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RTP Sigma Xi Past Activities
1999 | 2000 | 2001
2001 RTP Chapter Programs
Symposium on Drinking Water Quality
A discussion of issues and research relating to the regional water supply and drinking water quality was held at Friday Center for Continuing Education of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on January 31, 2001. This symposium was sponsored by the RTP chapter and by the UNC Drinking Water Research Center. It focused on water supplies and drinking water quality in North Carolina, with a particular emphasis on the Triangle area. This area is blessed with an abundance of expertise in the local area on this broad topic. A one-day meeting could not address all aspects of this important subject. The sponsors wanted it to appeal to a broad audience of people who are interested in drinking water. The presentations had enough technical information to be useful to the professionals who are working in the drinking water field, and to professionals in other fields who wish to understand the important issues. The presentations were as follows:
Welcome- Robert Wright, RTP Chapter
Symposium Overview- Philip Singer, UNC Drinking Water Research Center
Water quality monitoring, modeling, and research needs- Kenneth Reckhow, UNC Water Resource Research Institute
Water Quality Planning: Its Strengths and Weaknesses- David Moreau, UNC Dept. of City and Regional Planning
Watershed Protection: Determining Effective Management Measures- Trevor Clements, Tetra Tech, Inc.
Water Supply Planning- Ed Kerwin, Orange Water and Sewer Authority
Reclaimed Water Offsets Peak Potable Demands in Cary, NC- Wayne Mills, Robert Bonne', Robert Fischer, and David Ammerman
Management of Excessive Algal Growth- Hans Paerl, UNC Institute of Marine Sciences
Microbial Water Quality in North Carolina- Chip Simmons, UNC School of Public Health
Disinfection By-Products in NC Drinking Water, Philip Singer, UNC Water Resources Engineering Program
Proposed Radon Drinking Water Standard- James Watson, UNC Dept. of Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Evaluation of Selected Pesticides in Rural and Urban Watersheds- Robert Holman and Ross Leidy
Discussion and Closing Remarks
2001 Annual Banquet RTP Chapter of Sigma Xi
The annual banquet meeting of the Research Triangle Park chapter of Sigma Xi was held on June 7, 2001 at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. The program began at 6:00 PM in the museum's Magic Wings Butterfly House with heavy hors d'oeuvres and refreshments. Museum staff were available to talk to people about the exhibits and the live butterflies that live inside the climate-controlled enclosure.
At 7:30 PM, the meeting shifted over to the auditorium in the museum's main building. The outgoing chapter president, Robert Wright, summarized the chapter's activities over the preceding year. The chapter treasurer, Li-Chung Huang, discussed the chapter's income and expenses and reported that the chapter's bank balance had grown slightly during this period. Jack Scarborough, head of the nominating committee, presented a slate of chapter officers for next year. The slate was voted into office by a show of hands by those present. There is still a vacancy for vice-president/president-elect that has to be filled. The incoming president, James Bernstein, presented his plans for the coming year and encouraged the all chapter members to take an active role in organizing and participating in chapter activities.
The business portion of the meeting was followed by "Science, Art, Story: Picturing Research", a presentation by Rosalind Reid, Editor, American Scientist magazine. Since the dawn of civilization, people have used pictures to communicate ideas across barriers of language, culture and time. Today, new technologies and art forms offer ways to engage the senses in imagining and visualizing scientific ideas. Using stories from the history of science and behind-the-scenes examples from the making of American Scientist, Ms. Reid described what happens when you combine art, science and he ancient human tradition of storytelling.
2000 RTP Chapter Programs
A Botanical Tour in Yunnan Province, China
At the meeting of the RTP Chapter on Thursday, February 3, 2000 in Dreyfus Auditorium, Research Triangle Institute. Todd Lasseigne, a botany graduate student at North Carolina State University, presented a lecture and slide show about his tour of Yunnan Province in China.
The tour was sponsored by Sigma Xi and was held in October-November,1999. Fourteen members of Sigma Xi from various parts of the country participated in the tour. Lasseigne was one of the tour guides on this expedition.
The tour began in Kunming where there was an International Horticultural Exposition attended by nine million people in 1999. Traveling along the old Burma Road, they reached Dali, Lijiang, the Jade Dragon Mountains, Zhongdian, and the Tiger Leaping Gorge before returning to Kunming. Lasseigne mentioned the threat to beautiful natural regions such as the Tiger Leaping Gorge by proposed dams on the major rivers. The tourists were pleased by the hotel accommodations. Some hotels had separate sections for Chinese nationals and foreign visitors. However, the two groups were kept strictly apart.
Lasseigneís interesting presentation described the natural environment of China and included many photographs of indigenous species of plants. Many Chinese plant species have been imported into the United States and are common in American gardens. Of particular interest was the revelation that China has few wild birds, their having been exterminated as agricultural pests. One slide showed large bundles of maize stored by hanging from the eaves of farm houses. The hanging ears would shortly be devoured by birds in other parts of the world.
Industrial Animal Production
Impacts on North Carolina Rivers and Estuaries
On the evening of March 23, 2000 the RTP chapter met at Glaxo Wellcome's Girolami Research Center in Research Triangle Park. Dr. Michael A. Mallin of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington gave a talk on the impacts of industrial animal production on rivers and estuaries in eastern North Carolina. Most of this animal production is swine, but there are also large numbers of poultry raised in the area.
Dr. Mallin is the director of UNC-Wílmington Aquatic Ecology Laboratory, which includes the Lower Cape Fear River Program. Since 1995, the laboratory has regularly collected data on numerous physical, chemical and biological parameters at 35 locations throughout the Cape Fear River watershed.
The swine population in North Carolina has increased rapidly from 2.7 million to 10 million over the past decade. Most of these animals are located in the Cape Fear and Neuse watersheds. The acute impacts of swine on the watershed are due to accidental waste lagoon spills and severe meteorological conditions. The chronic impacts are due to runoff from the spraying of lagoon waste on nearby fields.
The bulk of Dr. Mallin's talk concerned the chemical and biological consequences from acute events. He presented data collected after waste lagoon spills whose effects could be detected up to 90 kilometers downstream. Hurricanes Fran (1996), Bonnie (1998), and Floyd (1999) caused the flooding of many lagoons and the release of waste.
Mallin's research suggests that industrial animal operations allowed under current state and federal regulations in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. pose serious risks for water quality, safety, and marine ecology.
Books and the Evolution of Libraries
Have you every wondered why books are shelved in the manner commonly seen in our homes, offices and libraries? Henry Petroski, the Alexander S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and professor of history at Duke University and chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has discussed this question in his recent book, "The Book on the Bookshelf."
At the annual meeting of the RTP Chapter that was held on May 11, 2000 at the National Humanities Center, Prof. Petroski, presenting a fascinating tour through time and place, described the history of books as artifacts and the structures that have housed them from ancient times to the computer age. Petroski described how art and art history, architecture, structural engineering, and information science have combined in the evolution of the ubiquitous bookshelf found in homes, university and public libraries.
Books were originally stored lying flat on single shelves. The stack of shelves, properly termed a book "press," was a later development. Because they were so valuable, books were chained to the shelf in public access libraries. The chain was most conveniently affixed to the front edge of the cover, so books were shelved spine inwards at that time. Only when books could be printed in large quantities and their titles impressed on their spines, were books shelved spine outwards.
1999 RTP Chapter Programs
Coping with Risk Roundtable
A half-day symposium on Recent Advances in Risk Assessment, Management, and Communication was held at North Carolina Biotechnology Center in Research Triangle Park on November 11, 1999. The subject of risks, their characterization, and subsequent business and regulatory decisions is an essential element of corporate and government activities in the Research Triangle. This roundtable, intended for scientists, engineers, and the scientifically literate public, discussed current procedures for characterization of risks to human health arising from exposure to environmental agents and explored how such findings inform regulatory decisions. The issues that were addressed include:
- Opening Remarks
John Ahearne, Sigma Xi
- Risk Assessment and Risk Management
Lawrence Reiter, USEPA, RTP
Scientific basis of risk assessment
Rory Conolly, CIIT
Risks from industrial chemicals
Douglas Crawford-Brown, UNC-Chapel Hill
Water disinfection by-products
Richard Allen, Agrevo
Risks from pesticides
Terrence Pierson, RTI
Complex risk assessment modeling
Chris Frey, NCSU
Variability and uncertainty in risk assessments
- Politics of Regulation and Legislation
Wade Pridgen, CP&L
Risks from electric power generation
Kenneth Rudo, NC Dept. of Health and Human Services
Communicating risks to regulators and the public
Emerging Environmental Issues in North Carolina
In response to a request by the Office of Environmental Education of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources of the State of North Carolina, the RTP Chapter prepared a report which summarizes the scientific judgments of the RTP Chapter's membership of emerging (10- to 30-year timeframe) environmental issues in North Carolina. This report is based on responses to a questionnaire by the RTP Chapter and the Carolina Environmental Program, which is an environmental group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The RTP Chapter was aided in the development of the questionnaire by Professor Douglas Gordon-Brown of the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The RTP Chapter acknowledges with appreciation the efforts of Professor Gordon-Brown and students Joshua Smith and Jonathan Schick in the development of this elicitation tool. The questionnaire format and the selected candidate emerging environmental issues were discussed at length by RTP Chapter representatives with Professor Gordon-Brown.
The questionnaire and accompanying descriptions of candidate emerging environmental problems were also posted on this Web site for the convenience of the RTP Chapter’s members and as a public outreach effort. An independent survey using this same questionnaire was also made by a small number of environmentally knowledgeable UNC-CH faculty and research assistants known as the Carolina Environmental Program. The belief was that this smaller group might provide members’ individual opinions of the same emerging environmental issues for comparison purposes with that of RTP Chapter members.
The RTP Chapter's response to the survey was 29 completed questionnaires or 20% of the 145 in-State members of the Chapter to whom the survey was mailed. RTP Chapter officers accept this response as a reasonable expression of Chapter opinion as to emerging environmental issues in North Carolina.
While the rank order of emerging environmental issues as perceived by the RTP Chapter and the Carolina Environmental Program differ, there is broad agreement on such issues as:
1. Eutrophication, an ecosystem impact, from organisms such as algae in rivers, lakes, and estuaries leading to decreases in populations such as fish in receiving streams,
2. Habitat Fragmentation, an ecosystem impact resulting from large geographic regions inhabited by a species being broken into non-contiguous parcels of land which are of insufficient area to support the species.
3. Endocrine Disruption, an ecosystem impact involving the intervention of a variety of hormones that interact with cells and DNA to either trigger or suppress control processes in the human body and essentially all living species.
4. Crop Yield, an agriculture impact which depends on such factors as soil quality, nutrients, use of fertilizers, pesticides/fungicides/rodenticides, introduction of new plant species, salination of soil due to irrigation, and buildup of pesticide residues which can cause decreases in crop yield.
5. Saltwater intrusion, a water quality threat resulting from the movement of sea water into aquifers along coastlines or estuaries as a result of decreased pressure in aquifers, in turn resulting from increased demand on groundwater supplies due to increased development along coastlines (i.e., increased population and increased industrial activity).
6. Disinfection by-products, a water quality threat resulting from chlorination water treatment processes in which organic material in the water interacts with the chlorine to produce a variety of chemical compounds referred to as disinfection byproducts or DBPs which themselves may pose potential health effects in exposed populations. The issue here is whether DBPs actually pose a significant threat to health, the extent of this threat versus that of the microbial risk the disinfectant reduces, and how to balance these two risks.
7. Urban/suburban sprawl, a development threat resulting from expansion of housing and population into previously rural areas in turn requiring conversion of rural land for shopping centers and roads, in turn pushing those who remain in the urban areas further from wilderness areas. The issue is whether sprawl significantly increases transportation emissions and the distance food must be transported from farms to urban centers.
8. Emerging pathogens, a water quality threat resulting from the introduction of disinfectants into drinking water and the general evolution of microbes. This threat is of concern since pathogens in water were historically the largest environmental cause of disease in the United States. The issue is whether old pathogens will merge again as a threat, and whether new strains of pathogens might have arisen for which there are no effective water treatment processes and/or antibiotic drug treatments.
9. Particulate Matter, an air quality threat implicated in various respiratory and other diseases, particularly with asthmatics and the elderly with pre-existing medical conditions.
10. Pfiesteia, and ecosystem threat resulting from microorganisms (dinoflaggelates) having characteristics of both plants and animals that appear in coastal waters during warmer months.
A number of additional environmental concerns were expressed by respondents that illuminated issues other than those listed on the questionnaire. Some of these potential emerging environmental issues include the following (not listed in order of importance):
1. Environmental impacts associated with future offshore recovery of North Carolina petroleum reserves,
2. Environmental impacts associated with new industrial processes required for production (and eventual sequestration) of "information age" heavy metals becoming increasingly prevalent such as cadmium and selenium. (Heavy metals present potential threats to water supplies, and allowable standards for cadmium and selenium have yet to be established.)
3. Environmental impacts associated with current and future actions by industrial nations to implement the global climate control initiatives agreed upon at the 1997 international Kyoto Conference. These initiatives are intended to achieve an average global reduction in emissions of 'greenhouse gases' (nitrogen oxides) below 1990 levels of 5 percent by the 2008-2012 time period, and to assist the transfer of more "climate-friendly" energy technologies to developing countries.
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