STUDENT ENGINEERING MAGAZINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

TECHNOGRAPHVOLUME 126 :: WINTER 2010READTECHNO.COM

Look Ma, the Future!

Table Of Contents:

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04 Computers: Now & Then05 Top 5 Retro Videogames06 Still to come: Human Exploration of Mars08 Dude, Where’s My Flying Car?10 iNever Thought it’d go so far...12 Romance, Robots, and (Indie) Rock: An Interview With Jeph Jacques13 Research Corner: Drug Discovery & Development14 Remember to E-Cycle15 Techno T.V.

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Cover Im

agecredit: Flickr User X-Ray-D

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technograph goes retroDo you remember when you were a little kid in science class? Our teachers told us by the time we were all grown up we would be flying around in hover cars and even living on the moon! Now that we are all grown up, where are all of these amazing life-enhancing technologies they promised us? In this issue, Technograph revisits some of these technologies from a modern perspective. Along the way, you will discover some old/new features:

Top ‘n’ Begins…“Top 10” lists seem to come up just about anywhere there are a group of people or songs or products that can be classified as the best at what they are or do. What happens, though, if there are 14 things that deserve this classification? What if there are only 4? That is why Technograph is proud to announce its new feature: Top ‘n’. Each month on our website, a Technograph writer will put together their own list of the top ‘n’ best of whatever they choose. This issue, to continue the retro theme, we have decided to include Technograph’s Top 5 Retro Videogames, page 5!

Technocuties are back!!!!A “Technocutie” is an engineering major at the University of Illinois who has caught the eye of the Technograph staff and therefore deserves a little recognition for their hard work. This issue, our Tech-nocuties are Nella Granback, page 07, and Dave Korenchan, page 10!

Research CornerWhen Technograph first started in 1885, each issue contained over 100 pages worth of research articles written by engineering professionals and professors here at the University of Illinois. Since students write today’s Technograph, we decided to interview today’s professionals and professors at the University of Illinois to keep in touch with our old roots and to find out more about what’s going on in our own town. Learn about the risky business of drug discovery and development, page 13.

TechnoT.V.Shhh…. there’s a sneak peek at our next video about the complications of falling in love with your Gameboy Color and what to do with your E-Waste, page 15.

Editor-in-ChiefJessica Metro

WritersCaroline Cvetkovic Christine HermanCameron Jimmo

Content EditorMegan Reilly

Copy EditorsNeil LyonsDan MalsomPui Ching Yung

Presentation EditorRJ Marsan

Video DirectorAdam Barnett

Video TeamErica Hinz

MailTechnograph512 E. Green St.Champaign, IL 61820

Phone1-217-337-8300

Webreadtechno.com

PublisherMary Cory

AdviserSarah Durham

Emailtechnograph@illinimedia.com

An Illini MediaPublication

Copyright 2010

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We cannot survive without com-puters in the 21st century. College students in particular rely on their computers or laptops for almost everything from entertainment to studying to connecting with friends. But do you even know when com-puters were developed or what they were used for before they became so commercialized and such an in-tegral part of our lives?

The first programmable comput-er appeared in 1936, when Konrad Zuse from Germany used a Z1, an electrical binary programmable computer. However, it was a few de-cades before the first personal com-puter was released in 1975, which relied on a series of switches to input or output data by turning on and off a series of light. IBM released its first laptop in 1984.

Hardly anyone anticipated such an astonishing rate of change in the use of computers. Professor Cinda Heeren from the Computer Science Department at the University of Il-linois at Urbana Champaign thinks that the evolution of computing is a matter of record. According to Her-een, “It has become increasingly personal and increasingly perva-sive as a result of research-driven advances in things like battery life,

storage capacity, and network com-munications.”

According to Moore’s Law, a theory developed by Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore, the pace of com-puter development is predictable. Moore, who has worked with Intel since 1965,states that the number of transistors in a chip doubles every two years. For non-computer science majors, this simply means that com-putation power doubles every two years. However, Jason Sze, a junior in Computer Science at the Univer-sity of Illinois at Urbana Champaign still expresses some astonishment over computers’ rapid growth: “How the market and consumer reacted and how it was then adopted by so many people and became so popu-lar: that was unexpected.” Sze goes on to comment, “The variations and innovations people came up with were also very surprising.”

The spread of the internet had a somewhat quicker pace. By July 1969, UCLA had already intro-duced the internet to the public, but it was only a tool for universi-ties to communicate with each other in a most primitive form of email. The first commercial online service, CompuServe, was established in the same year. However, the internet

wasn’t officially opened to commer-cial use until 1991 when the World Wide Web (WWW) was introduced to the public. In 1995, the dotcom boom burst into fervor and eventu-ally developed into the internet that we know now.

The internet has definitely changed the way we use the com-puter. Initially, Professor Heeren mainly used the computer for gam-ing or functions like programming and word processing. As time went by, she began to actively engage in search technology. Sze takes ad-vantage of the increased speed of the internet to connect and socialize with family and friends by conve-niently video-chatting with them. Sze also finds that new innovations have made computers more common and user-friendly. Furthermore, the cre-ation of interesting applications and online games and the commercial-ization of the internet have acceler-ated the process of integrating more users. Professor Heeren said that “most of the computing and com-munication technology in Star Trek seems to be nearly reality,” express-ing how dazzled she is by the path which technology has taken.

Pui Ching Yung

Computers: Now & Then

Photocredit: Left: Konrad Zuse, Right: Flickr User bakaotaku

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#5 Super Baseball 2020Though it might not be truly “retro,” this game makes it on the list solely because it describes a future (now only 10 years away) with robots that play sports. According to IGN, “It’s common to see players use a Rocket Pack to shoot 50 feet in the air to take away a home run, and the pitchers throw unbelievable 200 mph curveballs!” While it is doubt-ful that this will be possible before the actual title year, Super Baseball 2020 was definitely the dream of any child engineer in 1993.

#4 Space InvadersAlmost anyone who is familiar with videogames knows the classic, blocky images connected with this 70’s videogame. While few of our generation have played it in an arcade, Space Invaders is found online and in retro gaming packs for most systems. Even though it is so simple, people are still entertained for long periods of time by shooting at the rows and rows of aliens descending on Earth.

#3 TetrisA puzzle game sure to frustrate first-time players and masters alike, Tetris has been a huge part of videogame culture since its release in 1984. These days, while versions are available to purchase and play on portable gaming devices, you can also find versions online for free including one that moves the frame around the piece instead of rotating the piece itself.

#2 Pac-ManHow could we possibly do this without that wonderful yellow circle-man? Pac-Man came about in 1980, and ever since, people have been hooked by the simple maze and joystick wonder that is this game. Pac-Man is accompanied by a star cast including Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde who try to catch him on his mission to consume pac-dots and power pellets, and after countless versions of the game have been released, those characters and aims typically remain.

#1 Mario Bros.The first game in which we begin to see Mario, the undoubted star of the Nintendo franchise, as the title character, Mario Bros. debuted in arcades in 1983. This has to be Technograph’s number one on the list for no other reason but that it led to the creation of an icon that is still such a huge part of gaming culture today. Whether you love or hate the little plumber, Mario competes with Pac-Man and many others as the most famous videogame character ever created thanks to his multi-tude of appearances in games across three decades.

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Still To Come: Human Exploration Of Mars

As a kid, I remember read-ing in my Junior Scholastic magazine that one day hu-mans would live on Mars, and I distinctly remember wonder-ing what it would be like to ex-plore another planet.

Nearly twenty years later, I wonderedered what progress had been made and if life on Mars is still a possibility. So I looked into it. The following is what I learned by speaking to several experts in the field.

Imagine this: You’re an as-tronaut. You pack your bags and board a rocket the size of a school bus. Together with a crew of eight other people, (among them astrobiologists, geologists and engineers), you are launched into space for a 9 month journey. Destination: Mars. You arrive on a dusty red planet and step off the spacecraft in a suit that pro-tects you from the dangers of solar flares and galactic and cosmic radiation. And the ex-ploration begins.

It is just a matter of time before humans get are sent to Mars, according to Jim Bell, astronomy professor at Cor-nell University. Fernando Abil-leira, engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said NASA may accomplish its ulti-mate goal of sending humans to Mars as early as the mid-2030’s. But it will certainly have its challenges.

“It’s a complicated thing to go to Mars because it’s a long

way away,” Bell said. “Mars is about a hundred times farther away than the moon.”

The distance raises con-cerns over how the crew will have supplies and resources to sustain them throughout the journey, Bell said.

There is much work to be done before the first manned spacecraft is sent to Mars. Spacecrafts will need signifi-cant advancements to land on Mars, Abilleira said. Addition-ally, the biological and psy-chological effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity and isolation from Earth need to be better understood.

In addition to scientific ad-vances, political action must occur to establish an infrastruc-ture that will allow for strides towards Mars exploration, Bell said.

All this talk about the chal-lenges of space exploration may cause one to wonder why Earthlings are interested in ex-ploring Mars at all. For many studying Mars, the motivation is rooted in a desire to see if it is a habitable planet.

“As a civilization we need to expand beyond Earth to ensure the survivability of the human species in case of a catastrophic event on Earth,” Abilleira said.

Others study Mars for the sake of curiosity and a desire for challenges and adven-tures.

“Partly the reason is scien-

tific, but also, partly the reason is going to be purely for explo-ration,” Bell said. “Because it’s an adventure [and] as human beings we like to inspire our-selves and others by doing dif-ficult things.”

Jack Farmer, geology pro-fessor at Arizona State Uni-versity, says the motivation to study Mars is two-fold: “To gain insights into the history of another potentially habitable planet in our solar system and to search for a past or present life.”

“What motivates me per-sonally is the excitement of dis-covering life on another plan-et,” said Farmer, who studies Mars fossils in search of terres-trial microbial life.

While many researchers are working in areas that will eventually come together in the launch of the first manned mis-sion to Mars, plans for strategi-cally working toward this goal have not yet been made.

“Currently there is no one unified plan to send people back to Mars, it’s really sort of in the concept stage,” Bell said. “There is no specific schedule, no specific budget [and] no specific plan right now.”

Christine Herman

Note: The opinions in the article do not necessarily represent those of NASA or JPL.

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Nella is a sophomore in Engineering Physics; though she has yet to choose a definite research interest, she finds robotics and the research at the LHC fascinating, but she is not sure if she is actually interested in the LHC or if “it’s just awesome.” While she feels that graduate school will probably be necessary, she wants to wait until she is more certain of her interests before deciding on it. She was also recently awarded the Beryl Bristow Commonwealth Edison Award based on her GPA and status as a woman in the physics program.

Though her favorite place to study is in the peace and quiet of her dorm room, she enjoys spending her free time (outside of class and Marching Illini Flag Corps) sit-ting by Boneyard Creek on sunny days doing crossword puzzles. Her favorite building on campus is Beckman In-stitute; she remembers seeing it every day on the way to class until, in the final week of the semester, she decided to explore Beckman and immediately fell in love.

More of her favorite things are Physics 225 (Special Relativity and Math Applications, though she enjoyed Special Relativity far more than the Math Applications), mint chocolate chip ice cream, tigers, and the ISR din-ing hall.

Nella Granback

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Who hasn’t sat frustrated in traffic, daydreaming of engaging that little, red button on the steer-ing wheel and flying home? Since the airplane became a prominent means of transportation, there have been visions of combining aviation and automobile technology to cre-ate the ultimate vehicle: the flying car. For decades this idea has per-vaded society through all forms of media and fiction. The question is: Why hasn’t it been made a reality?

While the idea of a flying car has always been cutting-edge, it has seemed to take off with little more than overexcited imagina-tions. Admittedly, few have taken interest in creating this kind of ve-hicle. For example, a prototype aptly dubbed Aerocar was first de-signed in 1949, and its detachable wings and tail unit allowed the user to transform the automobile into an aircraft within minutes. Aerocar’s continued development allowed it to be certified by the Civil Aeronau-tics Administration in 1956, and its later models were able to reach speeds over 60 miles per hour on the road and over 100 miles per hour in the air.

Photocredits: DARPA

color

Dude, Where’s My Flying Car?

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Yet the Aerocar--and numerous other prototypes that followed--nev-er became available through mass-production. Dr. Rahim Benekohal, a professor within the Civil and Envi-ronmental Engineering Department here at the University of Illinois, feels that any hopes of distribution were and still are far from realis-tic, “It was just a generalized idea based on the aviation technology at that time and assuming that it can be brought down to a consumer level.”

The marketability behind a flying car seems undeniably ridiculous: its cost combined with the necessary insurance would be unfathomable, and road/air traffic regulations would have to be changed drasti-cally. “We already have problems with airspace near busy airports.” Dr. Benekohal said, “How could we put all these flying cars in the sky and expect it would work?” Still, the major deterrence would have to be the problem of human navigation. Already, human response-and-con-trol in an automobile is riddled with error, and one can only imagine the disastrous results of having people adapt to piloting an exponentially

more complicated machine. Currently, however, there has

been a focus on replacing human inefficiency with computer profi-ciency. Approaching future trans-portation, Dr. Benekohal believes that “Intelligent transportation sys-tems are initiatives that have great potential…” Steps already taken in this direction can be seen through projects such as a self-driving car being developed through a Google research program. Utilizing artifi-cial intelligence, GPS navigation and a wide variety of sensors, seven of these “Google cars” have each accumulated 1,000 driving miles without any human intervention.

It seems that these intelligent transportation systems have rekin-dled the flying car flame because shortly after these self-driving cars became public, the Defense Ad-vance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced its own ap-proach to smart-transportation: a self-flying Humvee. Labeled the Transformer X, it is the brainchild of military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and universities such as Pratt and Carnegie Mel-lon. These vehicles will be used for

military transportation and will be able to fly, carrying approximately 1000-pound loads, for up to 250 miles. Concerning its self-flying ca-pabilities, the agency states that “It is envisioned that guidance and flight control systems will allow for semi-autonomous flight, permitting a non-pilot to perform [vertical take-offs and landings], transition into forward flight, and update the flight path in response to changing mis-sion requirements or threats.”

It seems that with projects such as the Transformer X, the long-run-ning absurdity of flying cars may be coming to an end. Utilizing self-con-trolled transportation systems, these vehicles begin to seem practical as they overcome the obstacle of hu-man piloting and navigation. But with DARPA developing the Trans-former X for militaristic purposes, the impracticality of a flying-car at a consumer level still remains ap-parent. It’s going to be a long time before we can “George Jetson’” our way around town.

Cameron Jimmo

Sources

• Greenberg,A.(2010).ForgetGoogle’sSelf-DrivingCars.ThePentagonIsBuildingASelf-FlyingHum-vee.RetrievedOctober13,2010fromForbes:http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/10/13/forget-googles-self-driving-cars-the-pentagon-is-building-a-self-flying-humvee/.

• Markoff,J.(2010).SmarterThanYouThink-GoogleCarsDriveThemselves,inTraffic.RetrievedOctober10,2010fromNewYorkTimes:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all.

• TaylorAerocarIII.(2010).RetrievedOctober10,2010fromMuseumOfFlight:http://www.museumof-flight.org/aircraft/taylor-aerocar-iii.

Dave is a junior in Bioengineering and is most interested in BioMEMS (Biological Microelectricalmechanical Sys-tems) for controlled drug delivery. He hopes to earn his Master’s or Ph.D at MIT, Cornell, Duke, or UIC. He is both a Chancellor’s and James Scholar, a member of Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society, a former member of iGEM 2009 Wet Lab Team (in which his team earned a silver medal), and is currently in Professor Rashid Bashir’s research group working on microfluids.

Like Nella, Dave’s favorite place to relax after a long day of studying is on the Bardeen Quad near Boneyard Creek, but his favorite place to study is in the basement of DCL in the Linux lab during the evening hours. His fa-vorite building on campus is the Micro/Nanotechnology Lab (MNTL), and his favorite class thus far is ECE 444 (Theory of Fabrication of Integrated Circuits) because it is “very relevant to my particular interests. You get to learn about how the industry manufactures silicon computer chips, and fabricate your own chip in lab along the way. Bunny suits and all.”

His activities include the Marching Illini, Tae Kwon Do, amateur music composition, and piano-playing, and some of his other favorite things are daiquiri ice, penguins, and Hendrick House’s dining hall.

Dave Korenchan

Computers are ubiquitous. You don’t need to be a genius to know that. This article was typed on a com-puter. A computer was used to print the magazine. The internet was used for research. Maybe you’ll read this story on the Technograph’s website, and you’ll probably share it on Face-book and Twitter too. While you’re online, you’ll check your email, get instantaneous sports updates, share information with people via the click of the mouse, and sync your calendar (and your friends’) to your phone. You might pay your bills and buy a song or two while video chatting with a friend halfway around the world. She asks you a question, and in about ten seconds, you can find the answer. Our lives revolve around computers - but how did this technological explo-sion take place and when?

If you’re an Apple fan, the story goes a little something like this. Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak, who knew each other from high school, decided to try to sell Wozniak’s machine (the Apple I) in 1976. Not many people took the computer seriously, however,

1976 - Apple I

Photocredit: Jessica Metro

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until the Apple II was previewed at a trade show the next year. Apple’s first personal computer, along with the advent of the Apple Disk (the easy-to-use floppy disk) caused an increase in company size and sales. The release of the Apple III in 1980, coupled with the company’s new thousand employ-ees and managers, made Apple a technology force to reckon with. They were ready to take sales abroad.

Answering to its competition, Apple aired a commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl introducing the Ma-cintosh and depicting “the IBM world being shattered by a new machine.” Today, Apple is known for their sleek designs of the iMac desktop; the iBook, MacBook, and PowerBook lap-tops; iPods (from the first generation to the new iPod touch); Mac software such as iLife; dozens of gadgets and innovative features; and most recently, the iPad and the iPhone, which have redefined the way that people connect by offering hundreds of thousands of apps.

Of course, not everyone is an Ap-ple fan; that’s why the Mac vs. PC de-

bate still rages. Sure, there’s the old joke, “How do you crash Microsoft Windows?” (answer: “Start Microsoft Windows”), but the truth is that the IBM PC has been incredibly success-ful since its introduction in 1981. It was introduced with novel and useful third-party applications and on-screen menus. Windows 1.0 was introduced in 1983; OS/2 in 1987; 3.1 in 1991; and Windows 95 four years later. In-ternet Explorer was the first browser built into an operating system, intro-duced in 1998. With Windows 7 the newest operating system on the mar-ket, the PC is still going strong.

Though it may seem to many young people of Generations X and Y that computers are an innate char-acteristic of human life (and indeed, today’s college students have always had computers in their homes and schools), it was not always so easy to connect to the rest of the world. Nei-ther is it true that computers are an en-tirely recent invention from the 1980s. The makings of the first computer ac-tually began in the 1930s. The Z1, from 1936, was the first freely pro-

grammable computer. In the 1940s, computers such as ENIAC1 were used by companies to perform high power mathematical functions. U of I’s John Bardeen and Jack Kilby, respectively, invented the transistor (1948) and integrated circuit (1958). The 1950s were characterized by new program-ming languages. ARPAnet was the first internet in 1968, and the 1970s gave rise to floppy disks, word pro-cessors, and computing companies.

Today, computer technology is used for almost everything. The possi-bilities are endless; it’s mind-boggling to think of the nearly infinite number of ways that we are connected to peo-ple, places, things, and ideas. No one can predict what the future holds for computers and technology. All we can do is look back on how far we have come and reflect on the ways in which computers have changed the way that people of the world live their lives.

Caroline Cvekovic

iNever Thought It’d Go So Far...

1984 - Macintosh1980 - Apple III1977 - Apple II

Photocredit (from left to right): Flickr Users Hugo Pardo Kuklinski, Raneko, Spaceageboy, Raneko

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Whether it updates once a week or every day, most students these days have one or two favorite webcomics. Few reach as wide of an audience, however, as Questionable Content, the week-daily comic about life, love, music, and annoying little robots (with the occasion-al joke about male genitalia) that is the work and passion of Jeph Jacques. While he was in Champaign for the Reflections|Projections conference held by ACM (Association of Com-puting Machinery), Jeph sat down with this Technograph writer to talk about his comic, the world and business of webcomics, and his in-ternet fame.

QC (Questionable Content) was first put online on August 1, 2003 with the first 4 strips all posted at once. When asked why he chose a comic over the various other means of expres-sion available online, Jacques said that while he already had a blog, he needed another outlet for his creativity. Webcomics seemed to pop out at him mostly because he had thought, through much of high school, that he would be a cartoonist when he finished his education. Along with this, comics seemed to be some-thing he could concentrate on in a solitary en-vironment; while he had been in bands before, they required the collaboration and coopera-tion of the entire group, and this meant relying on others to follow through on their parts in order to express himself.

To create QC, Jeph spent between a month and six weeks on story and character concepts in order to organize what kind of comic he wanted to do. Even this, however, wasn’t going to stop the personalities Jeph Jacques brought into his comic from creating havoc in their world. In the beginning, QC was “just going to be about this kind of depressed guy and his ro-bot. Then, all of a sudden, Faye showed up.”

Jeph lets the characters take him from week to week with what he thinks they would hon-estly do in each situation he presents them with. Though he has plans for where the comic is headed (which he refused to share), he says that often the story will veer off in the oppo-site direction from where he had thought it was headed. “It’s like quantum,” he says, “there’s no real way of knowing what will happen. The moment I say that something definitely will or definitely won’t happen in the comic, it’s almost guaranteed to be the opposite.”

When Jeph Jacques first began writing QC, only a small handful of webcomic artists were able to support themselves from the reve-nue generated by the comic. Now, Jeph is part of an ever-growing community of professional webcomic writers. Jeph stresses to anyone that might be interested in making their living from the internet that it is a “labor of love.” Even his colleagues at Topatoco, a major printing and distribution center for webcomic merchan-dise, need to have access to their computers or smartphones every hour of every day in order to keep the store running smoothly. Jeph stress-es that any internet business “is not for anyone looking for your typical nine-to-five job.”

Jeph has over 400,000 unique readers every month, and over 40,000 of them follow him on Twitter. How does it feel to be internet famous? “I think that Ryan North, the creator of Dinosaur Comics, said it best when he ex-plained that you get all of the good stuff with none of the bad. You don’t have to deal with the paparazzi and privacy invasion of being a normal celebrity, but you do get recognized and sometimes you see your merchandise, which is cool.”

Megan Reilly

Romance, Robots, and (Indie) Rock: An Interview With Jeph Jacques

Jeph’s character Faye, image credit Jeph Jacques

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Drug discovery and develop-ment is a risky business. Every drug available to patients today traveled a long road and is one success story out of thousands that did not make it.

According to Wanda Haschek-Hock, professor of veterinary medi-cine at the University of Illinois, it takes many years and up to billion dollars to take a single drug from initial discovery to the market.

“The discovery phase is fol-lowed by drug development, which includes safety testing in animals,” Haschek-Hock said. “Then the drug goes through the approval process from the regulatory agency, the Food and Drug Administration, before going into clinical trials in people.”

If the drug succeeds, it will be marketed and may be sold around the world. However, if the drug has toxic side effects or does not effi-ciently treat the disease, it will be pulled from development.

According to Hakim Djaballah from the Sloan-Kettering Institute, it all begins when a drug candidate is identified. As the director of the high-throughput drug screening fa-cility at Sloan Kettering, Djaballah’s work focuses on drug discovery using new technologies that make it possible to screen thousands of drugs at a time, shortening the time it takes to discover drug can-didates.

“Once you get to Phase II, that’s when you’re trying to assess the ef-ficacy of the drug in real patients,” Biehl said. Then, in Phase III, studies are performed in patients around

the world, to see if the drug is go-ing to work with the same level of efficacy and safety in people of dif-ferent cultural descents.

All the hurdles involved in the process may explain why so few compounds successfully make it from the lab bench to the hospital bedside. With the high costs in-volved, it may now be clearer why pharmaceutical companies charge as much as they do for the drugs that do get marketed.

Today, many researchers are striving toward the goal of “‘per-sonalized medicine’, the idea that future therapies, both preventative and curative, will be based on our own individual genetic fingerprint.”

“The medication will be pre-scribed based on medical needs,” Waschek-Hock said. As research continuously progresses, personal-ized medicine will one day allow patients’ therapies to be tailored to their specific needs.

With this end in mind, research-ers in drug discovery and develop-ment continuously strive toward the goal of bringing new treatments to the market, overcoming the numer-ous challenges along the way.

Christine Herman

Sources:

• Professor Wanda Haschek-Hock, Vet Med, whaschek@illinois.edu, 217-333-3947

• Dr. Hakim Djaballah, Sloan-Ketter-ing Research Institute, djaballh@mskcc.org, 646-888-2202

• Professor Michael L. Biehl, DVM, PhD, MBA, office: (217) 244-4649

Research Corner

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Most people know and un-derstand the dangers of pollu-tion and of incorrectly handled waste such as car emissions or litter. Many people, however, don’t realize just how dan-gerous their electronics really are once they’ve become “too slow” or “out of date” and make that last trip to the land-fill. When not recycled prop-erly and through reputable companies, E-Waste, or elec-tronic waste, can be extremely detrimental to the environment and deadly to those working with it.

One of the major problems with E-Waste is the fact that 30 years ago, no one had any idea what kind of electronics people would have today. The technology of that time, also, has some of the most danger-ous components to recycle; CRT (cathode ray tube) tele-visions and monitors are be-coming almost impossible to use in some situations. These parts are heavy and filled with dangerous chemicals, which make them even more difficult to dispose of or recycle.

Most electronics are made up of materials that could be very harmful to people and animals that come into con-

tact with them in the wrong conditions. “Some of the con-stituents, such as lead, nickel, cadmium, and mercury, could pose risks to human health or the environment if misman-aged at their end-of-life,” claims the EPA’s website. Some of these, like mercury, are very dangerous on their own, but if disposed of improperly, they can be even more harmful.

One of the ways some companies keep the cost of recycling E-Waste down is by shipping it overseas to third-world countries for disposal. In these situations (according to GOOD magazine), workers burn circuit-boards and other electrical components in the open and are exposed to the toxic fumes and chemicals that result. Often, flame retardants are used on the cases and oth-er parts, and these must first be stripped from the electron-ics using dangerous chemicals. Not only are these dangerous situations for the workers, but over time the effects of these practices could cause world-wide environmental damage. Though recycling may seem less convenient for E-Waste than attempting to dispose in the trash (there is not curbside

pickup for E-Waste in most ar-eas), there are other ways for citizens to dispose of their E-Waste properly.

To start (according to the EPA), if the electronics are still in working condition, people can donate them to various charities; even if a piece of electronics seems obsolete, there are some organizations which collect them for use in countries where the technol-ogy is practically new. If there are worried about data secu-rity or the piece of electronics is unusable, the EPA provides lists of local drop-off spots for E-Waste. Checking if the company chosen to handle the waste will export it, however, is very important to avoid the pollution concerns mentioned above.

Megan Reilly

Sources:

• http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/ecy-cling/faq.htm#howmuch

• http://www.good.is/

Remember to E-Cycle

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JUST ANOTHER LOVE GAMEBoy falls in love with Gameboy Color. Gameboy Color breaks. Boy drops Gameboy Color symbolically off parking garage. What should he do with the E-Waste?? A question we all ask ourselves once our love has past.

Watch the video at www.readtechno.com

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Techno T.V.

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technograph presents:

Bad Sci-Fi Movie Night!!!

Do you have a movie that you love to watch just because it is so bad?

So does Technograph!

Bring your friends and join us for movies you love to hate of the sci-fi variety at Illini Media on December 8th from 8pm-12am.

Bring a snack to share and cozy up to make fun of bad effects and terrible writing before jumping into finals week.

Stay updated at readtechno.com