Xiao Cheng Zeng, associate professor of chemistry and a model of his flat ice.

'Nebraska Ice' Is Flatter than Platte

Scientists Chip Away at Mysteries of Water and Ice

By Tom Simons, Public Relations

Water is one of the most ubiquitous substances on earth. It covers three-fifths of the globe and is essential for life as we know it - but scientists are far from understanding all of its fundamental properties, particularly at the nanoscale level.

That's gradually changing, and another piece of the H2O puzzle has fallen into place with the publication of a paper by two Japanese chemists, Kenichiro Koga of Fukuoka University of Education and Hideki Tanaka of Okayama University, and Xiao Cheng Zeng, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the Nov. 30 edition of Nature, the international weekly journal of science.

In the paper, Koga, Tanaka and Zeng describe how they have induced water to form glass instead of ice crystals when it is cooled to minus-10 degrees Celsius in a slit one nanometer (one-billionth of a meter) thick.

The paper grew out of a discovery Zeng and Koga made three years ago when Koga was a postdoctoral fellow in Zeng's lab in UNL's Hamilton Hall doing basic research in nanoscience, a major research area at UNL and for the National Science Foundation. Using a computer model, they made the startling discovery that water contracts rather than expands when it is frozen under extremes of pressure, temperature and confinement (493 atmospheres at minus-40 degrees Celsius between two water-repellent plates spaced one nanometer apart).

In the computer model, the water froze into ice crystals with the hexagonal structure of ice in which each water molecule has a hydrogen bond with its four nearest neighbors - but differed from normal ice in that its crystals were two- rather than three-dimensional.

"We were looking for new water glass, or ice glass, but we accidentally found this new crystal. My first reaction was that we had to have made mistakes in creating the computer model, that we would have to go back and double-check everything," Zeng said. "We ran many, many trials for about six months, but we found the water froze into crystals and shrank every time."

Zeng said he informally calls the ice "Nebraska" ice because the name Nebraska comes from the Otoe word for "flat water," and this two-dimensional ice is as flat as flat can be.

The glass Koga and Zeng expected to find would have had a mixture of pentagon, hexagon and heptagon molecular structures. They didn't think it would be that hard to produce it, Zeng said, because it's usually easier to get glass than crystals in computer simulations. But to produce the laboratory results reported in this week's Nature, it has taken another three years, with the collaboration of Tanaka, one of the world's leading experts on ice, and grant support by the Nebraska Research Initiative through UNL's Center for Materials Research and Analysis, the NSF and its Japanese equivalent, and the Office of Naval Research.

"Dr. Koga introduced some 'frustration,' a trick people like to use to make glass, to prevent the growth to true crystal," Zeng said. "The frustration he introduced was to hold the two water-repellent plates immobile during the freezing process. This time, he was successful.

"This glass is unique because it not only shows a new ice-glass structure, but it also shows a new piece of important physics. It has a strong first-order transition, meaning you have a large energy change from the liquid phase to the solid phase. When you make regular window glass, the energy change is pretty smooth as a function of temperature, so some people say it's not really a phase transition. But this is a genuine strong first-order transition, which is very, very rare."

Zeng said he doesn't foresee immediate applications for the discoveries, which is often the case with basic research, particularly in nanoscale research. He said the immediate reward is the joy of discovery.

"Being able to find a new ice structure is very exciting because of our curiosity as chemists," he said. "Water is such a fundamental substance that it deserves a lot of attention and we want to understand it from every aspect, from its nanoscale behavior, from its molecular properties, and all the way up. What we understand about water is just the tip of the iceberg."

UNL Alumnus Brian Halla (left) tours the Kauffman center with Steve Dunbar.

'It Just Feels Academic'

Kauffman Building Nearing Completion

By Kim Hachiya, Public Relations

When Steve Dunbar guides visitors through the new Esther Kauffman Academic Residential Center, he gets more animated as he walks through each hallway and room.

"I just love the view from this corridor," he says as he picks his way past construction equipment and leads a group down a hallway in the building's west wing. "It has such great views of the fountain, the library. It just feels so academic."

As the founding director of the J.D. Edwards Honors Program in Computer Science and Management, Dunbar was one of several who offered comments and input on the design of the Kauffman building, which will house the program. Now, just weeks from completion, the $14.7 million project is nearly ready to accept its first complement of residential students who will study and learn in the state-of-the-art, unique combination of residence hall and classrooms.

Funded by a gift from Ed and Carole McVaney of Denver, the building is named in honor of Carole McVaney's mother. Construction on the site north of the Nebraska Union began in 1999. Now, about 18 months later, the 81,000-square-foot building is almost completed.

The building was designed by Bahr, Vermeer and Haecker and Sampson Construction Co. was the contractor.

Dunbar said the building was modeled after corporate campuses such as Microsoft's in Redmond, Wash., and the J.D. Edwards Co. in Denver. That means lots of breakout space to encourage conversation and collaboration and a conscious effort to look homey and inviting and less overtly "educational." Banks of windows take advantage of natural light and give the neutral earth tones in the building an especially warm feel.

The main entrance faces north. A mall will extend toward Vine Street once the Lyman and Bancroft buildings are razed. The south façade, featuring the academic and residential wings, embraces a courtyard.

"One of the challenges was designing a building that has no real backside," Dunbar said. "It's like a theater in the round."

The building's Great Hall will function as a living room and community gathering space for the residents. Tables for informal study flank a fireplace. Once a week, all members of the program will gather for formal meetings in this room.

The Great Hall can seat 150 banquet style. A kitchen area was built in to finish food brought from the Selleck kitchens. Most of the time, students will eat at Selleck, most likely accessing the older hall via a new under-street tunnel connecting the two complexes.

The building has living space for 120 undergraduate students and some possibly some graduate students and faculty. Junior-senior suites include a sitting room, kitchenette, bathroom and separate sleeping rooms for each resident. Sophomore suites lack the sitting room area and freshman suites feature shared sleeping quarters.

Each suite is rich in dataports and other technology that the students will need in the program.

The west side main floor has five classrooms that are multi-media ready with dataports, electrical outlets, audio-visual outlets, teaching podium and other amenities. Seating is flexible. Two classrooms can seat 35 students each; the others are designed for 20 students.

The hallways feature "huddle spaces" and breakout rooms ready for small group meetings and team projects. Each space has numerous dataports and electrical outlets.

The entire building, probably the most "wired" on campus, will feature about 600 dataports. Other academic amenities include four study rooms, a presentation room where students can demonstrate their work to each other and to clients, two computer labs (networking and multimedia), a copier room and a writing lab.

Office space for the program administrators, faculty and the residence hall manager and apartments for the residence hall manager and visiting faculty occupy the main floor's east wing.

Dunbar is excited about the program's possibilities.

"It's really satisfying to see it come true. I'm really anxious to get into it and I'm interested in seeing how the students will interact and use the building," he said. "For faculty, this is really unique. I don't know of anything, anywhere that so completely blends academics and residential (aspects of learning)."

Tracy Aksamit, assistant manager of architectural and engineering services at UNL has been the project manager. She said the building has been a fun one to over see.

"We design buildings now with a 100-year lifespan," she said, "but we also have to weigh the costs against quality."

Dunbar said the building would be substantially completed in mid-January with faculty and others moving in starting in mid February. "We'll kind of take a shakedown cruise into April," he said. The first students will move in for the fall semester.

A CSPAN video camera rolls as UNL senior broadcasting major Mike Ruhlman gets an autographed copy of Voices of Wounded Knee from author William S.E. Coleman. Ruhlman says the book-published by University of Nebraska Press-will be a Christmas gift for his father.

NU Press Author Featured by Book TV

By David Fitzgibbon, Public Relations

University of Nebraska Press author William S.E. Coleman will be in the national spotlight when a Lincoln book signing event airs on CSPAN television's "Book TV." The broadcast date has not yet been set.

Coleman promoted his new book Voices of Wounded Knee Nov. 28 during a videotaped discussion and book signing at Barnes & Noble South Pointe. While in Lincoln, he also appeared on Nebraska Educational Television's Roger Welsch &-set to air in the Spring-and did a Nebraska Public Radio interview which aired Nov. 29 and will be rebroadcast later this month.

In Voices of Wounded Knee, Coleman brings together accounts of participants and observers to reconstruct the massacre that occurred Dec. 29, 1890.

A history refresher: As about 350 Sioux Indians made their way to refuge at the Pine Ridge Reservation, they were intercepted by U.S. soldiers. The Sioux were brought to camp on the Banks of Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. As Chief Big Foot sat among his warriors and powwowed with officers, a shot rang out, followed by volley after volley into the Sioux camp. When the smoke cleared approximately 300 Sioux and 25 soldiers lay dead.

After finding most books give little credence to Native accounts of the battle, author Coleman concentrated on accumulating accounts of survivors on both sides. The result, Coleman says, is a scholarly book that reads like a novel. The experience of writing the book changed him.

"The further I got into the evidence, the angrier I got," Coleman said in response to an audience question during the CSPAN taping. "We've done something very terrible to a marvelous civilization. It was worse than I thought it was."

Coleman, a professor of theater at Drake University in Des Moines, spent nearly 30 years interviewing and gathering documents to create the book. From here he says he may follow his love of theater and work on a screenplay. "I don't think at my age, I'm going to embark on another 30-year project."

Textile, Clothing and Design students work on a mural at the Matt Talbot Kitchen, 19th and R streets, as part of a class. Students in the class developed the design for the mural, negotiated with vendors for project support as well as painted the 160-foot mural themselves.

Food for the Soul

Students in textiles, clothing and design 121, "Design Essentials," taught by associate professor Wendy Weiss, are painting a full scale wall mural at the Matt Talbot Kitchen at 19th and R streets.

Rita Kean, board member at Matt Talbot and chair of the Department of textiles, clothing and design, asked Weiss if she would be interested in developing the project for one of her classes. Weiss readily agreed.

During late November and early December, the semester's worth of preparation is coming to fruition as the students paint the mural on the wall.

Weather has been problematic for the class, but has not diminished the approximately 40 students' enthusiasm for the project. With the days warming up to the 40s, students are committed to completing the project by the end of the semester. Diamond Vogel Paints has become a partner in the project and has donated gallons of oil-based paint, in primary colors, for the students to mix the complex palette their design requires.

The students have been fully involved in all aspects of the project, from presenting preliminary drawings to staff and users of the kitchen, developing design proposals based on their feedback, to negotiating with local vendors for support for the project and of course to the actual painting. They spent many hours translating their preliminary ideas into the dimensions required for the project, painted color renderings of all the design motifs, and then enlarged the scale drawing using a grid system they drew on the approximately 160-foot long wall.