All News Archives – Page 179

Etruscan dig’s common objects are unprecedented finds

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 22, 2009

SMU’s Meadows Museum honors the 15th anniversary of University Distinguished Professor of Art History P. Gregory Warden‘s groundbreaking archaeological excavation in Poggio Colla, Italy with an exhibition dedicated to the Etruscans.

“From the Temple and the Tomb: Etruscan Treasures From Tuscany” is the most comprehensive exhibition of Etruscan art ever undertaken in the United States, with more than 400 objects spanning the 9th through 2nd centuries B.C.

P. Gregory Warden at Poggio Collo

“New Light on the Etruscans: Fifteen Years of Excavation at Poggio Colla” will offer a look into the rare and dramatic finds from this important Etruscan site.

The exhibit includes almost 100 objects from its sanctuary and from a habitation and center of ceramic production discovered in a field below its acropolis.

The excavation site spans more than 50 acres. It is the most extensive Etruscan settlement ever discovered and revealed a wealth of details about ordinary life of Etruscans, the ancestors of Rome.

Poggio Colla Field School trains students on an Etruscan site about 22 miles northeast of Florence in the scenic Mugello Valley.

The settlement on Poggio Colla spanned most of Etruscan history, from the seventh century until its destruction by the Romans at the beginning of the second century.

Students open new trenches the first week of 2008 field season.

The first 11 seasons of excavation have revealed at least three major construction phases, including an extraordinarily rich Orientalizing-Archaic phase that includes the remains of a monumental structure on the acropolis, and two later phases when the site was turned into a fortified stronghold.

Discoveries include 2,000-year-old pendant necklaces, gold hair ornaments, rings and semi-precious stones, and silver coins. The discoveries bring to life a largely forgotten people who, among other things, built the first cities in Italy and introduced Greek culture to the Romans.

Warden, co-director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, says the gold discovery was significant because the riches were not buried in tombs.

“The discovery of these gold objects in this ordinary setting is unprecedented in Etruscan archaeology,” he says.

Student/staff member Rachel Julis
uncovering gold.

Etruscan civilization thrived for hundreds of years during the first millennium B.C., before assimilation by the Romans. Little is known of them because researchers have found only scattered ruins.

The gold found at the top of a hill overlooking the Poggio Colla settlement probably was used for religious ceremonies. Like many ancient cultures, the Etruscans were obsessed with symbols and rituals, and evidence says they used such rites and totems to maintain their rigid caste structure, which existed of a tiny elite, a huge slave population and a small serf class. The items found at Poggio Colla, meticulously placed and capped with temple stones, most likely were chosen to persuade — or appease — the gods.

Both exhibitions will run from January 25 to May 17. An opening reception for SMU faculty and staff is scheduled February 5 from 4:30 p.m.-6 p.m.

The shows join the Dallas Museum of Art’s blockbuster King Tut exhibit “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” as part of a citywide celebration of ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean.

Gold pendants

Featured in “From the Temple and the Tomb” are an entire temple pediment — the terracotta decoration for the front of an Etruscan temple.

It will also include objects from Etruscan tombs, including sarcophagi, ash urns, guardian figures, and gold, silver, bronze, ivory and ceramic objects that were deposited in the tombs of the wealthy.

Also featured are several pieces of gold jewelry, created using techniques so advanced that they are difficult to reproduce today.

“From the Temple and the Tomb” is organized by the Meadows Museum in association with the Florence Archaeological Museum, Italy, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Soprintendenza of Archaeology for Tuscany, and Centro Promozioni e Servizidi Arezzo. It was funded by a gift from The Meadows Foundation.

Tags Meadows Museum, Meadows School of the Arts, P. Gregory Warden, Poggio Colla Field School

Fossils & Ruins Plants & Animals Student researchers

Mistaken ID for official Texas state dinosaur; name to change

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 13, 2009

It’s a case of mistaken dino-identity. The official State Dinosaur of Texas is up for a new name, based on Southern Methodist University research that proved the titleholder has been misidentified.

State Rep. Charles Geren of Fort Worth filed a resolution January 7 to change the name of the state dinosaur from Pleurocoelus to Paluxysaurus jonesi to correctly name the massive sauropod whose tracks and bones litter the central Texas Jones Ranch.

Peter J. Rose is the scientist behind the name change: His master’s level study of dinosaur bones at SMU eventually led him to dispute the long-accepted notion that the large, sauropod bones found in and around the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, were the same as Pleurocoelus bones first found in Maryland in the late 1800s.

Rose determined it was a different dinosaur altogether — a previously unrecognized genus and species he named Paluxysaurus jonesi, after W.W. Jones, the owner of the land on which the fossils were found. Once Rose’s discovery was published in 2007, Pleurocelus’ grand Texas title no longer fit.

Geren filed his resolution on behalf of constituents at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, which is a partner with SMU in ongoing research at the Glen Rose site, about 60 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Aaron Pan, Ph.D., the museum’s curator of science, believes it’s crucial to get the record corrected.

“I think it’s going to be good for Texas paleontology and dinosaur research in general,” Pan said. “Peter Rose’s research has found that it is a new genus and a new species. This dinosaur is unique to Texas, and it is the most abundant dinosaur fossil found in the Glen Rose area.”

SMU geological sciences professor Louis L. Jacobs, who was Rose’s mentor, said that nobody before Rose had made an adequate study of the sauropod bones found at the Glen Rose site. Jacobs has described Texas as a kind of “free trade zone for the age of reptiles” since dinosaurs from three different geologic time periods have been found in three different geographic areas of the state. Paluxysaurus jonesi is believed to have lived 112 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period.

“It just goes to show that Texas is a great place to make great discoveries — even when you might think everything has been found,” Jacobs said.

Rose, 29, received his master’s degree in geological sciences from SMU in 2004. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in paleontology at the University of Minnesota, he concedes he is excited about the proposal to change the state dinosaur’s name to correspond with his research.

“But when you come down to it, whether it’s a new species is not the big question. More important are some of the bigger picture ideas about how these organisms evolved and what they were doing when they were alive,” Rose said. “I hope the future work I do has some broader implications. Currently I’m doing more climate research with implications, I hope, for global climate change.”

Tags Aaron Pan, Louis L. Jacobs, Michael J. Polcyn, Paluxysaurus jonesi, Peter J. Rose

Researcher news Technology

Inventor of DRAM, SMU alum Robert Dennard, wins highest award

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 8, 2009

Robert H. Dennard, an alumnus of SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, will receive engineering’s highest honor “for his invention and contributions to the development of Dynamic Random Access Memory, or DRAM, used universally in computers and other data processing and communication systems.”

The Charles Stark Draper Prize is a $500,000 annual award given by the National Academy of Engineering. It honors engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society. The award was presented to Dennard at a gala dinner in Washington, D.C., on February 17.

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Dennard’s invention of dynamic random access memory using one-transistor cells paved the way for the worldwide computing explosion by making cheap, high-density memory available. DRAM market sales in 2008 totaled an estimated $420 billion. Watch the IBM video about Dennard and DRAM.

DRAM is a form of computer memory that puts bits of data into capacitors, which are energy-storage devices within a miniaturized electronic circuit, and periodically recharges the capacitors so that the information in them is not lost.

Dennard’s one-transistor design was a vast improvement over the six-transistor cell in use at that time. Dennard’s ability to use only a single metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor, called MOS, allowed his memory cell to be much smaller and simpler in design than its predecessor. MOS is a device that conducts electricity, amplifying the charge as the electricity is passed along.

Robert H. Dennard

In addition, Dennard and associates developed a set of consistent scaling principles for miniaturizing MOS transistors and the integrated circuits using them, which are the basis for today’s electronic microprocessor and DRAM chips. In the early 1970s the industry was concerned with how far MOS transistors could be miniaturized without affecting their switching ability.

Dennard’s IBM group introduced a theory, called constant-field scaling, which addressed these issues. This scaling allowed for computers to run faster on significantly less energy and thus be less costly to operate and is a major driver of the industry. Dennard’s 1974 paper on MOS transistor scaling is universally referenced and has been reprinted as a “Classic Paper” in the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

After earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1958, Dennard spent his entire professional career in various positions at IBM, including the prestigious title of IBM Fellow beginning in 1979. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1984.

Tags Robert Dennard

Mind & Brain

Forget brainstorming, try brainwriting!

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 5, 2009

Given difficult business issues such as rapidly emerging technologies, shrinking budgets and growing global competition, generating creative solutions is imperative for organizations to survive and prosper.

However, the widely used process of brainstorming may not be nearly as effective as a technique called brainwriting, says Peter Heslin, an assistant professor of Management and Organization in SMU’s Cox School of Business.

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“The most widely adopted process for generating creative ideas within organizations is brainstorming,” said Heslin, who won the 2006 C. Jackson Grayson Endowed Faculty Innovation Award for excellence and creativity in teaching.

“Despite its immense popularity, when groups of people interact for the purpose of brainstorming, they significantly over-estimate their productivity and produce fewer unique ideas than nominal groups of people generating ideas alone.”

“When the stakes are high, group process innovations that enable even modest increases in the quality of ideas available for consideration could be of immense practical value,” Heslin says in an upcoming paper for the “Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.”

Heslin says that a key challenge for managers and scholars is identifying how groups can be more productive in generating ideas.

In contrast to the oral sharing of ideas in groups during brainstorming, brainwriting involves a group of people silently writing and sharing their written ideas. Research has revealed that brainwriting yields superior idea generation than either non-sharing or nominal groups. Groups that contain people with diverse but overlapping knowledge and skills tend to be particularly creative, he says.

Tags Cox School of Business, Peter Heslin

Health & Medicine Technology

Titanium-alloy technology simplifies dental implants

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 20, 2008

The Christmas tree that adorns the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering holiday card is more than a colorfully lit symbol of the season. It’s a unique and festive embodiment of the capabilities of the School’s cutting-edge laboratories.

Designed and built in the Lyle School’s Research Center for Advanced Manufacturing, called RCAM, the tree features a 3-dimensional lattice structure, known for its strength and versatility in a variety of manufacturing applications. With an actual height and width of about 5 inches, the tree was “grown” in a vacuum chamber from thin layers of titanium-alloy powder and shaped by the controlled melting of an electron beam.

In the holiday card photo by SMU photographer Hillsman S. Jackson, a high-power fiber laser stands in for a treetop star.

The RCAM refined the techniques used to construct the tree during a collaboration with Dallas’ Baylor College of Dentistry, says Radovan Kovacevic, Herman Brown Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the RCAM and the Center for Laser Aided Manufacturing, CLAM. Working with Baylor researchers, the RCAM has developed a way to manufacture a dental implant typically assembled from three pieces as a single component. The unitary construction results in devices with fewer weak points at which breaks can occur.

The technology has many other potential applications in industries ranging from medicine to aviation, Kovacevic says. In the meantime, he says, the Lyle Christmas tree “is a good example of the complexity we can achieve.” – Kathleen Tibbetts

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Radovan Kovacevic, SMU Research Center for Advanced Manufacturing