GAINESVILLE, Fla. — “What brings you in to see me today?”

“Part of my left breast has been painful for awhile.”

“Can you lie down so that I can examine you?”

It sounds like a snippet of conversation between doctor and patient. But the doctor, in this recent exchange at the University of Florida campus, was actually an engineering doctoral student — and the patient a “mixed reality human” composed of a life-sized computer avatar on a flat screen and a mannequin with a prosthetic breast.

Intimate procedures such as breast exams, while a routine and critical part of medical care, are notoriously tough to teach. Medical students practice on disembodied prosthetics but have limited opportunities to practice exams on real people — especially patients who have an abnormality. In a collaboration with the Augusta, Ga.-based Medical College of Georgia and three other universities, UF engineers have crafted a solution: a hybrid computer/mannequin that helps train students not only how to correctly perform a breast exam — but also how to talk to, and glean information from, the patient during the procedure.

The project is important because correct examinations and good doctor-patient communication are critical to successful medical treatment, said Benjamin Lok, a UF assistant professor of computer and information sciences and engineering who heads the effort.

“Studies have shown that communication skills are actually a better predictor of outcome than medical skills,” Lok said. With the virtual patient, “all of a sudden, students have to not only practice their technique, but they also have to work on their empathy.”

The mixed reality human, named Amanda Jones, “talks” to students, and they respond via a computer speech and voice recognition system tailored by doctoral student Aaron Kotranza, Lok and others on the team. Her physical form — a mannequin — is immobile, but her virtual representation, created by the engineers, moves and speaks from a large flat screen above her physical body. Students can also view Jones through a head-mounted display.

The interaction is unscripted, but it follows a typical pattern for a woman’s visit and examination — with both verbal and tactile challenges for the medical students.

The student must tease out Jones’ medical history, listen to her concerns and respond to her questions. Just as in a real exam, this interaction occurs simultaneously with the physical examination. For that, the student must use the correct palpitating technique and apply the proper pressure. Sensors within the prosthetic breast — developed by Dr. Carla Pugh at Northwestern University — provide pressure information depicted by colors on the virtual breast, guiding students in the exams. The engineers can program the system to include or exclude an abnormality — and the attendant conversation.

It sounds awkward, and to be sure, the speech recognition element has its hiccups.

But especially for students reared in an era of sophisticated three-dimensional video games, the system turns out to be surprisingly convincing. The researchers have tested it on about 100 medical students so far, all from the Medical College of Georgia, where co-principal investigator Dr. D. Scott Lind is based. One of their most consistent and prominent findings: Students do not hesitate to express empathy to Jones.

“We have found that they will try to comfort the virtual human,” Kotranza said. “They’ll often touch the mannequin in order to comfort her.”

A pilot study has concluded that students who practiced with a mixed realty human improved their communication skills and their technical abilities, but more trials are needed to determine whether those skills persist once the students examine real patients.

That said, it seems obvious that more practice students get, the better off they will be. Lok said the mixed reality patient is not intended to replace real volunteers - far from it. But students typically have only a handful of opportunities with those volunteers before graduating. The mixed reality patient can add to their training while making it easier for teachers to help students with both their conversational and medical techniques.

“What happens if you find something in a woman’s breast? How do you talk to the patient?” Lok asked. “Students have to somehow build their database of experience.”

While the breast exam research continues, the team also intends to explore other intimate exams. Next in line: prostate exams. Lok and the students already have prosthetics they intend to couple with a virtual male patient similar to the breast exam patient.

The other institutions participating in the project are the University of Central Florida, the University of Georgia and Northwestern University. The research, part of a larger effort involving a number of different virtual patient projects, is supported by grants of about $2.8 million primarily from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

A team of scientists and engineers from Stanford University, the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the first to create one of two basic types of semiconductors using an exotic, new, one-atom-thick material called graphene. The findings could help open the door to computer chips that are not only smaller and hold more memory — but are also more adept at uploading large files, downloading movies, and other data- and communication-intensive tasks.

A paper about the findings, co-authored by eight researchers, is set to be published Friday in the journal Science.

“There are still enormous challenges to really put it into products, but I think this really could play an important role,” said Jing Guo, a UF assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of two UF authors who contributed.

The team made, modeled and tested what is known in the industry as an “n-type” transistor out of graphene nanoribbon. Graphene is a form of carbon that has been called “atomic chicken wire,” thanks to its honeycomb-like structure of interconnected hexagons. A graphene nanoribbon is a nanometer-wide strip cut from a graphene layer.

The team’s feat is significant because basic transistors come in only two forms — “p-type” and “n-type” — referring to the presence of holes and electrons, respectively. “P-type” graphene semiconductors had already been achieved, so the manufacture of an “n-type” graphene semiconductor completes the fundamental building blocks.

“This work is essentially finding a new way to modify a graphene nanoribbon to make it able to conduct electrons,” Guo said. “This addresses a very fundamental requirement for graphene to be useful in the production of electronics.”

First isolated in 2004, graphene has spurred a great excitement in the chip research community because of its promising electrical properties and bare-minimum atomic size.

Scientists and engineers believe that after decades of development, silicon is fast reaching the upper limits of its physical performance. If the rapid evolution of ever-shrinking, ever-more-powerful, ever-cheaper semiconductors is to continue, they say, new materials must be found to complement or even replace silicon. Graphene is among the leading candidates for these nanoelectronics of the future.

Researchers at a number of institutions have reported using graphene to create a variety of simple transistor devices recently, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reporting in March the successful test of a graphene chip that can multiply electrical signals.

Guo said the team built and modeled the first-ever graphene nanoribbon n-type “field-effect transistor” using a new and novel method that involves affixing nitrogen atoms to the edge of the nanoribbon. The method also has the potential to make the edges of the nanometer-wide ribbon smoother, which is a key factor to make the transistor faster.

“This uses chemistry to really address the major challenges of electrical engineering when you get into such these small nanoscale dimensionalities,” he said. “It is very unusual for electrical engineers, who are used to dealing with bulk structures of at least millions of atoms.”

As exciting as the findings are, researchers must overcome many challenges before graphene semiconductors could be manufactured in bulk for use in consumer products, Guo said. For one thing, graphene is extremely expensive, so its cost would have to be reduced substantially. Also, to mimic or exceed silicon, engineers would have to figure out how to build not just one, but billions of transistors, on a tiny graphene fleck.

Five Stanford researchers led by Hongjie Dai, J.G. Jackson-C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry, did the experimental work behind the findings. Guo and fellow author Youngki Yoon, who earned his doctoral degree from UF last December and is now at the University of California, Berkeley, did the computer modeling and simulation. The team also included Peter Webber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Said Dai, “This work is just a beginning. It suggests that graphene chemistry and chemistry at the edges are rich areas to explore for both fundamental and practical reasons for this material.”

The UF portion of the research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The Stanford portion was funded by MARCO MSD, Intel and the Office of Naval Research.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Trainers have used it for decades to help athletes build muscle. Late-night TV commercials hawk it as an effortless flab buster.

But a University of Florida engineering researcher says electrical stimulation — a simple, decades-old technique to prompt muscles to contract — can be combined with sophisticated computer learning technology to help people regain more precise, more life-like control of paralyzed limbs.

Although his research is still exploring the fundamentals, his progress so far suggests computer-adapted electrical stimulation could one day help the estimated 700,000 Americans who suffer from strokes and the 11,000 who suffer from cord injuries annually.

“It’s an adaptive scheme to do electrical stimulation more efficiently, with less fatigue and more accuracy,” said Warren Dixon, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, explaining that existing techniques do little more than apply a set current to a designated muscle.

Stroke victims may be among the first to benefit. Dixon said stroke sufferers who work at regaining the ability to walk often unconsciously drag their toes, causing them to stumble. He said his goal is to develop techniques for a wearable, pacemaker-sized device. The device would deliver just the right stimulation to the calf at just the right moment in a person’s gait, lifting the toe just enough to avoid a stumble and walk naturally.

The device would adapt to individuals, adjusting itself to weight, activity and diet, he said. It might even act as a kind of robotic therapist to the patient, guiding him or her in the proper action while very slowly backing off its own electrical input.

Dixon, who has published several papers on his research since receiving a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Development Career Development Program award in 2006, recently authored a paper accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. Publication is anticipated for this summer.

At its most basic level, electrical stimulation is a simple and well-understood process.

Electrical pads are placed on the skin, and when a small current is applied, the muscle contracts involuntarily.

Trainers have long used the technique, which may cause a slight tingling sensation but is not painful, to build or tone athletes’ muscles. Electrical stimulation is also at the heart of products touted, for example, to help people build “six-pack abs” without working out.

But the most promising application may be in physical rehabilitation, Dixon said. Specialists already use electrical stimulation to prevent unused muscle from atrophying – in effect, “exercising” the muscle even though the patient has lost the ability to move it herself.

Physical therapists and some products also use electrical stimulation for purposeful movement. One commercially available walker, for example, taps preprogrammed stimulation patterns to help paralyzed people stand for brief periods of time.

Dixon said that while the current state-of-the-art shows the potential, it only applies a predetermined and relatively high voltage to a designated muscle.

That means that while the muscle may move, it can easily fatigue, becoming less responsive and sore. Also, electrically stimulated movements tend to be rough, without the degree of control and variation — the subtle bends or twists that make all the difference in so much common movement — that people with functioning limbs take for granted.

Dixon and his graduate students are developing methods aimed at improving that model using techniques of “adaptive learning,” or giving a computer the ability to learn from a patient’s actions and reactions and adjust its muscular stimulation accordingly.

One of their main tools: a standard leg lift, or leg extension, exercise machine modified with electrical pads and sensors, and networked with a computer. The system measures and compares electrical stimulation and subsequent leg movement and direction — the “patient” is actually a healthy graduate student — to steadily determine pathways to become more sensitive and responsive to the user.

“We start with a desired trajectory, we do the leg extension, encode that in a computer and measure the motion,” Dixon said. “Then we develop control methods to intelligently stimulate the muscle to make it behave the way it should.”

The other authors of the IEEE paper are Nitin Sharma and Keith Stegath, both graduate students in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Chris Michael Gregory, a research assistant professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions.

The FDA late last week gave permission for Quick-Med Technologies Inc. to begin selling its “NIMBUS” barrier gauze wound care dressings after reviewing the dressing in a rare clearance process used only for medical devices for which there is no equivalent FDA-cleared wound dressing.

The dressing is unique in its ability to retain its antimicrobial properties without allowing any bacteria to migrate back into the wound, where they interfere with healing and can worsen infection, said Chris Batich, a professor of materials science and engineering and one of three UF inventors of the technology.

The fact that the antimicrobial agents remain permanently bonded to the gauze means that the technology is effective for longer periods, allowing longer intervals between changing the dressing, which speeds up the healing process. Neither blood, urine nor sweat dull its capacity to kill microbes — including such well-known pathogens as MRSA, VRE and Escherichia coli — drawn from the wound into the absorbent dressing or arriving from the air in the room. Not only that, but the dressing is less costly than similar treatments, and can cope with wounds that leak larger amounts of pus and other fluids, Batich said.

“You could potentially leave it on a longer period of time,” Batich said. “And even if it’s on a shorter period of time, all this toxic material from the bacteria doesn’t get back into the wound where it can worsen the infection. It makes a very effective barrier.”

The FDA cleared the NIMBUS gauze in its De Novo process, designed for medical devices that are unlike any currently on the market. It is one of about three dozen medical devices cleared as part of the accelerated process in the last decade. By comparison, the traditional process, for devices “substantially equivalent to existing devices,” is used about 3,000 times per year.

The other inventors of the technology are Greg Schultz, director of the UF Institute for Wound Research, and Bruce Mast, a plastic surgeon formerly at UF now in private practice in Gainesville.

Quick-Med Technologies is a small, publicly traded company in Gainesville that develops technologies and licenses them to partner companies for commercialization. It has licensed the NIMBUS barrier gauze to Derma Sciences, which plans to market it starting this June under its trade name, BIOGUARD.

The FDA clearance “is an important milestone for Quick-Med and will be a predicate for other medical devices incorporating the NIMBUS technology,” said J. Ladd Greeno, chief executive officer of Quick-Med, in a Quick-Med press release.

So says a new FEMA-commissioned report from the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. Peter Sheng, a University of Florida professor of coastal engineering, was one of the chief scientific contributors to the report published late last week.

“We’re calling for new maps, and we’re also calling for FEMA to update their technology,” Sheng said. “Their current methodology is getting very old.”

FEMA uses flood maps to set flood insurance rates, regulate development and inform those who live in the “100-year” floodplain of potential hazards. FEMA’s Map Modernization Program of 2003 to 2008 resulted in digital flood maps for 92 percent of the continental U.S. population. Most live in areas that had outdated or no maps.

However, after a $1 billion investment, only 21 percent of the population has maps that meet all of FEMA’s data quality standards, the National Research Council said

For this reason, FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration asked the research council to examine the factors that affect flood map accuracy. FEMA also sought to assess the costs and benefits of producing more accurate maps and find ways to improve mapping and management of flood-related data.

In response, the research council committee, the NAS Committee on FEMA Flood Mapping Accuracy, collected and analyzed information on selected streams in test states of Florida and North Carolina and on the economic costs and benefits of creating new digital flood maps in North Carolina.

The committee’s report concludes that the costs for improving flood maps — including analyzing flood-related data and updating regulations — would be outweighed by benefits.

These include not only more accurate flood maps, which would help reduce loss of life, property, and businesses, but also more efficient planning and response for emergency services and preservation of natural functions of floodplains.

Sheng said the 13 committee members spent two years researching the material that went into the report’s conclusions. His responsibility, he said, was to produce the section on coastal flood mapping. He concluded that FEMA, which continues to use flood modeling methods rooted in 1970s-era research, needs to modernize.

“Academics have developed new models and new technologies that lead to more accurate predictions,” he said, adding that the agency currently uses a simple, one-dimensional model to forecast wave action combined with storm surge. “We are recommending that they start doing a two-dimensional surge-wave model,” he said.

He said the updated models will not necessarily cause flood zones to grow or shrink, but rather that predictions will be more accurate.

“The uncertainty comes from the topological data and the way you do modeling, and we are trying to remove the uncertainties,” he said. “In some places, the projected flood levels could go higher, while in other places, they might go lower.”

Sheng is a veteran researcher in the field of flood and storm surge research and modeling. Among other efforts, he heads a Florida Sea Grant-sponsored project to test a new storm surge modeling system in Florida. He is leading experiments on storm surge and inundation models for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and co-developing a regional storm surge forecasting system for NOAA and the Office of Naval Research.

Kurt Gurley, a UF associate professor of civil and coastal engineering who conducts research on home vulnerability during hurricanes, said homeowners should take advantage of the six months before hurricane season to evaluate their homes, especially if the houses are at least 15 or 20 years old.

“Essentially, the rule of thumb, which is not always exact, is the older the home that you live in, the more likely it is that you’re going to want to have some kind of evaluation performed,” Gurley said.

Florida residents may have even more reason than usual to be concerned after hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University predicted 14 named storms in the 2009 season, including seven hurricanes — three of them major.

Hurricane season starts June 1 and continues until Nov. 30.

The 2008 season saw above-average activity, with 16 named storms and eight hurricanes.

Gurley said Florida homeowners should consider redoing their roofs if their homes have old shingles. They should also check the braces on the garage door and the connections between the roof and walls, he said.

If the roof needs new shingles, consider asking the contractor to also install a secondary water barrier on the seams below the shingles, Gurley added. That way, even if the shingles do come off in a hurricane, the extra barrier will help keep water from seeping into the home, he said.

He suggested visiting the Web sites of the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, a nonprofit organization, and the Institute for Business and Home Safety for more tips on evaluating a house.

In the long term, Gurley said, he and other researchers are looking into how Florida’s building codes could be changed to ensure that newer homes are as safe as possible for hurricane season.

He said research teams at UF are working with the home-building industry and the Florida Building Commission, which recommends changes to the state’s building code, to determine the most cost-effective improvements to home building in Florida.

“It’s pretty easy on paper to design a hurricane-proof home, but it’s going to cost a lot of money if the sky’s the limit,” he said.

University of Florida materials science and engineers have achieved a new record in efficiency of blue organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs. Because blue is essential to white light, the advance helps overcome a hurdle to lighting that is much more efficient than compact fluorescents — but can produce high-quality light similar to standard incandescent bulbs.

“The quality of the light is really the advantage,” said Franky So, a UF associate professor of materials science and engineering and the lead investigator on the project.

So collaborated with UF materials science engineering professor Paul Holloway and UF assistant professor Jiangeng Xue on the research.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which funded the research, reported the results on its Web site. Papers about it appeared earlier this year in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

OLEDs are similar to inorganic light emitting devices, or LEDs, but are built with organic semiconductors on large area glass substrates rather than inorganic semiconductor wafers. When used in display screens computer monitors, they have higher efficiency, better color saturation and a larger viewing angle. OLED displays are also used in cell phones, cameras and personal digital assistants. OLED flat panel TVs were introduced by Sony recently.

So and his team’s blue OLED achieved a peak efficiency of 50 lumens — a lumen is a measure of brightness perceived by human eyes — per watt. That’s a significant step toward the goal of his project: to achieve white light with efficiency higher than 100 lumens per watt.

So said the fact that OLEDs are highly “tunable” — each OLED is an individual light, which means differently colored OLEDs can be combined to produced different shades of light — puts warm, rich light easily within reach. “The quality of the light generated can easily be tuned by using different color emitters” he said. “You can make it red, green, blue or white.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Radar — the technology that tracks enemy bombers and hurricanes — is now being employed to detect another danger: when babies stop breathing.

In a high-tech twist on the remote devices that allow parents to listen to or watch their baby from afar, University of Florida engineering researchers have built a prototype baby monitor that focuses on a baby’s breathing. If his or her chest stops moving, the crib-mounted monitor detects the problem and sends an alarm to a portable unit kept by the parents.

“It’s a step beyond just watching the baby through a video link or hearing it cry,” said Jenshan Lin, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and the principal investigator of the Doppler radar technology used in the monitor.

A paper on the system, which works by using Doppler radar to remotely scan the in-and-out movement of the baby’s chest due to respiration, will appear in the February issue of IEEE Microwave Magazine.

Parents buy millions of baby monitors each year in the U.S., but most transmit only sounds or video images of the baby — both useful, but only if a parent is listening or watching. Some recently available monitors also monitor babies’ movements and breathing, but Lin said he is not aware of any on the market that use wireless technology.

UF engineering students Changzhi Li, Julie Cummings, Jeffrey Lam, Eric Graves and Stephanie Jimenez designed the monitor.

The students did the work as part of the College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Process Design Program, which allows senior-level undergraduates to participate in yearlong design projects of new products or processes. The student team’s goal: to use Lin’s radar technology, first developed three years ago and under continuous refinement since, in a useful product with the potential to be licensed to a company.

The students produced a small-book-sized device that attaches to the crib just like a standard monitor. They also designed a remote station with red, blue, green and yellow lights, variously indicating the status of the baby’s vital signs, the battery life of the station and confirming the station’s wireless connection to the crib monitor. The station emits a loud alarm and flashes a red light when the monitor detects that the baby’s breathing activity has fallen below a preset threshold, or that he or she has stopped breathing.

Future versions could also detect heartbeat, using a higher frequency signal, Lin said.

“It’s the same Doppler radar that police use to catch speeders, but in our case, we don’t measure constant speed, but rather back-and-forth motion — sort of like vibration,” Lin said. “That’s the fundamental principle of this technology.”

The crib monitor’s signals are very low power and not harmful to the baby or parents, Lin added. While a standard cell phone emits about one watt of power, the Doppler radar emits just one ten-thousandth of a watt of power, he said.

Tom Weller, associate dean for research at the University of South Florida College of Engineering, said the baby monitor is a good example of how research and education can come together in a useful product.

“This miniaturized monitor is an example of solid microwave engineering coupled with great innovation, and something with the potential for a very broad societal impact,” Weller said in an e-mail. “It is especially noteworthy that Dr. Lin transferred his research output into the very capable hands of creative undergraduate students.”

Lin is also pursuing other applications for his technology. His best-realized idea so far: a search-and-rescue robot equipped with the Doppler system to determine the presence of living people in structures damaged by earthquakes or explosions. Lin said the system, so far tested in a small working prototype robot, could complement robotic video systems because it requires less power to operate and has greater range. The robot was developed by student Gabriel Reyes as his research project in the University Scholars Program.

“Or the military could use it to find enemy soldiers,” Lin said, noting that the Doppler radar easily penetrates walls or other structural components.

Lin has also reduced the size of the electronics in his system so that they fit on a fruit fly-sized microchip, potentially enabling the remote monitor to be used in cell phones. That could turn the phones into portable life-sign detectors useful, for example, for friends and family who wish to keep tabs on elderly relatives living alone, he said.

Li, who based his dissertation on the research, was awarded a graduate fellowship from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society for his work.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It’s not much bigger than a softball and weighs just 2 pounds.

But the “pico satellite” being designed and built in a University of Florida aerospace engineering laboratory may hold a key to a future of easy access to outer space — one where sending satellites into orbit is as routine and inexpensive as shipping goods around the world.

“Right now, the way satellites are built, they’re all large, one-of-a-kind and very expensive,” says Norman Fitz-Coy, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the lead investigator on the project. “Our idea is that you could mass produce these small satellites and launch 10 or 20 from a single launch vehicle.”

The satellite is the first ever built at UF and may be the first orbiting spacecraft to be built in Florida, said Peggy Evanich, director of space research programs at UF.

Fifty-one years ago, the former Soviet Union inaugurated the space race with the launch of Sputnik. Since then, satellites have transformed communications, navigation and climatology, as well as science and the military. But satellites remain large, ranging in size from basketball to school bus proportions; expensive, with costs typically in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars; and slowly hand-built as one-of-a-kind devices, rather than speedily mass produced, Fitz-Coy said.

Scientists and engineers now hope to change that legacy.

“There is a national push to make satellites smaller so that you can provide cheaper and more frequent access to space,” he said.

As part of that push, the National Science Foundation this fall created the Advanced Space Technologies Research and Engineering Center at the UF College of Engineering. Headed by Fitz-Coy, the center will seek to develop “pico- and nano-class small satellites” that can be built and launched for as little as $100,000 to $500,000, according to the NSF. The UF center will receive NSF funding for five years for the research.

Fitz-Coy said small satellites are not anticipated to totally replace larger ones, but rather to complement them by adding new capabilities. For example, he said, “swarms” of small satellites could take multiple, distributed measurements or observations of weather phenomena, or the Earth’s magnetic fields, providing a more comprehensive assessment than is possible with a single satellite.

“People are looking toward these to not totally replace the big satellites but to supplement what the big satellites are doing,” he said.

He said the main impediment to designing small satellites is control: The smaller the satellite, the harder it is to manage its flight path and attitude, or orientation in space – for example, which directions its instruments point, a critical parameter in spacecraft design.

“It’s similar to you driving an SUV down the road or a sub-compact,” Fitz-Coy said, explaining that while inertia helps large satellites, it is not enough to keep small satellites on track and properly oriented. “The SUV is a lot more stable than the sub-compact.”

The goal of the UF satellite, nicknamed SwampSAT, is to test a new system designed to improve small satellites’ attitude control. Having precise control is particularly important for such satellites because they have to fly relatively close to Earth so that their weak communications signals can reach their targets, he said. Because of their proximity to Earth, their instruments must be precisely aimed.

“They need to be able to control their orientation and re-orient rapidly,” he said.

Fitz-Coy and about 12 undergraduate and graduate students began the project last year and hope to complete SwampSAT late this year or early next year, he said.

The cost is anticipated to be about $100,000, with a launch in 2009 – likely aboard an unmanned NASA rocket carrying other payloads as well. The satellite will fly at an altitude of between 600 and 650 kilometers, or from 373 to 404 miles, and will remain in orbit for several years, Fitz-Coy said.

A container that could be standardized for use in transporting the small satellites aboard the rocket also is being developed. As with the satellites themselves, the goal is mass production – to be able to transport satellites to outer space much the same way that ships and trucks transport goods around the terrestrial world now, Fitz-Coy said.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Diplomats or military envoys making their first trip to China may soon have a chance to visit a Chinese office building, stop in at a traditional teahouse or hop a cab — all before they board a plane.

A team of University of Florida computer engineers and scholars has used the popular online world Second Life to create a virtual Chinese city, one that hands a key to users who want to familiarize themselves with the sights and experiences they will encounter as first-time visitors. The goal of the federally funded research project: To educate and prepare foreign service or other government professionals to arrive in the country prepared and ready to work.

“I think what we hope is that this kind of environment can provide a bridge between knowledge alone and actually being in the real-life environment,” said Julie Henderson, an international program specialist at the UF College of Pharmacy and co-principal investigator and project designer for the effort.

People have long prepared for international travel with language and cultural instruction, role-playing and, in recent years, distance-learning experiences. The “Second China Project” seeks to add another element: Simulated experiences aimed at introducing users not only to typical sights and the Chinese language, but also to expectations of politeness, accepted business practices and cultural norms.

It may not be the real thing, but it’s a lot easier to get there.

As with all Second Life worlds, users’ avatars simply “teleport” in to Second China, a city with both old and new buildings that looks surprisingly similar to some of China’s fastest growing metropolises. There, they can try a number of different activities — including, for example, visiting an office building for a conference.

“We’ve built an environment around learning objectives,” said Paul Fishwick, lead investigator and a professor of computer and information science and engineering.

In the office simulation, the user’s avatar chooses appropriate business attire and a gift, greets a receptionist, and is guided to a conference room to be seated, among other activities. With each scenario, the user gains understanding or awareness: the Chinese formal greeting language and procedure, that it’s traditional to bring a gift to a first meeting, that guests typically are seated facing the door in a Chinese meeting room, and so on.

Supplementing the visual experience: A Web-based tutorial that the user can click on as he or she navigates Second China. The tutorial has much more detail about every experience. For example, it lists appropriate as well as inappropriate gifts — such as clocks, which in China are considered bad luck when presented as gifts.

In the teahouse simulation, a greeter shows the visitor photos of well-known personalities who have visited as patrons, a typical practice in many establishments in China. However, in the simulation the photos include, for example, a photo of Hu Jintao, the president of China. The accompanying Web tutorial provides biographical background on Hu and the other well-known Chinese personalities in the photos.

“It’s important to be able to go to China already familiar with the important historic and political figures,” said Henderson.

In Second Life, users typically control avatars. But in Second China, the teahouse greeter and other avatars in the various scenarios are controlled by computer software. This allows users to enter Second China anytime they wish, while also ensuring that all users have similar experiences, an important trait for an educational tool.

None of the information in Second China is exclusive to the Second Life simulation — it could also be presented in books or other traditional media.

But Fishwick and Henderson think that allowing users to place themselves within Second China’s virtual world may make the information more memorable and pique users’ curiosity and urge to explore. They’ll know more soon: After spending a year developing the project, they’ll spend the next year testing it on users to gauge its effectiveness.

“In terms of knowledge and empathy toward the culture, we don’t yet know the answer to the question of where one medium succeeds and another one fails,” Fishwick said.

The Second China project has been funded with a $1.25 million federal grant. Other co-principal investigators at UF are Elinore Fresh, a senior lecturer in Chinese and Franz Futterknecht, a professor of Germanic and Slavic studies. Amy Jo Coffey and Rasha Kamhawi, both assistant professors of journalism and communications in the department of telecommunication, will participate in the assessment phase.

Three weeks after the first particle beams were injected into the collider, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid will combine the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of LHC data every year. The part of the grid located in the U.S., known as the Open Science Grid, is a direct outgrowth of two earlier grid projects led by the University of Florida.

The principal investigator and director for those grids, known as GriPhyN and iVDGL, was Paul Avery, a UF professor of physics.

“There were basically three national projects that merged to form the Open Science Grid, and two of those were our projects,” said Avery, who serves as OSG’s Council co-chairman.

The LHC is currently down for repairs. But when it is running at full speed, it is expected to produce enough data to fill about 100 million CDs per year. The data consists largely of the record of hundreds of millions of collisions of protons per second, protons moving at close to the speed of light within the accelerator.

The Open Science Grid not only contributes computing power for LHC data needs but also for projects in many other scientific fields including biology, nanotechnology, medicine and climate science. Avery said those projects include projects at UF, which is tied into the Open Science Grid through its LHC effort and the UF High Performance Computing Center.

“Particle physics projects such as the LHC have been a driving force for the development of worldwide computing grids,” said Ed Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure. “The benefits from these grids are now being reaped in areas as diverse as mathematical modeling and drug discovery.”

The decision was good news for principal investigator Ramesh Shrestha and co-principal investigators Bill Carter and Clint Slatton, all professors in UF’s College of Engineering. UF will receive $3 million from the grant.

“At NCALM, we have worked to continually improve our ability to collect, process, and analyze LIDAR data that we provide to the earth science community,” Slatton said. “But NCALM also serves the national interest because our measurements of earthquake faults, levees, glaciers, and erosive beaches can help federal and state policy makers mitigate natural disasters.”

Using Light Detection And Ranging, known as LIDAR, the center’s researchers produce incredibly detailed three-dimensional images of terrain using laser pulses beamed earthward from an airplane. The technology has been applied both to environmental remote sensing and to military reconnaissance.

UF was the first university in the nation to purchase and operate a survey-grade airborne LIDAR system in 1998. Researchers mounted the system in a Cessna 337 at Gainesville’s airport. Pumping out 5,000 laser pulses a second, they mapped beaches, marshes, flood zones, sink holes, highways and forests in Florida and nearby states.

In 2003, UF and Berkeley started the laser mapping center with funding from the Instrumentation and Facilities Program in the Division of Earth Sciences at NSF. The center collected and processed LIDAR measurements for more than 50 NSF research projects scattered across the nation. In California, for example, NCALM researchers used LIDAR to create the highest-resolution 3-D image of the San Andreas Fault ever produced.

In 2007, UF purchased a new LIDAR unit that generates more than 160,000 laser pulses a second. With the new model, researchers can map areas covered with dense foliage and create high-resolution maps of the bare ground underneath, exposing details on the earth’s surface that might never have been studied otherwise.

In recent years, earth scientists from around the country have presented findings on processes, such as landslides, stream incision, erosion, and volcanism, at numerous workshops and international conferences that were made possible by LIDAR measurements from NCALM.

For more information, visit the NCALM Web site at http://www.ncalm.org.

“From a practical point of view, if we are going to ever be able to predict when and where lightning will strike, we need to first understand how lightning moves from one place to the other,” said Joseph Dwyer, a professor in the department of physics and space sciences at FIT. “At present, we do not have a good handle on this. X-rays are giving us a close-up view of what is happening inside the lightning as it moves.”

An article detailing the UF and FIT team’s findings appears this week in the online edition of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union.

The researchers used an array of electric field and X-ray detectors at a UF/FIT-operated lightning research facility in North Florida to hunt the source of X-rays emitted by lightning strokes. Their main conclusion: As the lightning comes down from the cloud toward the ground in 30- to 160-foot stages known as “steps” in a “step leader” process, the X-rays shoot out just below each step, mere millionths of a second after the step completes.

“Nobody understands how lightning makes X-rays,” said Martin Uman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Despite reaching temperatures five times hotter than the surface of the sun, the temperature of lightning is still thousands of times too cold to account for the X-rays observed.”

That said, Uman added, “It’s obviously happening. And we have put limits on how it’s happening and where it’s happening.”

As far back as 1925, theorists predicted that thunderstorms and lightning might make X-rays. However, scientists spent decades seeking evidence, with little success. Then in 2001 and 2002, researchers at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, the University of Florida and Florida Tech reported solid confirmation that lightning does indeed produce large quantities of X-rays. Scientists worldwide have been seeking to understand and explain the phenomenon since then, Uman said.

The New Mexico Tech researchers detected high-energy radiation from natural lightning. The UF/FIT’s International Center for Lightning Research Laboratory, located on a military base in Clay County, triggers lightning using wire-trailing rockets fired into passing storm clouds. In 2002, Uman’s team showed “triggered lightning” produces X-rays.

In the latest research, electrical engineering doctoral student Joey Howard, the paper’s lead author, and other UF/FIT researchers used a series of electric field detectors and sodium iodide X-ray detectors to try to probe X-rays more closely.

In the 2002 paper, the UF/FIT researchers confirmed that X-rays are produced by the stepped leader in natural lightning. In the latest paper, they narrowed the production of X-rays to the beginning of each step of the step leader, based on data gathered from one natural lightning strike and one triggered strike, Uman said.

“We could see when the electric field arrived at the sequence of stations, and it was the same with the X-rays,” Uman said. “We then went back and calculated what the source location was for the field and the X-ray.”

Dwyer said the research is one more step toward using X-rays to understand how lightning travels.

“A spark that begins inside a thunderstorm somehow manages to travel many miles to the ground, where it can hurt people and damage property,” he said. “Now, for the first time, we can actually detect lightning moving toward the ground using X-rays. So just as medical X-rays provide doctors with a clearer view inside patients, X-rays allow us to probe parts of the lightning that are otherwise very difficult to measure.”

Uman said the research will continue with more expensive, faster and more sensitive X-ray detectors. One area of future interest, he said, is whether lightning strikes to airplanes could produce X-rays harmful to passengers.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — For black people, it doesn’t matter whether their color shows up in pigments or pixels. Doctors may be less likely to heed their complaints either way.

So suggests a new study that used virtual patients — computer-generated people able to carry on a limited conversation with human counterparts — to test how medical students respond to white- and dark-skinned patients. The study found that the white third-year students were less empathetic with dark-skinned than light-skinned virtual patients during brief one-on-one interviews, suggesting racial bias extends from real people to their virtual representations.

“You are seeing a transfer of bias come through the screen,” said Benjamin Lok, an assistant professor of computer and information science and engineering.

Lok is one of five authors of a paper on the study set to appear this fall in the journal Intelligent Virtual Agents.

He also is the lead investigator of a four-year-old research project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, aimed at using racially diverse virtual patients as a new tool to train medical students to identify and avoid racial bias — a kind of human-relations equivalent to the equipment used to train pilots.

“We’re hoping that in the future, we will be able to automatically detect bias and, then and there, help medical students out,” Lok said. “That’s really our goal: An interpersonal simulator, just like a flight simulator, to help people get better at this skill of interacting with people who come from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.”

Deeply embedded racial bias against minorities has been a hot issue in medicine since at least 2002, when “Unequal Treatment,” a national study of the phenomenon commissioned by Congress, was released.

The study found that racial and ethnic minorities consistently receive lower quality health care than their white counterparts and attributed the problem in part to bias or prejudice — bias all the more pernicious because it may be unconscious. Such unequal treatment is thought to be one reason that minorities, especially blacks, consistently suffer higher rates of many serious diseases.

Lok said medical schools use actors or actresses in role-playing scenarios for a wide range of medical training, including helping future doctors combat racial bias. While the actors can be highly effective, they also come with logistical challenges, he said. For one, actors may not be available, especially in states or cities with low minority populations. They are expensive. And they cannot offer all the students exactly the same experience, he said.

Virtual patients pose none of these problems, Lok said. But before educators can embrace them, they must know practitioners respond to virtual people as they do real people.

The researchers used virtual patient technology developed in Lok’s UF laboratory. The technology taps voice recognition software to allow people to speak normally with the virtual patient, who appears on a projected screen. The human subject wears a hat studded with special tape that reflects infrared light. Detectors pick up the reflections, informing the computer of the motions of the subject’s head. This allows the virtual patient to move his or her head in response andmaintain eye contact during conversation.

The researchers divided a group of almost two dozen third-year medical students at medical school in the Southeast, with half the students interviewing a light-skinned virtual woman, the others a dark-skinned woman. But for the skin tone, the virtual women had the same voice, animation and appearance. Medical faculty and other observers watched recorded videos of the students in the interviews, but the observers were blinded to the skin color of the virtual patient. They then rated the students’ empathy toward the woman’s medical complaints, using a standardized scale.

The observers rated the students interviewing the dark-skinned woman as consistently less empathetic. The results correlated with standard psychological tests of the students, tests that showed they had an unconscious bias against minorities.

The technology is so new that Lok said it “barely works” – for example, the virtual patient may misunderstand the human user and respond with a non sequitur. But Lok said he is confident it will improve rapidly.

Brent Rossen, another author of the paper and a UF graduate student, said most of the medical students in the trial were keen to use it, because they recognized its intrinsic value.

“These are people who want to treat others equally, but racial bias is a very subconscious thing, and in the end it really has to be trained out,” Rossen said. “One way to do that is through repeated exposures to the subject of the bias, which is where this research comes in.”

Lok, Rossen and Kyle Johnsen, a graduate student at the time of the study who has since earned his Ph.D., collaborated on the study. The two other authors were Dr. Adeline Deladisma, a medical resident, and Dr. Scott Lind, chief of surgical oncology, both of the Medical College of Georgia.

The Florida Energy Systems Consortium, created in the energy bill signed into law by Gov. Charlie Crist on Wednesday in Miami, will bring together the state’s universities to work on new solar, biomass and other renewable energy technologies. With the University of Florida heading up the effort, the consortium also will focus on helping new technologies succeed in the market — and on cultivating a workforce of graduates with expertise in renewable energy.

“All of the universities have pieces of the puzzle,” said Eric Wachsman, a UF professor of materials science and engineering and director of UF’s Florida Institute for Sustainable Energy. “By putting these pieces together with this consortium, we will be able to address the larger, statewide energy challenges facing Florida.”

The state will provide at least $50 million for the consortium. UF will receive the largest portion, $15 million, because of its leadership and administrative responsibilities. Florida State University, the University of South Florida, the University of Central Florida and Florida Atlantic University each will receive $8.75 million. The remaining six state public universities are expected to participate in the consortium as well.

Wachsman said initial efforts, expected to begin as early as July, will focus on taking stock of, and bringing together, the diverse renewable energy expertise within the universities. Participants also will begin planning collaborations on research efforts ranging from producing renewable energy to improving energy distribution to alternative transportation technologies.

“We can make a real contribution,” he said. “We just need the commitment from the state and the financial incentives for industry. This consortium is a great first step.”

The universities are expected to appoint a director for the consortium later this summer.