“Nothing is more seemingly innocent than a child and a dog,” says Dr. Michael Sims, professor with the UT College of Veterinary Medicine. “Yet before you can blink, that can go from something cute and inspiring to a tragedy that can change a child’s life forever. Dog bites occur every 40 seconds, and many of them are preventable.”

Every year in the U.S. approximately 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates almost 800,000 of those bites are serious enough to require medical attention and half of them are to children under 18.  Injury rates are highest among children 5-9 years of age.

“Of the things that injure children, water accidents, athletic injuries, and dog bites are way up on the list,” explains Sims. Dog bites can also carry a tremendous price tag. A State Farm Insurance spokesperson has indicated the total claims cost of dog bites is about $2 billion annually. To reduce the number of dog bites, Sims helped create a dog bite prevention program for the college.

In past years, CVM offered the class for children each spring, but this year volunteers with the college’s Human Animal Bond in Tennessee started taking the program into classrooms they regularly visit with their dogs. “In one visit, they can educate more kids than we could with a class held at the college and with less expense,” says Sims.

The lessons are built around RUFUS, a rather slow, approachable spokesdog who has never met a bowl of dog food he didn’t like. Even the letters in his name represent lessons for kids: Respect, Understanding dogs, Friendly dogs, Unfriendly dogs, and Staying away from some dogs. The key is to keep the message simple, non-threatening, and fun to learn. Kids, naturally drawn to RUFUS, are taught how to behave around dogs in various situations.

The college is creating a complete package to approach the problem on several levels. A dynamic Web site offers a section with games and activities for kids, as well as a section for adults. Brochures and a DVD have been produced, too. Initially, the goal is to put a DVD in the hands of every first grader in Knox County, one of the counties in Tennessee with a high incidence of dog bites. The college is also creating a teacher’s packet. The program is scalable and geographically independent, and veterinarians and pediatricians can also use the information in their waiting rooms or for public presentations.

For more information about the college’s dog bite prevention program, visit www.vet.utk.edu/dogbiteprevention, email dogbiteprevention@utk.edu, or call (865) 974-8387 and ask to speak with Dr. Sims.

Rufus’ Top Four Rules

Remember what Rufus says…“Always use good manners around dogs.”

Rule #1 Never go up to or try to pet a strange dog without the owner’s permission.

Rule #2 Never run from a strange dog. Walk slowly away and don’t stare at the dog.

Rule #3 If you are on the ground and a strange dog comes near you, be like a log.

Rule #4 If you are standing up and a strange dog comes near, stand still like a tree.

To understand the gist of what Bronson Messer and his fellow astrophysicists are studying, a Nerf ball helps. But to better understand a core-collapse supernova and its effects you’re going to need the most powerful academic supercomputer on the planet. The University of Tennessee happens to have that.

Messer received both his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in physics from UT Knoxville. He currently runs simulations of core-collapse supernovae on Kraken, the UT supercomputer housed in the National Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The National Science Foundation awarded $65 million to UT in 2008 to build a supercomputer. In early 2009, the supercomputer, named Kraken after a mythical sea monster, ran at full capacity for the first time.

When the June 2009 edition of the Top500 list came out – the globally recognized rankings for supercomputers – Kraken ranked as the fastest university-managed supercomputer in the world and sixth fastest overall.

Being so powerful, Kraken is ideally suited to, say, describing and decoding the biggest explosions in the Universe. Enter Bronson Messer; space-time left.

The sun will likely “die” after 10 billion years, Messer said. But a star 25 times the mass of the sun burns all of its hydrogen quickly, in roughly 7 million years, he said. “The star burns through helium and other elements, and then it gets to iron, and it’s screwed.

“It reaches a point where it can’t hold itself up against its own gravity,” he said. “It’s like taking a Nerf ball in your hands and collapsing it down. It rebounds into your hands, so that bounce shock is what eventually is going to rip the star apart.” Voila, a core-collapse supernova. If a star as close to Earth as the red star Betelgeuse in Orion’s arm were to do this, it would be visible during the day for weeks and brighter than the full moon for month, he said.

“Once we understand how they blow up, then we can do things like predict how much stuff comes out of the event,” Messer said. “That gives us some notion of how our solar system formed because our solar system came from the ashes of a previous generation of stars. What’s really important scientifically, other than it’s a really big explosion, is that all the iron in our blood, all the gold around our neck, all the silicon in the sand in every pebble on Earth was either born or disseminated in a supernova explosion.”

Messer and his collaborators on core-collapse supernovae run simulations on Kraken, pumping the supercomputer full of algorithms to model how conditions behave. Kraken is around precisely to tackle these types of massively complicated problems, such as climate change, how to best break down material and convert it into biofuels, and earthquake simulations.

Kraken is a tool, a very large tool, said Thom Mason, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Some scientific problems can’t be solved simply or elegantly and “you need brute force to crack it.”

“Another approach is to just go out with the biggest mallet you got, and model it,” Mason said. “There’s a whole set of areas where there’s many constituents to the problem, many degrees of freedom so intrinsic, you’re going to need a computer with many, many (central processing units), and lots of memory and a very high compute rate in order to computationally solve that problem.”

Having the biggest “university-managed” tool in the shed is growing UT’s reputation worldwide, said Thomas Zacharia, deputy director of science and technology at ORNL and former vice president at UT.

“Just two years ago nobody associated UT with computing,” Zacharia said. “Today, the world over, everybody knows UT and ORNL about supercomputing.”

And with Kraken being so powerful, UT can continue momentum that has made it “better than it has ever been,” said UT Interim President Jan Simek after the Top500 list was released.

“Having the fastest university-managed supercomputer in the world allows UT to keep getting better, and Kraken is another tool that helps us attract the best students, the best researchers, and the best professors, something every university strives for,” Simek said.

It certainly attracted Messer, who was running his simulations on “Ranger,” a supercomputer in Texas, before he moved his work to Kraken in 2008.

“I wasn’t just being a homer,” Messer said. “It’s just that Kraken, for the kind of simulations we wanted to do, was much more capable.”

And the value of Kraken reaches down to the undergraduate level. “There’s not many places – period — where if you’re an undergraduate or graduate student that you can learn high performance computing, because it’s still very much an apprenticeship,” Messer said.

“You sort of have to go to the mountain and, well, Kraken is one of those mountains now.”

The Gulf Dead Zone—an 8,000-square-mile area near the U.S. Gulf coast where oxygen levels are too low to support marine life—is blamed on agricultural runoff that enters the Mississippi River and its tributaries hundreds of miles upstream.

Scientists at the UT Institute of Agriculture may improve water quality in the Gulf by research totally unrelated to water. They’re working on a new kind of soybean.

In an article recently published in the journal Crop Science, researchers outline a method that allows them to select for a certain trait in soybean breeding. This trait is beneficial to the growth and development of farm animals that consume feed made from soybeans, and it boosts the efficiency of livestock operations. An added plus is that this characteristic can also reduce phosphorus pollution, leading to cleaner ground and surface waters.

According to studies, much of the problem in the Gulf Dead Zone is the result of nitrogen and phosphorus contamination, with a significant portion of the phosphorus coming from animal waste. This contamination can lead to excessive plant growth and decay in aquatic ecosystems and a reduction in available oxygen for fish and other organisms. Some experts say livestock feed contributes to the problems in the Dead Zone. The U.S. Geological Survey recently named Tennessee as one of the chief polluting watersheds that contribute to the Dead Zone.

Feed made from soybeans contains a form of phosphorus called phytate. As UT plant sciences professor Dr. Vince Pantalone explains, high levels of the phytate compound can be bad news to animals and the environment.

“Phytate is not digested and not absorbed by animals like poultry and swine,” says Pantalone. “So two things happen. One, the feeding animal doesn’t benefit because it doesn’t get good nutrition from the minerals. The second thing is, because the animal doesn’t digest this phytate, it is excreted in manure. If you spread chicken manure on agricultural land, soil bacteria break that up and then release inorganic phosphate, and that can contribute to phosphorus contamination in ground water, lakes, streams, and rivers. And that can be a really serious pollution problem.”

So Pantalone, along with Dr. Dennis West and Dr. Carl Sams from the UT Plant Sciences department, as well as Dr. Forbes Walker from the UT Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science department set out to develop a “low‐phytate” soybean—a soybean that would be more digestible by animals, thus reducing phosphorus contamination in manure and eventual run‐off and contamination in water. To do this would mean locating the low‐phytate trait within the soybean’s DNA, which is just what they did.

“Using molecular genetic markers, scientists have found that in soybeans there are two recessive genes for low levels of phytate,” says Pantalone. “And working along with the University of Georgia, we have confirmed the particular chromosome and the particular spot on the chromosome where those genes are located.”

According to Pantalone, UTIA researchers will be able to use these markers to cross low‐phytate plants with normal plants. The markers will then help track which specific progeny inherit both genes.

“If we get these two genes together, that will actually reduce the phytate level by about four times,” says Pantalone. “The phosphorus level remains stable, so it allows the feeding animals to benefit from the total phosphorus, [but] the phosphorus is no longer in a bound, indigestible form. The animal feeds, it can use the phosphorus, it’s absorbed, it’s metabolized, and it doesn’t pass out in the manure.”

The study could have a huge impact in the Volunteer State, which, according to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, is home to more than 200 million chickens and ranks 13th in the nation for broiler production.

The development of soybeans that are lower in seed phytate should improve the availability of mineral nutrients to these growing animals and at the same time reduce runoff damage to ecosystems in Tennessee’s waterways. And of course Tennessee’s waterways eventually flow into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Relief for the effects of the Gulf Dead Zone could potentially start with a soybean seed in Tennessee.

While low‐phytate soybeans are not on the market yet, varieties are being tested at several AgResearch and Education Centers across the state including Milan, Highland Rim, and East Tennessee. At these outdoor laboratories, scientists can evaluate the soybeans under real life conditions. UT Institute of Agriculture researchers say they will use the new breeding technology to continue development of a low‐phytate soybean that will be marketable and economical for farmers. Even for non‐farmers, it’s something to get excited about—better water that starts with better beans.

A few times each year, light bounces just the right way through our atmosphere to give the moon an orange glow. If one UT Knoxville faculty member has his way, that lunar tint will be distinctly Big Orange.

In just a few years, the U.S. is seeking to send astronauts back to the moon, following in the footsteps of their predecessors in the Apollo program of the 1960s and 70s. This time, however, the mission reaches far beyond the already-lofty goal of simply getting to the moon and back. Humans are expected to build permanent lunar bases, learning how to use the materials available on the moon to survive and, with any luck, thrive.

UT Knoxville Distinguished Professor Larry Taylor, who heads the Planetary Geosciences Institute, says the idea is to use the moon as a proving ground to prepare for future human expeditions to Mars.

“In many ways the moon can serve as an experimental platform,” says Taylor, whose early career was spent as a NASA scientist consulting with the Apollo lunar missions. “The moon is close enough to perform rescue missions if needed, and conditions on the moon can be even worse than on Mars.”

Taylor is part of the science team on a NASA instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper—“M3” for short. It’s currently orbiting the moon on the Chandrayaan-1 satellite, which was launched by India in October. Taylor points to the level of international cooperation and the presence of such new competitors in the space race as India, Japan, and China as new factors in this round of moon exploration.

As M3 orbits the moon, it is recording complex images of the moon’s surface. The data it provides allows Taylor, along with scientists at NASA and Brown University, to understand the mineralogy and composition of soil and rock on the lunar surface and determine where there may be concentrations of specific minerals for use in producing oxygen, making habitats, and other necessary materials too costly to bring from Earth. The mission has a dual purpose, according to Taylor.

“There’s a wealth of scientific knowledge here. Three billion years ago, the moon’s energy budget ran out, and the surface we see now is a type of death mask. If we can interpret the geologic aspects of that mask, there’s much we can learn.”

Past instruments have had great difficulty analyzing the mineralogy of the moon’s surface, according to Taylor, because of the copious amounts of incredibly small metallic iron particles in the soil. With M3, Taylor and his partners will be able to “see through” the camouflage that these minute iron grains create for the minerals beneath.

While the information collected by M3 is scientifically fascinating because of the picture it provides into the early life of the moon—and with it, the early days of Earth—its work also has major implications for humanity’s return to the moon.

By slowly analyzing the entire lunar surface, M3 will provide Taylor and other researchers with a roadmap to where future explorers can find the resources they need to be able to survive on the moon long term. That information will prove critical in planning missions for years to come—including possibly providing rocket fuel for humans’ first journey to Mars.

“The moon has the potential to be, essentially, a gas station in the sky,” Taylor says. “With existing rocket technology, eighty-five percent of a vehicle’s mass is fuel needed to leave Earth’s gravity. If we can find a way to create fuel using resources on the moon, it would greatly aid the process of traveling to Mars after that.”

Taylor recognizes, however, that going forward, a new generation of scientists will assume the mantle carried by him and his colleagues, who helped pioneer manned lunar exploration and the scientific efforts that have followed. That’s why in the fall semester of 2008, Taylor taught a seminar course for freshman honors students in UT Knoxville’s colleges of Arts and Sciences and Engineering.

He sees the course as part of his continuing efforts to make the moon relevant to students today, while encouraging them to follow in his footsteps.

“To these students, 1969 is a date in a history book. I want to make the kids come to the realization that ‘You’re going to be the ones going to the moon!’ ”

Angela Frantz, a UT Knoxville freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences who is planning to pursue studies in the medical field, says the course made her look at space exploration in a different light.

“I was always interested in space,” she says. “But when it comes to the moon, I hadn’t given much thought to it, other than the fact that it was there.”

Over the course of the class, Taylor covered all aspects of studying the moon, from lessons in geology and mineralogy to a historical perspective on the evolution of lunar exploration and an examination of plans to return to the moon. That includes exposing students to his collection of actual samples of lunar rock and soil returned during the Apollo missions, of which Taylor has one of the largest allocations.

Both Taylor and Frantz say one of the highlights of the course was a visit by Dr. Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt, one of the last two astronauts to walk on the moon in December 1972 and a former U.S. senator from New Mexico.

“It’s such a different experience to learn from people like [Schmitt and Taylor], who have so much emotion behind it,” Frantz says. “When my generation reads about the space race, we don’t have anything to compare it to. We haven’t been through anything that’s been both that inspiring and scientifically important.”

That’s something that Taylor hopes to fix as he continues to teach undergraduate students alongside his ongoing and still-growing research projects, including innovative new ways to deal with the health and logistical hazards the fine lunar soil could create for future astronauts.

“I want to show people that this is not just gee whiz,” Taylor says. “There’s real value in going to the moon as mankind expands its presence into the solar system.”

In 1959 Dr. Eyvind Thor planted two white pines outside his University of Tennessee laboratory. Today the Norway-born scientist can scarcely stretch his arms halfway around their girth.

The trees’ rapid growth symbolizes how the University of Tennessee Tree Improvement Program has flourished in the 50 years since Thor’s arrival. The tree geneticist and Fulbright Scholar, who is now retired, was hired to found the program at a time when many state universities, drawn to the value they perceived in their state’s forested lands, were launching similar efforts. Tennessee’s approach differed significantly, however. Instead of hiring a specialist in silviculture or tree management—each of which focus on immediate utilization of forests—UT hired a tree-improvement specialist.

“Tree improvement, you have to wait a while,” says Thor in his precise accented English. The work occurs over generations of trees, the slowest growing crop there is. But there is no question that Thor had immediate positive impacts. Before his arrival, the state of Tennessee had bought big lots of white pine seedlings for reforestation from the lowest bidder. The seedlings came from Pennsylvania and sometimes required 3 years in a nursery to grow large enough to transplant. Thor sought local seed sources—collecting white-pine cones across the southern range of the species—and demonstrated how much faster seedlings from those cones could grow.

“The first thing I had to do was convince these people that they had to look around a bit to see if those seed sources were the best in the sense that they’d grow faster and become good saw timber in a reasonable period of time. So I went out with my crew and we collected seed cones either by shooting down the branches and picking cones off of them or by climbing, using portable ladders. Seedlings from these cones grew twice as fast as those from Pennsylvania.”

This work established two of the precepts of UT’s Tree Improvement Program: (1) develop genetically improved seedlings ideally suited to Tennessee conditions and (2) focus on quality materials.

The shift from importing seedlings to growing them from local sources wasn’t important for speed of growth alone. It also meant that higher-quality genetic material was being reintroduced into the state’s forests where it would have effects throughout the trees’ decades-long breeding cycles. “It’s the kind of thing that’s not necessarily effective in my lifetime,” Thor says, “but it sure as heck will be effective for maybe hundreds and hundreds of years in the future.”

During his career with the program, he worked hard to find or breed blight-resistant American chestnut trees. “I found quite a few nice looking American chestnuts in the woods. They always had some signs of having been affected by the blight, so we were not looking for immunity, but for some form of resistance.”

He established a small chestnut seed orchard at UT’s Plant Sciences Farm in Knoxville. “But it went from bad to worse, really. They were attacked by the blight, and I lost one tree after another. It got a little bit discouraging after a while. I’m kind of a stubborn person, but that was even too much for me.”

Instead he shifted his focus to study the genetic variations of other tree species. With a UT graduate student, he collaborated on Christmas trees, which studies showed were well suited to growing in East Tennessee. There was then only one grower in the area, but as Thor worked with Frasier firs, more potential growers came forth, and eventually a Christmas tree industry took hold in Tennessee.

“Dr. Thor’s greatest contribution was taking the initial steps with a number of tree species, moving them toward domestication, and setting up an organized, well-run, and well-respected program that gave me the basis to build on,” says Dr. Scott Schlarbaum, who succeeded Thor in leading the UT Tree Improvement Program. While other states abandoned their tree improvement efforts over the years, Tennessee did just the opposite.

“The UT program and the cooperating state Division of Forestry’s program have actually strengthened, and this puts Tennessee in a great position for the future,” Schlarbaum says. “Tennessee consistently ranks among the top five hardwood-producing states. With the UT and the division’s tree improvement programs, we’ll be able to respond quickly to changes in products through integrating molecular techniques with conventional tree breeding in years to come. Unlike other states, Tennessee has taken the first or second step toward domestication, and that’s going to give us, I think, a tremendous advantage in the future.”

State forester Steve Scott agrees. “Tennessee landowners have the advantage of genetically improved seedlings that are going to give them the best growth and quality or resistance to pests in their future forests, and therein lies the value of these two integrated state programs,” he says.

Schlarbaum’s work to domesticate species begins with seed collections from native trees, many of them hardwood species. The seeds are grown for 1 year under optimum nursery conditions, then the largest, best-formed seedlings are selected, usually the top 10 percent of the year-old plants. These are planted in a genetic test that is eventually thinned to leave the best trees for a seed-production orchard. The Division of Forestry’s program then begins to manage the seed orchards and collect the seeds for planting at the East Tennessee State Nursery in Delano, Tennessee. The nursery typically produces from 7 million to 17 million seedlings each year for sale to Tennessee landowners for reforestation efforts.

“The diversity of seedlings will allow Tennessee landowners to mold their lands in any way they want after harvest, damage, or fire,” Schlarbaum says. “Depending on the species mix, seedlings can be planted for game or nongame wildlife purposes, timber production in combination with wildlife, or strictly for wood products. The UT and Division of Forestry programs work together to provide landowners with trees that will allow them to get the maximum yield off of their lands.”

Schlarbaum is most proud of two key accomplishments—the Margaret Finley Shackelford Orchards at the UT AgResearch and Education Center at Ames Plantation in Grand Junction, Tennessee, and technology transfer to the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) to guide a massive West Tennessee bottomland reforestation effort.

The Shackelford Orchards include seed orchards of 19 species, including oaks, as well as persimmon, American holly, and pecan. “The Shackelford trustees had the foresight to support the idea of developing locally adapted hardwood seedlings that are improved for both nursery and field performance,” Schlarbaum explains. He expects the Shackelford Orchards to be critically important to using molecular biology in years to come. “We don’t know what the full potential of the molecular genetics will be at the applied level.”

He also notes that seedlings from the Shackelford Orchard will feed into precision forestry research, which is a multidisciplinary effort that studies the effects of light, soil, moisture, competition, silviculture, management, and genetics on growth and form. The combination of orchards and precision forestry effort is possible only because of the enormous size (18,400 acres) and diversity of the Ames Plantation land base. “It’s a model that scientists and land managers are really going to watch,” Schlarbaum says.

TWRA’s bottomland restoration is establishing a corridor of forested land along the Mississippi River, stretching from upper northwest Tennessee down to the Memphis area. According to Gary Myers, executive director of the agency, the corridor will attract migrating neotropical songbirds and raptors, as well as deer, wild turkeys, and waterfowl, and thus support the interests of bird-watchers and wildlife enthusiasts. Technology transfer from UT’s Tree Improvement Program has guided this reforestation effort, which now stretches across 4,000 acres, with 700 to 900 acres added each year.

“Trees are like humans,” Schlarbaum says. “They have juvenile and mature phases and a long reproductive cycle. Just like humans, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the genetic variations and possibilities. The years ahead for the Tree Improvement Program will be exciting ones.”

Energy security, global warming, food versus fuel: these are the terms political insiders and John Q. Public and Jane Q. Citizen are tossing around at cocktail parties and church potlucks. But while the energy debates rage, the University of Tennessee is forging ahead toward a homegrown solution.

With financial help from state government and additional private investment, UT is aggressively pursuing statewide implementation of a business model for biobased transportation fuel, specifically, commercially competitive production and distribution of cellulosic ethanol. Dr. Kelly Tiller, agricultural economist and director of operations for the UT Office of Bioenergy Programs, predicts that once fully realized, this next-generation biofuel industry (as opposed to corn-based ethanol production) stands to significantly improve Tennessee’s economy while simultaneously reducing the transfer of wealth from consumers’ pockets through gas pumps across the Volunteer State to Swiss banks and foreign investment houses. What’s more, as Tiller has stated in testimony before a Senate conference, UT’s efforts combined with the resources at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory put Tennessee front and center in the race for research-and-development solutions to the national problem of energy security.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, gas prices shot up dramatically across the nation. By 2006, when prices were consistently hovering around the $2.50 mark, people were clamoring for a national solution to the high cost of transportation fuel. In 2007 future-minded researchers with the UT Institute of Agriculture’s AgResearch program, Tiller among them, boldly presented a plan that many had envisioned for years.

Nicknamed the Tennessee Biofuels Initiative, the plan to produce cellulosic ethanol from locally grown feedstocks like switchgrass quickly gained support across the state. Folks from farmers to business entrepreneurs, ranking politicians, and soccer moms were interested in investing in transportation energy security for the state and nation.

With the endorsement of Governor Phil Bredesen, the Tennessee General Assembly allocated $70 million over a 5-year period to the university to construct a pilot-scale biorefinery. Its purpose is to prove the feasibility of technology to produce commercially competitive cellulosic ethanol and to develop useful co-products that will further bolster the state’s economy with new jobs. Some $8 million of the funds is earmarked for research and development of a farm-based system of feedstock production to support the biorefinery, as well as an eventual network of additional refineries operating in communities across the state.

If $2.50-a-gallon gas put the national mood on a slow burn just 2 years ago, averages that topped $4.00 a gallon after Hurricane Ike last September caused the national psyche to blow. With high energy costs and the world financial crisis, the UT AgResearch vision for energy security and economic development is both welcome and timely.

As a land-grant university, UT is charged with research, education, and technology transfer. In the biofuels initiative, a substantial effort has been mounted to ensure that the state’s farming community can profitably support a biofuels industry while also ensuring the environmental soundness or sustainability of energy crops.

Research plots across the state are testing varieties of switchgrass for their suitability as a fuel crop, and additional research examines production and harvest practices and carbon sequestration. Biosystems engineers are designing and evaluating equipment for planting and harvesting, and plant scientists are working to isolate genetic traits to enhance switchgrass performance.

Because a crop must be ready when the biorefinery is first operational, UT is already working with selected farmers in East Tennessee. UT Extension agents and biofuels specialists are teaching 16 contract farmers the ins and outs of switchgrass production, and with their help, UT Extension is developing a body of publications and firsthand knowledge of how to establish and grow the new crop.

The pool of contract farmers was established because a market for switchgrass as biomass did not exist. “We needed some farmers to grow something they had no experience with, so we are working closely with sixteen select producers to help them manage their risk,” said Dr. Clark Garland, UT Extension economist who helped write the farmer agreements.

In spring 2008 UT contracted for 723 acres of switchgrass. Once the biorefinery is fully operational, some 4,000 additional acres may be needed for research and other purposes. If the business plan is implemented across the state, many more farmers and acres are expected to participate in feedstock production.
Ken Goddard and Jon Walton, UT Extension switchgrass specialists, were engaged to help the farmers establish the feedstock supply for the biorefinery. “It’s not that easy to establish. The first year some switchgrass fields can be full of weeds and pretty thin,” says Goddard. “By the second or third year, the switchgrass fields with adequate plant populations can naturally out-compete other plants.” Goddard transferred from West Tennessee after years of working with experimental crops of switchgrass to help the East Tennessee farmers get their grass crop up and growing.

At the same time that Garland, Walton, and Goddard were working to establish a feedstock for the biorefinery, Tiller was toiling on the tasks of biorefinery construction and economic development. While the state’s investment is sizable, the university hoped to supplement it with funds from technical collaborators. And in July 2008, DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol (DDCE) signed on to build the biorefinery.

The pilot plant and process development unit—a research facility that enables experimentation at a larger-than-laboratory scale, as well as faster adjustments to process components—will be located at the Niles Ferry Industrial Park in Monroe County.

A project of the U.S. and European industrial giants DuPont and Danisco, DDCE leverages more than $140 million of investment and more than 10 years’ research and development of integrated cellulosic ethanol technologies that use various nonfood feedstocks. In Tennessee, DDCE expects the pilot biorefinery to produce 250,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually from switchgrass and corncobs.

If all goes as anticipated, the pilot-scale biorefinery will prove the commercial feasibility of producing cellulosic ethanol, and private investors will step in to build and manage a new biobased fuel industry for the state, perhaps as early as 2012. The university will have found another way to improve the lives of Tennesseans, and just as important, the state and nation will be another step closer to energy security.

And the gas shortages of 2008? They may become an obscure footnote to history for future Tennesseans.

Breaking New Ground

The sun shone brightly on October 14 as the University of Tennessee took another step toward leading the nation in biofuel research.

Amid a gathering of more than 200 business leaders, farmers, scientists, and politicians—including Governor Phil Bredesen, Senator Bob Corker and Representatives Zach Wamp and John J. Duncan Jr.—Genera Energy LLC, a limited liability company of the UT Research Foundation, collaborated with DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC to break ground for an innovative pilot-scale biorefinery and state-of-the-art research and development facility for cellulosic ethanol, or ethanol from nonfood sources.

The first-of-its-kind facility, located near Vonore, Tennessee, will use nonfood biomass (corncobs, fiber, and switchgrass) as feedstocks for transportation fuel, so officials used a tractor and a no-till seed drill to officially break ground for the site. Utilizing DDCE’s cellulosic ethanol technology and the UT Institute of Agriculture’s expertise in cellulosic feedstock production and co-product research, the facility is expected to be a catalyst for a new biofuel industry for the state.

Governor Bredesen believes the state has an opportunity to take the leadership position in alternative fuels. “We are facing serious energy challenges from local to global,” he said. “When it comes to facing the challenges of the future, Tennessee isn’t just talking the talk about clean energy technology, we’re walking the walk—rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.”

The governor said the alternative fuels industry could be an economic engine for Tennessee. “The bottom line is that this plant and this partnership are going to do a lot of good for Tennessee’s future,” he said.

For his part, UT President John Petersen is proud of the role the university is playing in this initiative. “It is an important part of our responsibility and our mission as a land-grant university—to impact the state’s economy and serve the public, in addition to educating the young people of Tennessee,” he said.

DDCE President Joseph Skurla praised the collaboration as a healthy union of cutting-edge technology, supply economics, and transportation logistics. “DuPont Danisco has the technology package that will lead the way in the market,” Skurla said. “We are ready to scale up, we have economics that can’t be beat, and with the University of Tennessee and the farmers of this great state, we have a winning team that is going to help deliver sustainable nonfood biofuels to the market on an accelerated schedule.”

The pilot plant is expected to produce cellulosic ethanol by the end of 2009.

The biorefinery’s construction and switchgrass production are the first major components of the UT Biofuels Initiative, a farm-to-fuel business plan developed by UT Institute of Agriculture researchers. The initiative models a biofuels industry with multiple commercial facilities supplied by locally grown feedstock and capable of supplementing 30 percent of Tennessee’s current petroleum consumption.

The supercomputer is located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences, a state-funded facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Petersen says the grant affirms the “tremendous capability” of the UT-Oak Ridge partnership.

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen gave his vote of confidence to the joint success of UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“I’ve long believed the University of Tennessee has the potential to be a world-class research institution, and this is just the latest in a series of successes by UT and its partners in Oak Ridge that tells me others agree,” the governor said. “I’m pleased to see this project come to the National Institute for Computational Sciences and proud of the state’s role in supporting the innovative projects it houses.” The grant also positions UT to lead a nationwide partnership to put the supercomputer to use (see “The Players”).

The UT-Oak Ridge partnership is a model for how American competitiveness works, says David Millhorn, UT’s executive vice-president.

“We’re bringing together some of the best and brightest researchers in science and equipping them with some of the most powerful and technologically advanced tools available in the world,” Millhorn says.

The system is being built and deployed in partnership with Cray and AMD. It will be capable of nearly a quadrillion (that’s a million billion) calculations a second (1 petaflop).

Climate figures to be a key focus of Kraken’s research potential. As climate change continues to gain prominence in both the policy and the scientific arenas, such powerful systems as Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jaguar will take the lead in climate simulations. UT’s new supercomputer also will enable:

• astrophysicists to move toward realistic simulations of supernova formation, galaxy evolution, and black hole mergers;
• earth scientists to perform high-resolution simulations of the earth’s interior and enhance understanding of the planet’s evolution; and
• materials scientists to design better materials with useful properties.

Research in such fields as chemistry, biochemistry, particle physics, engineering, and computer science also will benefit.

Thomas Zacharia, UT vice-president for science and technology, led the successful grant process. He is also ORNL associate lab director for computing and computational sciences.

“Researchers need increasingly powerful computing resources if they are to deliver the breakthroughs that society demands in climate science, energy research, and other fields. This award will guarantee that we are able to deliver those resources,” Zacharia says. The award includes $30-million for computer hardware and $35-million toward operation of the system during the next 5 years.

Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray, says as the system is upgraded to become one of the largest supercomputers in the world, he foresees far-reaching benefits.

“This system will enable researchers to work toward achieving the top industry advancements and scientific breakthroughs of our day.”

UT & Oak Ridge: Together in Research

The UT-Oak Ridge partnership shares four new joint institutes:

• National Institute for Computational Sciences - Home to the new supercomputer and the first state-owned building ever built on a national laboratory campus
• Joint Institute for Advanced Materials - A $45-million facility to be built on the Cherokee Farms campus at Knoxville
• Joint Institute for Biological Sciences - An $11.8-million facility on the ORNL campus that will be home to the Department of Energy’s new Bioenergy Science Center, a $125-million research endeavor shared among ORNL, UT, and other partners
• Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences - To be built adjacent to the Spallation Neutron Source at ORNL

The Players

The National Institute for Computational Sciences will facilitate use of the new supercomputer. UT will lead the partnership, which also includes these organizations:

• Universities–Clemson, Duke, Florida State, Louisiana State, North Carolina State, Rice, Vanderbilt, Houston, Oklahoma, Virginia, and Virginia Tech
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Texas Advanced Computing Center
• Oak Ridge Associated Universities
• Industrial partners Cray and AMD

The “Top500″

UT’s Dr. Jack Dongarra, along with colleagues, releases the “Top500″ list of the world’s fastest computers semiannually. As computers perform at faster and faster speeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a spot on the list. In fact, the slowest computer on the current list would have ranked in the top 200 last November!

“As high-performance computing takes an increasingly prominent role in various fields of scientific research, the demand for bigger and faster machines will continue, says Dongarra, who heads UT’s Innovative Computing Laboratory. Dongarra’s colleagues in compiling the list are at the University of Mannheim and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

See video about UT’s largest-ever research grant at www.tennessee.edu/system/news/nsf/.

When cats purr and dogs invite more, more, more tummy scratching, their human friends assume the animals are enjoying themselves. But we have no ultimate proof that animals feel pleasure.

Research scientist Jonathan Balcombe (Knoxville ’91), who has spent years studying animal behavior, posits in his book Pleasurable Kingdom that humans aren’t the only animals capable of feeling pleasure.

He says an instance of apparent animal pleasure piqued his interest in exploring the topic.

“The idea came to me as I watched a crow repeatedly sidle up to another on a perch, lean over, and expose the nape of his/her neck,” he says. “The other bird preened the soliciting one. It looked pleasurable, and I realized that I’d read practically nothing about animal pleasure despite all my years of studying animal behavior. Pleasurable Kingdom is my effort to start filling that void.”

Balcombe says the book has been well received.

“New perspectives are inevitably met with skepticism from more conservative thinkers, but my book comes at a time when biologists are emerging from a period in which it was considered taboo to address animal minds and feelings,” Balcombe says. “It’s not as if animal pleasure is especially mysterious or controversial; it’s just been neglected.”

He provides anecdotes showing animal pleasure in play, in sex, in feeding, and other instances. The strong survive and pass on their genes to the next generation, and Balcombe says pleasurable reactions can support that process.

“Play is positive for evolution. It builds strength and social skills and helps teach rules,” he says. But he doesn’t think a dog who insists on continuing a game of fetch is doing so to imprint his genes on his progeny; the dog, Balcombe says, is just having fun.

Though most of us are familiar with cats and dogs and what we perceive as their pleasurable reactions, Balcombe has compiled both scientific and anecdotal evidence of pleasure in penguins, dolphins, lemurs, parrots, iguanas, and chimpanzees. Balcombe is a senior research scientist with Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C. He was born in England and lived in Canada and New Zealand before coming to the U.S. in 1987.

He enrolled at UT Knoxville to study with Dr. Gary McCracken, an international expert on bats. Balcombe says his time at the university was a “rich experience . . . the then-new library, teaching undergrads, the football games, and the Great Smoky Mountains were all highlights.” He earned his Ph.D. in ethology, or animal behavior.

Though Balcombe has gone more or less mainstream with Pleasurable Kingdom and various blogs, his background is unquestionably academic as evidenced by his rich trove of scientific papers and presentations. He says humans have a responsibility to not deprive animals of pleasure.

“Our treatment of other animals is profoundly out of step with what we know of their awareness and sensitivity and their capacities for suffering and pleasure,” he says.

Balcombe is developing a documentary film that showcases animals’ abilities and another book that will present more research on animal cognition, awareness, emotions, and virtues.

“The book will ask the question, If animals experience the world essentially as we do, isn’t it time we started treating them better?” Balcombe says.

For all this knowledge of and experience with animals, Balcombe finds himself in much the same position as millions of other humans: “I’m owned by two cats.

“The beauty of pleasurable interactions is they’re bidirec­tional. When I give an appreciative cat a belly-rub, I’m enjoying it [almost] as much as he is.”

Like many youngsters who grew up in the 1950s, Michael Lofaro enjoyed watching Fess Parker portray frontiersman Davy Crockett on television.

Eventually his interest in Crockett and Daniel Boone led him to a career teaching and researching early American literature and folklore. Lofaro keeps an autographed photo of Parker wearing the famous coonskin cap on a bookcase in his office at UT Knoxville.

These days, Lofaro, Lindsay Young Professor of American Literature and American Studies, is more widely known for restoring James Agee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family.

The veteran professor recently completed A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text, which is Volume 1 of the new series “The Works of James Agee,” published by the University of Tennessee Press.

The novel was altered significantly by editor David McDowell, a family friend, in an effort to earn needed money for Agee’s family. But Lofaro’s version has been completely reconstructed on the basis of manuscripts left by Agee.
Agee died in 1955, 2 years before A Death in the Family was published. The author grew up in Knoxville, and his father’s death is the focus of the novel.

Lofaro says he didn’t set out to vindicate Agee. “I didn’t have the intention of redoing A Death in the Family. I didn’t know it needed it.”

Lofaro first read the novel in high school—as many students still do—and he recalls being confused by the story.

“I clearly prefer Agee’s version, but for fifty years the older work has been a part of the fabric of American literature,” he says. “While I may become known either as the person who resurrected Agee’s masterpiece or the one who called a classic into question, for the first time, readers now have in their hands a way to make their own judgments.”

Lofaro’s work on Agee started in 1988 when he got a call from UT Libraries’ Special Collections department. A book dealer was offering to sell the university some papers left by Agee’s editor.

Special Collections called Lofaro because he is a manuscript appraiser, a skill he honed while researching Davy Crockett. He often studies letters and signatures for authenticity.

Lofaro says rummaging through the Agee papers was like “looking in a candy store window.” In the papers were two chapters, “Chilhowee Park” and “Enter the Ford,” that were left out of A Death in the Family but obviously intended by Agee to be part of it. “That got me interested,” Lofaro says. “I wondered how much else had been changed.”

The answer ended up being “a great deal.” But because the trustee of the James Agee Trust wouldn’t let the papers be published, and there was a lawsuit over the materials, Lofaro had to suppress his interest for nearly 13 years. In the interim, he helped lead two conferences at UT Knoxville on Agee, and his work helped deepen the community’s connection to its native son.

Lofaro restarted the restoration project in 2002 after a new trustee was appointed.

He says McDowell altered the novel—dropping chapters and adding others—to appeal to what he thought audiences of the time would like. Lofaro wanted to restore the novel to the version Agee actually intended. One of the biggest changes comes at the beginning of the book. The editor deleted the original introduction, which was a nightmarish sequence of Agee’s father’s death, and substituted the flowery “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Lofaro plans nine more volumes in the series that will encompass Agee’s other work. The target completion date is 2015.

As a twist, Lofaro found some similarities between Agee and his previous work with Boone and Crockett.

“People changed the lives or works of all three men to suit their conception of what they should be,” he says. For Boone and Crockett, their personas were changed. For Agee, it was his writing.

Other books by Lofaro are Agee Agonistes: Essays on the Life, Legend and Works of James Agee; Davy Crockett’s Riproarious Shemales and Sentimental Sisters: Women’s Tall Tales From the Crockett Almanacs; and Daniel Boone: An American Life.

President George H. W. Bush enjoyed showing his friends the White House painting of President Abraham Lincoln and his Civil War generals. Bush would point to the painting and assert that all of America’s great presidents were tested by fire. Bush, a decorated World War II hero and experienced Cold War warrior, would have an opportunity to prove himself as America’s commander-in-chief during the 1991 Gulf War. His son George W. Bush, only the second U.S. presidential offspring to also hold the presidency, will be judged for his own wartime decisions.

Palgrave Macmillan has just released Test by Fire: The War Presidency of George W. Bush (the latest volume in its series “The Evolving American Presidency”), written by Dr. Robert H. Swansbrough, political science professor at UT Chattanooga. Swansbrough’s assessment of Bush’s performance raises questions about how the Iraq War and Bush’s Middle East policies will affect the 2008 presidential election.

In an interview with NBC’s Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, President Bush defined himself with the statement “I’m a war president. I made decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign-policy matters with war on my mind.”

“Has he been a good war president? Does being a war president inevitably lead to admission into the pantheon of America’s great presidents?” Swansbrough asks. “How has President Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ impacted upon U.S. foreign policy, particularly as we look at Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Middle East today?”

The horrific events of 9/11 gave the Bush administration a focus it previously had lacked. Bush moved away from the “realist” policies followed by his father and presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, adopting the neoconservative aggressive ­foreign-policy approach promoted by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.

“Vice President Cheney had assumed an unprecedented power in the U.S. ­foreign-policymaking process,” Swansbrough says. “Cheney had assembled a large staff of foreign-policy specialists who shared his dark, threatening view of the world. The vice-president’s staff rivaled the president’s National Security Council staff.

“Bush embraced the neoconservatives’ emphasis on military force, which downgraded the role of diplomacy in American statecraft. The more ‘forward-leaning’ policy placed less emphasis on prudence and the cautionary voices of other presidential advisors, such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, and many of our generals, allies, and foreign friends.”

The Bush administration’s toppling of the Taliban and destruction of al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan was applauded at home and abroad. However, the president turned too quickly toward Iraq before destroying the al Qaeda terrorist threat in Afghanistan, as evidenced by the Taliban’s escalating attacks on U.S. and NATO forces and the reconstituted al Qaeda threat in Pakistan’s mountainous tribal region.

Swansbrough says Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein can be traced back to a 1993 assassination attempt on his father. “The guy,” Bush said in October 2002, “tried to kill my dad.”

“The military victory in Iraq was never in doubt,” Swansbrough says, “because Operation Desert Storm destroyed much of the Iraqi army during the 1991 Gulf War. Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who served as head of the U.S. Central Command until 2000, described the Iraqi military as ‘a decaying force.’ The real question revolves around whether President Bush should have launched a preemptive invasion or relied on the containment of a weakened Saddam Hussein, as followed by the first President Bush and President Clinton.”

Swansbrough examines the credibility gap created by the Bush administration over the avowed imminent threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that—after the successful toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime—were never found.

“An arms expert with the state department labeled as ‘faith-based intelligence’ the exaggerated claims of a massive Iraqi arsenal of deadly weapons of mass destruction. Bush administration officials had faith that what they believed about Iraq’s WMDs was true and sought intelligence to support their dire assumptions. This led to groupthink within the CIA. President Bush then presented a worst-case scenario, bolstered by emotional references to 9/11 and a nuclear ‘mushroom cloud,’ to frighten the Congress and American people into war with Iraq,” Swansbrough says.

U.S. peacekeeping experience in Bosnia and Kosovo provided the basis for a number of studies done by the government and the RAND Corporation think tank to suggest troop-level guidelines to establish postwar security. Swansbrough cites RAND’s prediction of the need for 20 occupying troops for every thousand people in the country, or in the case of Iraq, 526,000 coalition troops. The RAND analysis warned that when the number of occupiers is low compared with the population, the occupying forces suffer casualties.

Bush’s Iraq War legacy should have cost $40 billion, according to the man who ran the Pentagon for the first 6 years of Bush’s presidency, Donald Rumsfeld. According to Swansbrough’s research, the projected cost of the Iraq War will come closer to $532 billion by fall 2008.

George W. Bush brought three different personas to his war presidency, says Swansbrough. “The Bombastic Bushkin,” a moniker created for him by his Midland, Texas, friends that followed him into his political career, referred to his extroversion, rowdiness, and often-­cutting sense of humor. Bush the “Machiavellian Politico” emerged when he joined forces with Karl Rove, who guided his campaigns to the Texas governor’s mansion and on to the White House with an aggressive must-win-at-all-costs strategy. Finally, the “Righteous Hawk,” his third persona, “did not fully reveal itself until after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when President Bush launched the war on terror to ‘rid the world of evil’ and confront the ‘axis of evil,’ ” Swansbrough says.

Bush’s biographical development will appeal to young readers, Swansbrough says. “I’ve found students enjoy reading about the youth and early careers of presidents. George W. Bush persevered, despite failing to match his father’s success in school, sports, the Texas oil patch, and the military. He later upset the low expectations of family and friends by winning the Texas governorship and the presidency. Most important, he overcame the major hurdle of alcoholism after celebrating his fortieth birthday,” Swansbrough says.

Swansbrough believes one aspect of President Bush’s legacy has been the political polarization of the country, reflected in a 70-percent partisan gap (the difference in the percentages of Republicans and Democrats who approved of the job President Bush was doing) in 2007. That partisan divide in part reflects bitter division over the war in Iraq, despite Bush’s early declaration that he was a “uniter, not a divider.”

Swansbrough observes that “the lessons of the Bush administration reveal how the idealistic goal of promoting Middle East democracy often conflicted with the realpolitik policies of the war on terror, as demonstrated in Pakistan.”

The legacy of the unpopular Iraq war, escalating attacks in Afghanistan, and Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East will confront the victor of the 2008 election.

Says Swansbrough, “The next president will also face the daunting challenges of resurrecting America’s reputation, mending relations with longtime allies and friends, and working for a Middle East peace settlement in that vital region.”