Kent Broyhill, James Moeser and Craig Broyhill view the newly rededicated Broyhill Fountain through a window at the Nebraska Union April 15. The Broyhills are the brothers of the late Lynn Diann Broyhill, whom the fountain memorializes. They attended ceremonies dedicating the renovation of the Nebraska Union and the fountain.

Smithsonian Lends NU Scarab Collection

Biodiversity Research Hinges on Insect Analysis

By Robert Sheldon, Public Relations

It only took one container. That's all the Smithsonian Institutions in Washington, D.C., listed on its manifest for a large shipment destined for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

But the container was a good-sized moving van, and it carried the Smithsonian's entire collection of scarab beetles-with the exception of the Smithsonian's dung beetles-to the university. The beetles made their journey packed into 46 cabinets and 37 computer boxes.

Brett Ratcliffe, professor and curator of entomology for the NU State Museum, and Mary Liz Jameson, visiting assistant professor in the museum, drove the truck from the nation's capital to the university, to which the Smithsonian is entrusting its collection of Scarabaeidae for the next 10 years at least, or for how ever long it takes to complete "off-site enhancment" of the collection.

"Off-site enhancement" includes the identification and curating of some quarter of a million Scarab specimens, a task which Smithsonian curators are not prepared to undertake.

"We already had one of the better scarab collections in North America," Ratcliffe said. "With the Smithsonian collections combined with ours, we probably have one of the best collections in the western hemisphere." Other older collections exist in Paris, Berlin and London, he said.

The collection's arrival at NU follows on the pair's success in securing a $740,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study New World Scarab beetles (there are 320 New World genera representing thousands of species), and train graduate students. The grant provided the foundation for bringing the national collection to Lincoln.

With two graduate students already working with Ratcliffe and Jameson and two more to come aboard soon, NU will have "the largest accumulation of specialists who work on scarab beetles of any laboratory in the world," Ratcliffe said. "This will give us extraordinary capabilities for providing service to the scientific community by getting the Smithsonian collection back to world-class status."

Together, the combined collections give NU's team of specialists a valuable tool to address broad questions of speciation and evolution, and the dispersal of plants and animals around the globe.

"Our task is not simply to discover new species and write them up. That in itself has no value. It's how we use that information that's important," Ratcliffe said.

Scientists have described perhaps one million different insects, he said. "But based on our studies, especially in tropical areas, we now 'guess-timate' that there may be as many as 10 million to 30 million different species of insects out there. And we are altering habitat so rapidly, we are losing species to extinction before we even know them. What potentially valuable things are we losing in the process?"

In addition to the grant to study New World scarabs, NSF has provided other grants to Ratcliffe and Jameson. One is specifically for research in Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, and the other provides $38,000 for new specimen cabinets to house the national collection.

Ratcliffe said NSF support is due to the high regard the agency has for the NU Museum's expertise in entomology. It also represents the agency's awareness that the nation is losing competent people who can identify animals from around the world.

"We're not training these people as much as we used to," Ratcliffe said. He regards the loss of such trained scientists as particularly regrettable in a time of biodiversity crisis, when so many species are becoming extinct. "Without people trained in taxonomy, we lose our ability to handle the problem."

Ratcliffe said that working on the collection will provide a "fabulous opportunity" to train graduate students in research, curating, databasing and managing an internationally important scientific resource. Each graduate student will participate in overseas research in one of the countries to be visited by Ratcliffe and Jameson.

"Each student has picked out a poorly known group of scarab beetles as the subject for a master's thesis or doctoral dissertation," Ratcliffe said. "In the end, they will have a record of everthing there is to be known about the beetle they chose"

"This kind of science is the fundamental building block to all other science," Ratcliffe said. "Those other sciences build on it. In the process of identifying something, you work out all the ecological relationships between the animals and their habitat. For future resource managers, such understandng is essential. If they don't have it, they aren't going to be able to manage resources, whether timberlands, water, plants , animals, or pharmaceuticals."

That scarab beetles are essential to environmental and biodiversity studies should be obvious when you realize that one in every four living things on Earth is a beetle, that scarabs, are the fifth largest family of beetles, and there are about 35,000 different species of scarab beetles worldwide, Ratcliffe sadi.

"A few are pests," he said. "Most are not. A lot of them are invaluable to humankind. Dung beetles, for example, recycle livestock waste in pastures. If they weren't there, waste would smother the grass and there wouldn't be a pasture."

Ratcliffe said that the loan to NU from the Smithsonian is renewable, and the off-site enhancement might take 20 years or longer to complete. An NU curator for more than 30 years, Ratcliffe has no intention of retiring before the job is finished.

"I love my job," said the entomologist who has been interested in insects since he was a youngster. "If I wasn't getting paid to do this, I'd still be doing it."

Web Designs for Real Clients

Construction Management Students Construct Web Pages

By Connie Walter, Engineering and Technology

Students in a construction management class at the College of Engineering and Technology aren't working on buildings right now.

Instead, they're building World Wide Web pages for four Nebraska businesses and will present their proposals from 6 to 8 p.m. April 28 during a special class session in Nebraska Hall Room 145W.

The class, Project Management Web Design, was developed by Mostafa Khattab, associate professor of construction management , and focuses on networking among participants in a construction project.

"Developing a network between the participants ... allows them to communicate different issues related to a construction project," Khattab said, including specifications sharing, problems with the site, scheduling, budgeting and even meeting minutes. "If you are not in town and you want to know what is happening with your project, you can look at the Web site."

The class is a testing ground for Global Project Management Solutions, a software developed specifically for Web-based project management by Khattab and NU graduate Nathan Wilhelmi. Based on his contacts with other construction management departments, Khattab said he believes this course is the only one of its kind being offered in the country.

After designing their own pages for practice, 10 students began building Web pages for two construction organizations (Associated General Contractors-Nebraska Building Chapter and National Electric Contractors, Nebraska Chapter) and two firms (Floors Inc. of Lincoln and Ward Plumbing and Heating of Valentine).

Working in pairs, the groups designed two sites for each construction business. The students will act as Web-site consultants, competing to win the business of each firm. Those firms will then choose the sites they want.

Senior Steven Marquez said the course and the projects will give him and others in the class an edge when they graduate.

"We'll hit the ground running," said Marquez, a company commander of an Army Reserve unit in Omaha and a highway design tech one with the Nebraska Department of Roads. The management and Web-development skills they are learning will make the students "a viable part of any company," he said.

And that's not just because they can build Web pages, said Robert Danielson, a senior in construction management. Students have learned a good deal about marketing, time management and problem solving, Danielson said. "(We) can help companies be a lot more productive, solve problems ... set up new technologies."

Students and teacher have learned a great deal from the class. The students came in with no background in Web development and designed sites from top to bottom. "This class proves if you give students the opportunity to learn new technology, they will," Khattab said.

CLASS Website Explores Balkans Issues

Concerned families of Nebraska National Guard members flying re-fueling missions and conducting operations in medical units in the Balkans welcome any information that will help them understand the conflict.

A new website, http://www. CLASS.com, provides an easily accessible, in-depth perspective for Guard families and anyone else seeking to understand the centuries-old hostilities in the region.

"From where we sit this website is an excellent way to help Guard families and others understand exactly why we are conducting operations in the Balkans," said Lt. Col. Buddy Smith of the Nebraska Air National Guard. The Air Guard's 155th Air Refueling Wing and the Nebraska Army National Guard 24th Medical Company both are supporting the NATO effort in the Balkans.

"We are proud of our brave men and women serving during this conflict. This interactive technology will allow family and friends, and all interested parties, to understand the history of the region and the conflict in the Balkans," said Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.).

The interactive multimedia site details the historical and cultural roots of the conflicts in Kosovo, Bosnia and their neighboring states in this volatile region. CLASS.com, a private for-profit entity of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that markets web-based, Internet-delivered educational products, and the university's Division of Continuing Studies, are providing the website as a public service.

The website contains portions of an online high school course called Global Perspectives: Bosnia, developed by Nebraska's federally funded CLASS Project. Global Perspectives: Bosnia was the first of 55 web-based CLASS courses being developed by the Division of Continuing Studies and Nebraska Educational Telecommunications.

The idea for the Bosnia course originated in 1995, when the war in Bosnia had already claimed the lives of almost 300,000 people and the Dayton Accords seemed to promise peace in the region. Kerrey, an enthusiastic proponent of web-based education who was instrumental in securing funding for the CLASS Project, believed that Bosnia was an ideal initial subject for the innovative multimedia courses CLASS would develop.

"This is web-based education at its best, serving as a valuable learning tool for all who visit and use the website," Kerrey said.

The course and website illustrate the power of web-based education to overcome barriers of time, distance and geography and make knowledge accessible to anyone who wants to learn, at any time, anywhere.

Global Perspectives: Bosnia traces the Balkan conflict from its roots in the region's two-thousand-year history to present-day video interviews with Bosnian refugees living in the United States. Through extensive use of videos, interactive learning activities, and graphic illustrations the course builds a clear picture of the region's history and people. By clicking on icons representing people, events, the past, and the world, the user can explore topics ranging from the ethnicity and religion of the people to geography to descriptions of current events.

Global Perspectives: Bosnia has been updated for the website with information on the current conflict and expanded content on Kosovo. The videos on the site may take several minutes to download on some systems, said Art Zygielbaum, director of research and development for Nebraska Educational Telecommuni-cations. This situation is remedied for high school students taking the course by providing CD-ROMS containing course multimedia components, an option also being explored for website users. The site's information will be continually updated and the technology modified to make it accessible to the widest possible audience, Zygielbaum said.

The CLASS courses, which by 2001 will include an entire accredited high school diploma sequence, will be available for purchase through CLASS.com. Students interested in registering for CLASS courses can register at http://class.unl.edu or through the Division of Continuing Studies.

NU Project Places Speech Therapists in Rural Schools

By Mary Jane Bruce, Public Relations

A five-year program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has been successful in helping train speech therapists and place them in hard-to-fill positions in rural areas and inner city schools.

Project Return placed 24 speech/language pathologists with master's degrees from the university in school districts across the country, including 19 jobs in Nebraska. Four more students will graduate from the program over the next year.

Project Return is funded with a $852,110 federal grant used to pay tuition and a monthly stipend for graduate students accepted into the program. As part of their training, students take specialized coursework focusing on the needs of culturally diverse populations and the unique issues faced by teachers in rural and inner-city schools.

For every year they are part of Project Return, students promise to work two years in shortage areas. Graduates of the program are working in Omaha Public Schools, rural schools serving the northeast Nebraska counties of Antelope, Boyd, Holt, Madison, Stanton, Wheeler and Pierce and in the Sutton, Palmyra-Bennet, Seward and Humphrey public schools. Other graduates can be found in Baltimore, Seattle, Des Moines, Iowa, and Mankato, Minn.

David and Jean Smith in the department of chemistry have recently received more than $1.5 million over the next five years to continue their research into changes to the eye frequently associated with the cataract condition.

Nearly everyone, who lives long enough, develops cataract. Cataract is a condition in which the lens of the eye becomes cloudy, preventing a person from seeing clearly. It is the number one cause of blindness worldwide. In the United States, surgery to remove a cloudy lens is the most frequently performed operation for persons over 60 years old.

The cause of a cataract is not yet known, but one hypothesis is that, as a person ages, the concentrated solution of proteins that form the lens changes, no longer packing together closely and losing some of their ability to form a transparent lens. In the lens of a young person, these proteins are closely packed and allow light to be transmitted. As a person grows older, new proteins are formed, but the old ones remain in the lens, subject to chemical reactions and undergoing modifications which may lead to a cataract condition.

The research will be funded by the National Eye Institute. This project, which has been on-going for the past 10 years, involves isolating proteins forms donor lenses. Through the Center for Mass Spectrometry at the University of Nebraska, the proteins in the lens are studied to identify changes in their molecular masses. The masses of the proteins can reveal the chemical reactions that have occurred in the lens. When these changes have been identified, further research will target prevention of cataracts by changes in diet, lifestyle or medication.

The grant includes funding for supplies, chemicals and instruments, salaries of graduate students and post-doctoral research assistants, as well as $650,000 granted to the University of Nebraska to cover expenses involved in administering the grant and paying for the use of laboratories.