Weiss takes a series of these images at specific locations corresponding to a grid. With the help of some special software, he is able to map out how much sunlight and wind is able to penetrate the forest at specific locations. This information is important because overwintering monarchs prefer microhabitats that provide both plenty of sunlight, but are protected from the wind.

With the information gleaned from his hemispherical photography, Weiss is able to characterize the monarch habitat and provide guidance on the long-term management of the major monarch overwintering sites. The City of Pacific Grove placed Weiss in charge of developing the habitat restoration and management plan for the Monarch Grove Sanctuary, and he has overseen the planting of additional Eucalyptus trees to improve wind protection for the monarchs. While small in size, the Sanctuary is a vital destination for monarchs and a major tourist attraction boasting visitors from around the world.

In addition to their pleasing appearance, monarch butterflies are famous for their extended migrations. The type of lengthy annual north-south migration undergone by monarchs is more commonly associated with birds. Monarchs spent most of the year in close proximity to their host plant, milkweed. Each fall, as the days grow shorter and the milkweed recedes, monarchs journey to their overwintering grounds.

The Rocky Mountains split monarch Butterflies into Eastern and Western populations. Image: Monarch Watch

The Rocky Mountains split the monarchs into two populations. Those butterflies that spend their summers east of the Rocky Mountains descent upon forests located within the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt Pine-Oak Forests not far from Mexico City. The monarchs that spend their summers west of the Rockies wait out the winter months in forests along the California Coast. Overwintering monarch populations return to the same forests year after year, even though none of the individual butterflies have ever been to these locations before.

Depending on the climatic conditions, monarch butterflies have three or four generations per year. How the butterfly’s great-grandchildren are able to find the same specific forests year after year remains a mystery. New research indicates that monarch butterflies possess photosensitive proteins called Cryptochromes that allow them to set an internal circadian clock. When exposed to UV light, Cryptochromes are also sensitive to magnetism. This allows the monarchs to follow patterns in the Earth’s magnetic field which guide them in their far-reaching travels. Monarch butterflies may also return to specific groves because the overwintering conditions at those particular spots are similarly attractive year after year. As Weiss explained, “The presence of other monarchs is a really good indicator it’s a good place to be a monarch, kind of crowd sourcing. So if a butterfly’s flying around looking for a place to land, if there are other monarchs there, it’s a good indicator that hey, that’s a good place to land.”

Monarch butterflies form a cluster on a Monterey Pine branch. Image: Joshua Cssidy

In the spring, the monarchs go into a mating frenzy, and then they depart from there overwintering spots to find the emerging milkweed throughout their range. Female monarchs lay hundreds of eggs on milkweed plants. The eggs hatch and the caterpillars gorge on the host plant. As the caterpillars grow, they sequester compounds called cardiac glycosides which make them distasteful – even toxic – to predators. During the pupae life stage the caterpillars transform into butterflies within the solitude of their chrysalises. As flying adults they feed on sugary nectar from milkweeds and other plants with their long tube-like proboscises. This cycle of reproduction repeats throughout the spring and summer as the monarchs disperse, filling out their geographic range.

Because monarch butterflies are intimately tied to milkweed, they are especially vulnerable to habitat loss from development and agriculture. Monarchs also need to find dependable overwintering sites, and both the eastern and western overwintering populations experience threats to these locations.

Erica Krygsman counts monarch butterflies at the Monarch Sanctuary Grove in Pacific Grove, CA. Image: Joshua Cassidy

Monarchs do have one advantage, which is that humans find them beautiful. Enticed by the monarch butterfly’s beauty, people have gone to great lengths to study them and provide for their needs. Erica Krygsman, Monarch Alert Monterey Co. Field Coordinator is one of those people. She has the colossal task of counting the overwintering monarchs. So how does someone count thousands of fidgeting butterflies as they hang from a tree?

“Well you don’t count them individually”, Krygsman said. “Basically you count the butterflies when they are in clusters in the trees, and you go by each group and you count…you count a small group and extrapolate to the rest of the cluster.” For the Monarch Grove Sanctuary location, Krygsman’s counts for the winter 2011-2012 hover around 10,000 butterflies. The detailed counts made by Monarch Alert help the scientific community trace the fluctuations in the western monarch butterfly population size and demographics.

Visitors to the Monarch Grove Sanctuary. Image: Joshua Cassidy

According to Weiss, “monarch butterflies are listed as an endangered phenomenon, because of the mass of the migration, the length of the migration, and the concentration of butterflies in relatively few overwintering sites. They’re actually vulnerable. You could cut down 20 groves of trees in coastal California and pretty much kill off the overwintering monarchs in California, they’re that concentrated. In Mexico, they occupy maybe a few dozen hectares of high elevation fir forests that are under extreme pressure.”

You can visit the overwintering monarchs during the winter months at the Pacific Grove Monarch Grove Sanctuary, and take a tour of the Monarch Sanctuary offered by the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. Other good places to find overwintering monarchs are Natural Bridges State Beach and Pt. Lobos Nature Preserve.

It could have been much worse, had Japan’s elaborate tsunami warning system not kicked in.

Here in the US, we have a similar system. It helped warn residents along the West Coast that waves from the Japanese tsunami were heading our way. But the program is facing steep budget cuts.

When the Waves Hit Santa Cruz

Rusty Kingon works down at the docks in Santa Cruz. He's the supervisor for the UC Santa Cruz Boating Program. When the smaller tsunami from the Japanese earthquake hit the coast of California, Kingon was there. He caught the whole thing on video.

The surging current ripped docks right off their moorings. Twenty-five foot fishing boats flipped on their sides, like bath toys and smashed together.

Losing Everything

One of the lost boats belonged to Jody Connolly. He had been living on his boat, Trident, for two years. When the boat sank, Connolly lost all his possessions.

Jody Connolly lost his boat in Santa Cruz tsunami

He says he knows what happened in Santa Cruz doesn’t hold a candle to the damage in Japan. But it turned his life upside down.

"There's life before the tsunami and life after the tsunami," says Connolly. "When you lose everything, especially that quick and that fast, it changes the course of your life."

It was the biggest tsunami to hit California since 1964. Damage amounted to about 50 million dollars. One man drowned in Crescent City, and the harbor there was destroyed.

How Tsunami Warnings Work

It could have been worse here in Santa Cruz, too, if not for a warning system that prompted people to vacate their boats and head inland.

David Oppenheimer, of the United States Geological Survey, says alarms around the world started ringing within 15 minutes after the fault ruptured off the coast of Japan.

Based on the shaking, computer models can predict how big a tsunami the quake might produce, and where it might hit. But those are just predictions.

"You don’t know how high the wave is." says Oppenheimer.

DART buoys

Deployed DART buoy. Photo courtesy of NOAA

For that, there’s another system in place: 39 buoys – they’re called DART buoys, Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis — each the size of a small car, positioned in a ring around the Pacific Ocean.

At the base of each buoy is a pressure recorder, a device that can measure how much water sits above it. When the tsunami wave rolls by, the difference in pressure is translated into a signal, which is transmitted via satellite from the buoy to government monitoring centers in Alaska and Hawaii.

Oppenheimer says that while computer modeling and predictions are important, the DART buoys provide "ground truth" of whether or not a tsunami is taking place, and how big it is.

But, he adds, "it's just as important to know when there isn't a tsunami."

Unnecessary evacuations based on false alarms of impending tsunamis can shut down an entire city and cause mass chaos, he says. The costs can run into the tens of millions of dollars.

Proposed cuts

Now, the Obama administration wants to weaken this system.

Under the 2013 budget proposed by the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the agency wants to trim $1 million off the DART program's $11 million annual budget. NOAA will essentially stop fixing the buoys as quickly when they break.

Lawmakers at a recent hearing in Washington DC told NOAA administrators that they're concerned.

"If we’re not able to repair these buoys," said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) "that could have a public safety impact."

NOAA head Jane Lubchenco responded that until now, funding for the program came from a law, passed in 2005, But the law is sunsetting at the end of this year.

"I agree it would be nice to have all those buoys up and running," said Lubchenko. "We just don’t have the money."

DART buoy. Photo courtesy of NOAA

Preparing for the Big One

What Lofgren, and other lawmakers didn't press Lubchenco on is a bigger, and arguably more important cut that NOAA is proposing: Three and a half million dollars that pay for tsunami education and outreach efforts along US coasts.

Rick Wilson, a geologist for the state of California, says that DART buoys are great for tsunamis that start far away, for example in Japan.

But if an earthquake is close — say, along the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of Oregon and Washington — by the time the buoys send out alerts, it’s too late.

"We’d have about 15 minutes to react to such an event," says Wilson.

Fifteen minutes before a major tsunami hits the shore, you do not want people checking their emails for the latest update, Wilson says. They should feel the quake, see the water receding, and know exactly what to do.

Says Wilson, "the ability of one person who does know what to do on a very crowded beach is priceless. "

And it was priceless in Japan, says David Oppenheimer, of the USGS.

"There were 200 thousand people living in the area. Ten percent of the people died. [It was a] terrible tragedy. But ninety percent survived. They knew what to do. It wasn't because of DART buoys. It was because Japanese people know about tsunamis."

But that level of awareness depends on education, drills, signs. And NOAA is making deep cuts to that program.

Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for NOAA, said safety won’t be compromised by the cuts, that NOAA has other programs in place to cover some of this work. She says there’s room in the budget to do some trimming.

"You don’t always have to continue putting signs up. Once they’re there, they’re there."

But signs, says David Oppenheimer, eventually get torn down. Memories fade.

"I don’t think that just because we’ve done our first round that we can sit back and think, OK, we don’t have to worry about this anymore," he says. "People forget."

Meanwhile, several members of Congress are looking for ways to restore the funding.

Emma Valdez, a Sapphire Energy technician, holds a petri dish with 1 million algae cells. Algae is grown and scaled up to 20-liter containers in about one week.

With more and more cars on roadways worldwide – and fossil fuel supplies running low, can renewable fuels really replace crude oil?

In Nebraska, the alternative of choice is ethanol because corn is the mainstay of our economy.  But corn, along with many other crops, takes lots of land…and huge amounts of water.  As important as it is to Nebraska, ethanol, at best, is a 10% additive, not a future fuel in its own right.

So what’s a real alternative?  Research shows one promising alternative seems the least obvious – algae (see QUEST Nebraska: Algae for Fuel).

Algae is a microscopic plant-like marine organism.  There are billions of them in our world, and they exist all around us.  Algae are found in ponds, lakes, streams – all types of bodies of water…even in your bathtub if it’s not cleaned regularly.

It’s green and a bit slimy to the touch.  For the most part, we avoid contact with algae – but it just may be the key to our energy future.  How’s that?  Companies like Sapphire Energy in San Diego, CA are working with universities, including the University of Nebraska to make microscopic algae into the fuel for the future.

Algae conjures up thoughts about Soylent Green, the 1973 sci-fi movie thriller that depicts human survival dependent upon on a green food ration made of “high protein plankton.”  Algae are a type of plankton.

SPOILER ALERT:  Do not read the next sentence if you’ve never seen this movie.   

But there was more to the content of Soylent Green.  Charlton Heston solves the riddle with a horrific warning:  Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

Remember when I said algae are slimy?  There’s a reason for that.  If Charlton Heston was warning us, he’d exclaim: Algae is OIL!  Not exactly – but oil we use for our fuel today is actually made from ancient, ancient algae.

“Each algae contains up to 50% oil,” says University of Nebraska-Lincoln biologist George Oyler.  Over millions of years, billions of algae die, collect, and over time are chemically altered through pressure and heat that converts algae oil into “crude oil” which we seek and drill for to energize our world.  Finding a way to convert algae into oil faster than nature would create an almost endless supply of oil.  “We want to accelerate that process into a single year.” 

In 2009, a QUEST video Algae Power, surveyed algae biofuel as a grand experiment, “not ready for prime time.”  The problem was scaling up to industrial production.  Now, Sapphire Energy is leading the way towards industrial production.  It’s no longer a survey experiment.

The process begins as Sapphire technician Emma Valdez swipes a metal loop over an algae filled petri plate (culture dish) and transfers cells to a new plate. “Algae is one of the fastest growing plant on the planet.  This plate contains millions of algae cells.  I can take this plate and make multiple copies.”  Pointing to a stack of petri dishes, she explains that these plates are added to water to make a dense culture, giving rise to 20-liter glass carboy containers.  “I can grow this to scale in a little over a week.”

The carboy containers are then added to long oval test pools in a greenhouse, creating larger concentrations of promising algae species.

Growing algae outdoors is a huge challenge.  But that’s exactly Sapphire’s goal – creating algae farms.  But algae is a wild plant.  “No one’s taken a wild plant and just grown it to scale,” says Mike Mendez, Sapphire’s former VP of Technology (now a research professor at UC-San Diego).  “Algae isn’t an industry.  It’s a commodity, like corn.  We have to think like a farmer and grow algae as a crop.” 

But plants like corn haven’t become crops overnight.  Mendez says, “It took 7,000 years to get corn where it is today.  I’m gonna have to do whatever it takes to speed up the process.”  Sapphire wants to plant, harvest and process algae oil in real time.

Algae ponds at Sapphire Energy's test farm in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

So, Sapphire has created a 20-acre aquatic test farm in arid Las Cruces, New Mexico.  Why here?  New Mexico has an abundance of sunlight and a rich supply of salt water beneath the dry sands that can’t be used for farming or drinking, but is perfect for growing algae.  Nonetheless, the algae has to survive stress, disease, summer heat and winter freeze.  For two years, scientists and technicians have been successful in scaling up algae from the carboys to 40-foot, then 100-foot, and finally 300-foot oval ponds.

Once the algae mature in the ponds, it’s sent to an industrial centrifuge that separates the algae from the water, creating a thick algae paste. That paste is fed into a test pilot extractor that uses eco-friendly solvents to crack open the algae cells and release oil – green crude.

Sapphire will soon open a 300-acre in 2012.  It will be the largest algae biofuel test plant in the nation.  They expect to produce 1 million gallons of algae biofuel per year – an industry record.  Once Sapphire can create even larger quantities of green crude, they believe the cost of creating an algae fuel will begin approaching the cost of oil.  Stay tuned to see if their plan creates a viable renewable fuel for our future.

Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz and his team use helmet accelerometers, known as the Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) systems, to identify at-risk behavior on the football field.

In September 2011, UNC-Chapel Hill sports medicine researcher Kevin Guskiewicz was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his work on what he calls a hidden epidemic: sports-related concussions.

The award comes with a head-spinning a $500,000 grant, a major portion of which Guskiewicz says will go towards his work:

“We have an amazing interdisciplinary research team at UNC, and the MacArthur Fellowship will help us to expand our work into developing injury prevention strategies and rehabilitation protocols for concussion that can help to preserve sports as we know it today.”

That’s right: a world-renowned concussion expert wants to save, not eliminate, contact sports.

You might assume that Guskiewicz prefers to keep his four children off the field and on the sideline, but that’s not the case at all.  It’s been reported that  “three of his four children have played football, and Guskiewicz has coached Pop Warner teams for five of the last six years.”

These days, barely a week goes by without another news report linking sports related concussions to brain trauma. Even PBS NewsHour is jumping into the rink. Guskiewicz applauds the media for bringing attention to the issue but he stops short of calling a TKO on all contact sports.

Below is an edited version of an UNC-TV interview with with Kevin Guskiewicz after he was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship:

UNC-TV: Let's break this down into very simple terms. What is a concussion?

Guskiewicz:  The word “concuss” means to shake violently. It's a shaking of the head. The brain rebounds off of the undersurface of the skull and can be damaged.  Most often, fortunately, it's considered a mild traumatic brain injury because it's temporary in nature in terms of the signs and symptoms that [athletes] experience.

Kevin Guskiewicz utilizes balance and orientation tests to determine the severity of sports-related head injuries.

UNC-TV: What does the public think of a concussion? Do we under or overplay it?

Guskiewicz: I think there certainly has been a culture shift in the right direction, meaning we're taking it more seriously.  The media has done a great job of creating awareness about the dangers of playing while still experiencing symptoms from a concussion, and we're trying to educate athletes, coaches, parents about those signs and symptoms and to take the right precautions in terms of staying out of play and not returning to play until the symptoms have resolved and being cleared by a physician or a clinician with training in concussion management.

UNC-TV: In which sports are athletes most prone to suffering a concussion?

Guskiewicz:  [With] any collision sport there's a higher incidence of concussion. So football, lacrosse, hockey, wrestling, gymnastics.  Those tend to sit at the higher end of the incidence rates in terms of concussion.

UNC-TV: How do you know you’ve suffered a concussion?

Guskiewicz: Common signs and symptoms are headache, dizziness, blurred vision, feeling as though you're in a fog or having concentration problems.

Later that day or that evening could be difficulty sleeping or loss of appetite, things of that nature.  Memory impairment, loss of consciousness.  Those are two parameters we used to weigh very heavily when diagnosing a concussion and saying this truly is a “concussion.”

If you go back 15, 20 years ago, it used to be, “Johnny hasn't lost consciousness, so he hasn't sustained a concussion.”  Less than 10% of concussions involve loss of consciousness.  So it's admitting you don't feel quite right.

It's been described as a hidden epidemic. Unlike an ankle sprain, we can't see this injury.  X-rays can't be used to identify the injury.

UNC-TV: In the everyday world, are concussions a big deal?  If you get a couple in high school playing football, should you worry about it when you grow up and go about your daily life?

Guskiewicz: At UNC, we house the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes. We've been studying retired NFL football players for the last 11 ½ years. Those with a history of three or more concussions are at an increased risk for depression or a precursor to Alzheimer's. We do need to be concerned that once a young child or a high-schooler has had two or three concussions, we begin to ask the question, what does that mean for that individual at age 35, 45, 55?  And so the late in life consequences must be considered in managing these acute injuries.

Kevin Guskiewicz, Ph.D., ATC  is the Kenan Distinguished Professor and chair of the department of exercise and sport science in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

To see a recent QUEST Northern California video about concussions, watch our Sidelined: Sports Concussions video story.

Archivist Stacey Peeples displays a hand-written text with a recipe for 'stomach pills.' (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The nation's first hospital culled its archives to create a collection of medical and botanical texts from the 18th and early 19th century.

The exhibit, “Flower to Pharmacy,” is housed at the Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collections in Philadelphia. The illustrations are beautiful, the hand-written lecture notes from medical students are fun to decipher, but maybe most striking is the physicians' focus on body fluids.

Phlegm was a big deal in Colonial times.

“They really believed that these systems were out of whack and you had to do something to bring it back into order,” said curator and archivist Stacey Peeples.

Doctors practiced “humoral medicine,” an ancient idea that health comes from a balance of the body's four humors–phlegm, blood, yellow bile and black bile. In addition to bloodletting, physicians relied on sweating and purging and needed the right mix of flowers, roots and herbs to make that happen.

A view of the library inside the historic Pennsylvania Hospital (Photo: Todd Vachon/WHYY)

The exhibit is a compendium of plants used for medicine as well as prescriptions for pills and poultices. Long lists detail the healing properties of blue flag and yellow-button tansy as well as familiar kitchen herbs such as ginger, rosemary and thyme.

In “The American Practice of Medicine,” Connecticut-born Wooster Beach writes that peppermint is “agreeable and penetrating, slightly bitter, followed by a sensation of cold in the mouth” and good for settling the stomach.

You can also look up ways to fight flatulence, hysteria, dropsy (inflammation), piles (hemorrhoids) and cardialgia (heartburn).

One of the oldest texts is a 1633 edition of John Gerard's “Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes.” The English herbalist includes detailed line drawings and warnings against the most poisonous plants.

“For them to say something will kill you immediately, probably means it was pretty harsh,” Peeples said. “Given the amount of enemas and purgatives these people were taking. It had to be really bad. We like to call it “heroic medicine,” that idea that the physician will go to any means to cure you, even if meant killing you.”

Most of the books were part of the hospital's active lending library and are amazingly preserved, especially Mark Catesby's “Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands.” It's a picture book of plants and insects illustrated on deeply saturated color plates – and lovely for art’s sake alone.

Wendy Grube is a nurse practitioner and registered herbalist who teaches a course on alternative therapies at the University of Pennsylvania. She collects her own historical volumes on plant medicine and has done research in the Pennsylvania Hospital archives.

“Flower to Pharmacy” includes some of the first “materia medica” produced for an American audience, and Grube says the meticulous anthologies are fascinating for modern day herbalists.

Early colonial doctors had a very different conception of disease and hadn’t discovered viruses or bacteria, but Grube says that didn’t keep them from hitting on the true medicinal value of plants.

Sage, for instance, is antimicrobial and thyme has anti-viral properties.

Physicians made connections from careful observation over time, Grube says. Doctors likely didn’t understand that an herb was killing off microbes, but it was clear that certain plants helped for cold and cough, she said.

“Flower to Pharmacy” collects the texts used by white, male physicians at Pennsylvania Hospital in the 1700s, but Grube says their records include knowledge learned from Native Americans and traced back to ancient Egypt and Greece.

Curator Stacey Peeples said some of the information in the library collection was surely common knowledge among Colonial women who kept their own recipe books.

“Today if you have a headache, you don't run to the hospital,” Peeples said. “The first thing do, is you take an aspirin. It was similar at that time. The woman was entrusted with the care of the family.”

“Why did these traditions happen? They happened because they were effective. I don't think people really waste their time on things that aren't effective,” Grube said.

Every day our lives are affected by the work of chemical engineers who specialize in solving problems through the use of polymers. Simply put, polymers are long “macro-molecules”, formed by combining carbon or silicon atoms with other elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The combinations form long chains of repeating chemical structures, each with a unique set of chemical properties and characteristics. Depending on the atoms used and their arrangement, engineers and chemists use polymers to create almost anything from a soft toothbrush bristle to a tough bullet-proof vest.

Some polymers occur in nature, like cellulose, amber, shellac, and natural rubber. Other polymers are manufactured by chemists and engineers, and are referred to as synthetic polymers. In an ongoing quest for better and more useful materials, these scientists aim to make substances tough enough to work in the bitter cold of Antarctica or under the immense pressures encountered thousands of feet below an ocean’s surface.

Becki Ramsay, Chemical Engineer at Parker- Hannifin Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio.

As a part of the “Great Job!” series that highlights exciting careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), a production crew with WVIZ/PBS ideastream®, in Cleveland, Ohio, spent a day with Becki Ramsay. Becki is a chemical engineer with the Hose Products Division of Parker-Hannifin Corporation. She and her team create hoses from synthetic polymers to meet the design specifications they get from mechanical engineers.

During our interview, Becki expressed to us why she decided early on to become an engineer.

Eventually, Becki decided that she was interested in polymers so she continued her studies to eventually become a chemical engineer.

As a result of her work with Parker, Becki and her team create hoses that remain flexible and convey power through hydraulic fluids while operating under the most extreme environmental conditions, whether it’s sub-zero temperatures or in an application that will pulse it millions of times. These hoses are absolutely critical in the operation of machinery used in industries such as construction, mining, forestry, transportation, and more.

Inside this Burst Test Chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode.

Every day, Becki works with chemists and other engineers to create and test the quality of new materials. On the day of our shoot, we visited the Burst Test Chamber. The chamber is made of armor-plated steel and bullet-proof glass. Inside the chamber, hoses are filled with water and pressurized until they explode. Many of the hoses have bursting points in excess of 14,000 pounds per square inch. That would be like getting hit by an explosion with more than 15 million pounds of force, or having to lift three space shuttles! During one of the tests, the hose exploded at nearly 16,000 pounds per square inch!

It was a fascinating day for us. Sometimes we take so much for granted that we don’t think about the interesting careers and interesting people who change our world with their inventions every day. Look around your house. If you look closely enough and think deeply enough, you’ll be amazed, too, by the number of everyday conveniences we have because of the ingenuity of chemical engineers like Becki Ramsay and the many other polymer scientists just like her.

Dickcissel - a grassland bird. Photo Credit: Amy Larson

In an effort to improve the sustainability and health of their land, farmers are increasingly interested in taking a systems approach to farmland management. A systems approach acknowledges the key connections between ecological, economic, and social components. Given the ensuing complexity, measuring the health of a farm system requires good diagnostic tools. In addition, these tools need to be clear and straightforward.

Our current effort at the University of Nebraska Lincoln to develop a set of such indicators for farmers, the Healthy Farm Index, focuses on biodiversity and ecosystem services at the farm scale. One indicator in the index is the presences of a given set of birds on the farm. Birds are a popular indicator because they are sensitive to change in farm practices, found broadly in the environment, and are easy to detect by sight and sound.

The ability to detect birds by sound has spurred our research group to develop resources to aid farmers and other people interested in the songs and calls of farmland birds. As researchers, we use auditory detections of birds as one of our primary monitoring tools. With acoustic recorders, we have recorded the songs and calls of our local bird communities. Back in the lab, we use software to identify and isolate the best songs and calls. These vocalizations have been posted to our website, Farmland Birds of Nebraska, and distributed back to farmers and others interested on CDs. With the acoustic recordings, farmers can select a group of indicator species suitable for their area, learn its call, and listen for the bird while working in the field. This information can be used by the farmer in assessing their own farm or can be shared more broadly with researchers.

The recordings also allow farmers to share with consumers (many of whom are birders) an added environmental benefit of their farm. This spring we were able to take these recorded vocalizations back to one of our participating farms. In partnership with Common Good Farm, we hosted a “Birding on the Farm” tour. Local residents and other farmers spent the morning listening for and identifying the community of birds at the farm. New and experienced birders alike were surprised at the diversity found on the single farm.

In the coming months, we are expanding our network of recorders. This winter we will be monitoring winter bird communities on participating farms and testing the influences that road noise may have on bird vocalization and communication.