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.

Nestled among the trees, streams and undeveloped land in Northern Wisconsin rests an environmental, societal and political challenge. The pristine area, with its proximity to Lake Superior, the largest fresh-water lake in the world, is why its residents choose to live there, but the area is also home to 25 percent of the country’s iron ore reserves, a commercial value of $200 billion.

Pete Rasmussen and Jamey Francis embody the conflict residents in the area face. Both are from the area. Both went away for college. Both moved back to enjoy what the area had to offer. However, the former doesn’t want to risk the change an iron ore mine could bring, the latter feels the mine would staunch the change that’s already occurred.

The four and a half mile stretch of land in question straddles Ashland and Iron Counties in an area colloquially called Wisconsin’s Northwoods. Since 1965, Iron County, an area where a history of mining is celebrated through streets signs and family history, has seen its population decline by 80 percent. Some, like Francis, see the proposed mine and the thousands of jobs it offers either directly or indirectly as a chance to save the county with the one of the highest unemployment rates (8.6% in September) in the state.

“There’s not going to be any opportunity that I can see in the near future other than this mine,” said Francis, an apparel salesman and city councilman in the town of Hurley. “This is an economic game changer.”

The company proposing to develop the mine, Gogebic Taconite (GTAC), has sponsored community events for most of the last year and held open houses throughout the region in an effort to drum up support. GTAC has also lobbied Wisconsin lawmakers to change state law to treat ferrous mining separately from sulfide mining as Michigan and Minnesota do. Iron ore mining uses water and magnets to extract the iron while sulfide mining uses chemicals to remove the deposits.

Among the legislative changes the company wants is a finite time line for the Department of Natural Resources to approve or deny a permit request. GTAC is also interested in being granted the ability to mitigate damages to currently protected wetlands by creating 1 ½ acres of wetland for every acre damaged in the process.

Critics fear the legislation is code for simply ramming through a strip mine without concern to the environment.

“The possibility of poisoning the water for future generations isn’t worth it to me,” said Rasmussen, a freelance photographer, web developer and carpenter in the area. “We’ve known it would be a struggle up here to get by, and it is for a lot of folks and they have to maybe take a couple of jobs. But it’s worth it. It’s part of the price you pay to live in such a beautiful place. And we’re here to protect that.”

The Republican-led legislature is moving forward with legislation to change Wisconsin’s mining laws in order to “get people back to work.” The head of the State Assembly, Rep. Jeff Fitzgerald (R), says there’s “no more important an issue” facing lawmakers in the next few months.

Photo Credit: Kimberli Miller, USGS National Wildlife Health Center.

Standing in the entrance of a Vermont cave in March 2008, it was clear from the dead bats in the snow, another flying in the frigid cold and one clinging to an icicle that something was wrong.

I’m a Wildlife Disease Specialist for the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.  The Center’s mission is to safeguard wildlife and ecosystem health through dynamic partnerships and exceptional science.  I was at the cave with two Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department biologists to learn more about white-nose syndrome (WNS), a new disease that was killing bats in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut by the thousands.

Bats are fascinating creatures that have evolved very specialized survival skills.  One of these is their ability to hibernate to conserve energy by reducing their heart rate, temperature and other body functions to very low levels for extended periods.  This allows bats to survive long winters using their stored body fat when their insect food source is unavailable.  Although bats may briefly rouse out of hibernation to drink water or move to a different part of the cave, they typically stay deep in their hibernaculum or winter “roost site” until spring.

So it was odd in winter 2007 when New York residents reported seeing bats flying during the day and finding them dead in the snow in their yards.  Biologists following up on the reports were surprised to find a nearby cave littered with dead bats and a fuzzy white growth on the nose and wings of some of the live bats.  The following winter, sick and dead bats were reported in multiple locations in New York as well as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.  The disease has now spread as far west as Kentucky, as far south as North Carolina, and to four Canadian provinces.  It is estimated that over a million bats have died since 2007, making this the largest disease outbreak among mammals in modern times.  WNS has spread very rapidly, by bats themselves, and likely also by people moving between affected and unaffected sites.

WNS Occurrence by County. Map courtesy of Cal Butchkoski, Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Navigating the icy rocks into the Vermont cave, dead bats were so numerous; stepping on them was sometimes unavoidable.  A live little brown bat clinging to the rocks overhead didn’t have white nose fuzz but did have wing damage, which we now know, is one of the components of WNS.

Photo Credit: Kimberli Miller, USGS Nation Wildlife Health Center

Nationwide, scientists are collaborating to quickly learn as much as possible about this disease.  One of my Center’s laboratories first isolated a cold-loving fungus from sick bats that they later named Geomyces destructans.  Additional studies determined that it is the cause of WNS.  Other scientists studied the wing damage caused by the fungus and how the injury affects body temperature and hydration during hibernation.  The caving community has helped efforts to prevent the accidental spread of the fungus to new areas on equipment and supplies.  All involved hope to one-day find ways to slow or halt the spread of the disease and reduce bat deaths before WNS causes some bat species to become extinct.

 National Wildlife Health Center Investigates Educator Guide

“The National Wildlife Health Center is sort of what it says. We're a national center and we receive carcasses from refuges and state management areas all around the country, usually from state biologists, federal biologists, tribal biologists,” says disease investigation chief Dr. Scott Wright. Those carcasses shipped overnight to the center are most often samples taken from large animal die-offs. It’s the job of the center to determine the cause of death.

“Much like the CDC would do for human health, or the USDA would do for agricultural animals, for livestock and so forth, that's the role we play for wildlife,” says Wright.

At the heart of the center is a level 3 bio-safety lab where the animal samples are processed and examined through necropsy, the animal version of an autopsy. “Every case that comes in is a potential real challenge,” says veterinary pathologist Dr. David Green. “I sit down and look at all of these different lab results; the toxicology, the poison tests, the virus cultures, the bacterial cultures. And I have to put all of these pieces of information together to determine why was that animal sick, why did that animal die or why did 500 birds die at this site.”

It was 5000 red winged blackbirds dying in a small Arkansas town on New Year’s Eve 2010 that briefly thrust the work of the Center into the national spotlight. “Oh there were just all sorts of clever names applied to the event,” remembers Green. “'Aflockolypse' was, I think, the cleverest.”

Harbinger of the end times, covert military testing, magnetic disruption, all manner of strange theories were applied to the event. The intense interest surprised the NWHC staff, says Wright. “There were people calling me at my home at night, on weekends wanting to know what was going on.”

The cause of death, determined after numerous bird necropsies, was much more banal than the theories. “All of the tests and cultures that we did for infectious diseases and parasites and chemicals came back negative,” says Green. “Basically it came down to, we couldn't find anything other than physical injuries, what we call blunt force trauma in the birds.”

Those necropsy findings, combined with field reports of New Year’s fireworks, and the fact that blackbirds are terrible night flyers came together to paint a picture of startled birds flying into each other and stationary objects and succumbing to traumatic injury.

This most plausible explanation didn’t satisfy the most dedicated conspiracy-theorists according to Wright. “It really sort of floored us. We didn't expect that. We didn't expect to be not believed.”

That’s something that Dr. Wright, who is soon to retire from the Center, finds a troubling omen for the future of science and public understanding. “Science is not being believed,” he says. “That's not a good sign, because there's too much important stuff coming that we need to be stepping up and telling everybody, ‘This is what's going on.’ And they hopefully will believe us.”

Plant Modifications poster by Kandis Elliot. Click on the image for a larger size.

Kandis Elliot didn’t think she’d make art her profession. “When I was in high school and thinking of a career, we were told back then that you can't make a living as an artist and if you're smart enough you go into the sciences,” said Elliot. She was smart enough- and interested enough- in the sciences to graduate from the University of Wisconsin with a BA in biology and Masters in zoology. “In all these courses I drew like crazy without letting too many people see these drawings,” she recalls.

But art drew her back and after her advanced degree Elliot returned to school, this time in a technical college program in commercial art. Shortly after that, the perfect opportunity came knocking. “I was out about a month when four people, four or five people called me up the same day and said, ‘The botany artist is leaving, go apply for a position,’" Elliot says. The position was as staff artist for the University of Wisconsin’s Botany department, one of the best in the country.

Elliot was strong on science and gifted in art, but she also had another card up her sleeve, “I knew back in 1988 there was this new thing called Apple Computer where you could draw a perfect square. You didn't need a right angle. You could draw a perfect circle, you didn't need a compass. And I said, ‘Surely you want to do this kind of work on a computer.’ And they said, ‘Alright, let's try it.’"

Kandis Elliot's poster "Introduction to Fungi". Click on the image for a larger size.

The idea of using computers appealed to the scientists, but Elliot had never actually used one. So she went to the campus computer center, held up a hundred dollar bill, offering it to anyone who could teach her how to use an Apple. That investment paid off in a position she held for over two decades. As the botany artist, she created charts and graphs for countless scientific publications and perfected the art of digital painting. Starting with less-than-perfect images taken by scientists in the field, or dried, pressed plant samples, Elliot’s job was to transform them into striking, painterly objects that could hold a student’s attention.

“It makes your eye dwell on the picture a little bit longer,” says Elliot, “I guess the only way I can describe it is that the paintings say, ‘Look at me.’”

After years spent shining the spotlight on nature’s botanical beauty, Kandis Elliot retired from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. But not before receiving one of the highest honors in her profession. A poster titled “Introduction to Fungi” won the 2010 prize for information graphics in the National Science Foundation’s International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Mushrooms capped a brilliant career.

NASA's Juno spacecraft is shown in orbit above Jupiter's colorful clouds in this artist's rendering. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Even though NASA is no longer in the business of deploying manned-missions to outer space, they continue to explore the cosmos in ways that have never before been possible.  Their next target is Earth's bigger, gassier neighbor: Jupiter.

On August 5, 2011 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in conjunction with the Southwest Research Institute launched the Juno mission,  which NASA says will, "improve our understanding of the solar system’s beginnings by revealing the origin and evolution of Jupiter."

This is a pretty big deal in the world of astrophysics.   NASA scientists theorize they will be able to determine the origin of The Giant Planet, "and thereby the solar system" by measuring the amount of water and ammonia in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio explains the significance of the mission:

"Jupiter is the Rosetta Stone of our solar system.  It is by far the oldest planet, contains more material than all the other planets, asteroids and comets combined, and carries deep inside it the story of not only the solar system but of us. Juno is going there as our emissary — to interpret what Jupiter has to say."

But scientists will have to wait a few years to test their theories.  Even though Juno is traveling at a relative speed of over 13,000 miles an hour, it is not scheduled to reach its final destination until July 2016.

And the ride to Jupiter is not exactly a clear path.  Juno will face many obstacles – including large mentors – that can potentially derail the $1.1 billion project.

Thankfully, scientists can rely on old "maps," or astro-photographic images of the night sky to plan a flight path that will steer the spacecraft away from debris.

Dr. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, says the astro-photographic plates housed at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) contributed directly to the success of the Juno mission;

"Juno, for example, in order for it to be successful they have to design it.  And one of the things they have to design it for is to protect it from meteoroids out in space.  Well we never measured meteoroids around Jupiter, because we don't go there very often, right?  So we have to take what             we've learned here at Earth to help us design that spacecraft to go to Jupiter and those negatives [at the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive] helped formulate the model we used to design that spacecraft to go to Jupiter.

Dr. Cooke is referring to a collection of nearly 150,000 old astro-photographic plates and film known as APDA, or the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive.  The APDA collection is stored at PARI's secure facility in Western North Carolina.

Dr. Cooke became aware of the collection a few years ago and has quickly become on of its biggest advocates:

"The photo archive which contains a lot of the photographs that form the basis of modern meteor science are housed … at ADPA.  They collected them from around the country, but those old photographs, that data, formed the basis for everything we know now in regards to meteors.  So it's kind of like visiting a treasure trove of ancient data.  The great hieroglyphic inscriptions out there in APDA."

Brendan Fallon of the American Meteor Society examines film in the APDA collection.

The connection between APDA and the Juno mission came full orbit during this year's annual NASA Fireball Workshop, which took place at PARI's Rosman, North Carolina campus.  Attendees were able to watch the Juno launch and then walk into the archives to hold the original pieces of film that helped Juno's engineers develop a safe flight path.

By relying on old astronomical plates and film – some of which date over 100 years old – today's astronomers can safely stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and reach for the stars, without fear of being knocked down by meteors.

For more info check out NASA's website for the JUNO mission:

twitter: @NASAJuno

http://missionjuno.swri.edu/