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  July 23 , 2001: Highlights

Distributed Terascale Facility to Commence with $53 Million NSF Award
The world’s first multi-site supercomputing system — Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF) — will be built and operated with $53-million from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The DTF will perform 11.6-trillion calculations per second and store more than 450-trillion bytes of data, with a comprehensive infrastructure called the “TeraGrid” to link computers, visualization systems and data at four sites through a 40-billion bits-per-second optical network. The National Science Board (NSB) today approved a three-year NSF award, pending negotiations between NSF and a consortium led by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Illinois and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in California, the two leading-edge sites of NSF’s Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI).
More... (posted August 9, 2001)

Dinosaur heads and skull Dinosaurs' Large Noses May Have Been Key to Physiological Processes
With only bones for clues, scientists continue to puzzle over many details of dinosaur appearances and physiology. Detective work by a paleontologist at Ohio University now indicates that the creatures' fleshy nasal passages were larger than had been thought, which could lead to more-realistic depictions and greater understanding of their respiratory functions. In the August 3 issue of the journal Science, National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported researcher Lawrence Witmer reveals that nostrils on many dinosaurs were much farther from the eyes and closer to the mouths than previously depicted.
More... (posted August 2, 2001)

Two halves of a newly discovered lower molar from Alayla Earliest Human Ancestors Discovered in Ethiopia
Anthropologists have discovered the remains of the earliest known human ancestor in Ethiopia, dating to between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago and which predate the previously oldest-known fossils by almost a million years. The previous discovery of the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus was up to this point the oldest known hominid, the primate zoological family that includes all species on the human side of the evolutionary split with chimpanzees. The fossil finds, reported in the July 12 issue of Nature, were made by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists over a four-year period in Ethiopia's Middle Awash study area, about 140 miles northeast of the capital, Addis Ababa. To the team of scientists, the discovery represents more evidence to confirm Darwin's conclusion that the earliest humans, or hominids, arose in Africa.
More... (posted July 23, 2001)

Image of Ocean-Floor Vent Scientists Discover Secrets of 'Lost City'
Hydrothermal vent structures serendipitously discovered last December in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, including a massive 18-story vent taller than any seen before, are formed in a very different way than ocean-floor vents studied since the 1970s. The findings are published by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers in the July 12 edition of Nature. This new class of hydrothermal vents apparently forms where circulating seawater reacts directly with mantle rocks, as opposed to where seawater interacts with basaltic rocks from magma chambers beneath the seafloor.
More... (posted July 23, 2001)

Image of Termite Microbiologists Find a New Source of Nitrogen Fixation
Microbiologists have discovered that a type of bacteria found in termite guts and in fresh and salt water plays a major role in the process of nitrogen fixation. All organisms require the element to survive. In the June 29 issue of the journal Science, a team led by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded microbiologist John Breznak of Michigan State University (MSU) reports that spirochetes - spiral and wavy-shaped bacteria -- are important providers of nitrogen in termites, whose ability to thrive despite a nitrogen-poor diet of plant matter had posed a decades-old puzzle.
More... (posted July 23, 2001)

Image of ContinentsNew Database to Save Endanged Languages
The emergence of English and Spanish as the dominant languages of global commerce is causing many other tongues to fall into disuse. This trend alarms social scientists worldwide because linguistic research not only provides cultural information, but also insight into the diverse capabilities of the human mind. To combat the decrease in the number and diversity of languages and to capitalize on a growing store of digitized linguistic data, a team of National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers led by Anthony Aristar at Wayne State University is developing an endangered languages database and a central information server that will allow users to access the material remotely by computer.
More... (posted July 23, 2001)


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