Newsmakers

(Every week faculty and staff from across campus are featured or cited in newspapers, magazines, broadcasts and other media from around the country. The listings that follow represent a small selection of the many stories that spotlight UW–Madison and its people. More newsmaker listings)

Follow the isotopes
“You can always tell the newcomers from the locals – by the way they look and the way they dress, by their languages and accents,” writes T. Douglas Price, director of the UW–Madison archaeological chemistry lab, in a Discovering Archaeology (September/November 2000) article describing current research at the lab. The same principle is helping him explore the way that people of the past moved around, by tracking the traces of different chemicals in their bodies. Archaeologists have typically had to derive guesses at migration patterns from the tools and artifacts they found, asking who might have carried them. But now, Price writes, “scientists are discovering that they can often decipher the migratory path not just from the artifacts, but from the bones and teeth of the migrants themselves.” They do this by comparing the ratios of two isotopes of strontium in the body, which vary as people move from place to place. Thus, they can surmise whether a human has died close to the place of their birth or after many travels.

Smelt, not smelly, diapers
America has growing problem with dirty diapers, which now account for about 1.5 percent of solid waste in municipal landfills. The commercial fishing industry creates a formidable pile of trash of its own, discarding about 20 million tons of unwanted marine wildlife every year. Srinivasan Damodaran, a professor of food science, has done what very few would even dream of, putting smelt and smelly together and dealing with both problems at once. By attaching water-binding molecules to protein extracts from the fish, Technology Review (September/ October 2000) says, he has created a gel that absorbs as much as 600 times its weight in water, making it ideal for disposable diapers. And because the gel is protein-based, it is biodegradable, meaning that it disappears from landfills within 30 days.

Superbugs meet their match
Scientists at an international conference of microbiologists are talking about the promising results of a new class of drugs, which appear to be more effective than older methods against serious respiratory infections, including those caused by so-called superbugs. The new antibiotics, called ketolides, impair the bacteria-manufacturing mechanisms in the body, disabling bugs that cause pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory infections. “This class of drugs will clearly be an important advance, good for treating pneumonia, bronchitis and other bacterial illnesses, particularly those that have become resistant to other agents,” William Craig, professor of medicine, tells MSNBC (Sept. 21).

Center: Pack rat to the stars
Film historians and scholars generally cite three outstanding sources when it comes to the history of the motion picture industry: the Library of Congress, the University of California in Los Angeles, and UW–Madison’s Center for Film and Theater Research. That such a treasure trove, including 15,000 films and 2 million pictures from Hollywood’s glory years, calls Madison home is largely due to aggressive stockpiling in the center’s early days, before many people thought about posterity. Tino Balio, who is now director of the UW Arts Institute, was hired to start the collection in 1966. “Film was being recognized as a major art form at this time. [This] urged me on to get as much as I could,” Balio tells the Washington Post (Sept. 20). “This takes us behind the scenes and gives a kind of enormous window onto how the Hollywood film industry worked,” says David Bordwell, the center’s director.