Research
News
•
FYI Research: Book examines Chinese attitudes
toward food, sex
• University researchers discover technology
that will revolutionize x-rays
• Office for Sponsored Research streamlines
grants, research administration
FYI
Research: Book examines
Chinese attitudes toward food, sex
What
do food and sex have to do with history? In today's China, everything,
says Judith Farquhar, professor and chair of anthropology. In her latest
book, Appetites, Farquhar explores contemporary Chinese attitudes
toward food and sex, and how those attitudes are linked to Chinese history.
"Chinese citizens who lived through the famine of the late 1950s
and the rigors of the cultural revolution period, from 1966 to 1976,
are very articulate on the historical meanings of food in particular,"
Farquhar says. "It is easy to elicit - or overhear - middle-aged
and elderly people's talk about all the historical reasons why food
should not be wasted, and they are also happy to explain how various
food habits reflect the inequalities of the present and the past."
Everyday life in China is still inhabited by the nation's Maoist past,
Farquhar explains. She argues that the mundane practices and habits
of Chinese who lived through 30 years of socialist construction under
Mao Zedong - 1949 to 1978 - did show and still show evidence of Maoist
projects and achievements.
After 1978, when Deng Xiaoping's rise to power brought reform, China's
economy became increasingly privatized and adventurous. Farquhar says
Chinese fiction of the period began to make almost a fetish of the concrete
and mundane after decades of Maoist abstraction. In Appetites
Farquhar examines The Gourmet, a novella written by Lu Wenfu
in 1984 about a gluttonous, wealthy landlord named Zhu Ziye, who was
"unwilling to lift a finger because he witlessly preferred to concentrate
all his efforts on that stomach of his." Ziye's wife refers to
him in the novella as "a gilded chamberpot." He does no work
and is good for nothing but eating, which gets him "only the private
ephemera of bodily pleasure," Farquhar says. Worse, he has no perception
of, or concern for, the exploitation inherent in his love of eating.
However, author Lu Wenfu presents the narrator's contempt for the landlord
even while evoking the reader's carnal identification with the kinds
of hedonistic pleasures Zhu Ziye enjoys, Farquhar says. "Lu Wenfu
succeeds in stimulating the senses while at the same time examining
the politics of production and consumption in everyday life," she
writes.
Yet even after China's rapid social and economic changes of the 1980s
and 1990s, Maoist influence could still be felt in many ways, Farquhar
says. Farquhar became part of a Chinese medical school work unit between
1982 and 1984, that she describes as more closely resembling the Chinese
daily life of the 1970s than that of the later 1980s. "Everyone
I knew attended 'political study' sessions on Thursday afternoons, every
textbook was prefaced with paeans to the wisdom of China's laboring
masses … and a public address system instructed residents of every
corner of the campus, morning and evening, with ideologically correct
news and public service announcements. … Everyone knew everyone
else's business, and felt free to criticize it," she writes.
Farquhar says she tried to write her book in a way that stimulated appetites
in the readers - "to generate experiences through reading that
could produce a kind of carnal comradeship between readers and the Chinese
subjects I was talking about."
Writing Appetites has been good for Farquhar's appetites, too.
"Apart from all the wonderful eating I have done, and continue
to do, in China, the most enjoyable part of writing the book was reading
and translating the Chinese essays and films that are interpreted in
the book," Farquhar says. "Now that the book is out, I find
that the things I want to tell people about it all come from these primary
sources. Clearly, they continue to inspire me and draw me back to Chinese
popular culture."
Provided by Research and Graduate Studies
Editor: Neil Caudle
Writer: Jason Smith
University
researchers discover technology that will revolutionize x-rays
The
basic technology that produces X-rays has remained essentially the same
for a century, but now scientists and physicians at Carolina and Applied
Nanotechnologies Inc. say they should be able to improve it significantly.
Experiments the team conducted show they can cause carbon nanotubes,
a new form of carbon discovered about a decade ago, to generate intense
electron beams that bombard a metal "target" to produce X-rays.
Researchers say they have demonstrated that their cold-cathode device
can generate sufficient X-ray flux to create images of extremities such
as the human hand.
The advantage of using carbon nanotubes is that machines incorporating
them can work at room temperature rather than the 1500 or so degrees
Celsius that conventional X-ray machines now require and produce.
"If this works as well as we think it will, we can make such machines
a lot smaller and cooler and be able to turn them on and off much faster,"
Otto Z. Zhou, associate professor of physics and materials sciences
and director of the N.C. Center for Nanoscale Materials at Carolina.
"Other advantages are that they should be cheaper, be safer in
terms of the lower heat generated, last longer, use less electricity
and produce higher resolution images.
"We believe we have made a major breakthrough in X-ray technology,
and we are extremely excited about it."
A report on their experiments appears in the July 8 issue of Applied
Physics Letters, a science and technology journal. Patents on the Carolina
work are pending. Besides Zhou, authors are Guo Z. Yue, a former University
faculty member now with United Solar Systems; Qi Oiu and Bo Gao and
Hideo Shimoda of Applied Nanotechnologies Inc., students Yuan Cheng
and Jian Zhang, and Jian Ping Lu, associate professor of physics and
astronomy and applied and materials sciences. Sha Chang, associate professor
of radiation oncology at the School of Medicine here, also participated
in the project.
"Scientists and others, including the popular press, have shown
a lot of interest in carbon nanotubes because of numerous potential
applications," Zhou said. "They are very strong tubular structures
formed from a single layer of carbon atoms and are only about a billionth
of a meter in diameter."
In the past, University scientists and others have used carbon nanotubes
to produce electrons, he said. What's new is that until now, no one
could generate enough electrons to create distinct images like conventional
X-rays do. Nanotubes replace traditional metal filaments that must be
heated to high temperatures before being subjected to an electric field.
The tubes shed electrons easily because, being so small, they are extremely
sharp.
"We already have taken pictures of human hands and fish that are
as good as standard X-rays," Zhou said. "We think our images
eventually will be clearer than conventional ones since we have a more
pointed, tunable source of electrons. That would help doctors, for example,
get more useful information from pictures of broken bones."
The physicists are working with manufacturers to turn their discovery
into working machines and expect to have them on the market within a
year or two, he said.
Being able to miniaturize X-ray devices could have more major benefits,
Zhou said, including allowing technicians to take X-rays inside or outside
ambulances before ever leaving the scenes of accidents.
In addition, the new X-ray technology will allow manufacturing of large-scale
X-ray scanning machines for industrial inspections, airport security
screening and customs inspections.
Other uses of carbon nanotubes include flat panel display and telecommunications
devices, fuel cells, high-strength composite materials and novel molecular
electronics for the next generation of computers, he said. People have
raised the possibility of using them to improve batteries, but no one
demonstrated that they might work better than conventional materials
until Zhou and his Carolina team published a paper on the subject in
January in Physical Review Letters.
That paper showed they could potentially improve electric batteries
by using single-wall carbon nanotubes to help store electrical charges.
They have patented the process of creating such nanotubes.
Support for the experiments came from the Office of Naval Research and
private sources.
Office
for Sponsored Research streamlines grants, research administration
The
new Office for Sponsored Research (OSR) opened July 1.
The office will manage all aspects of sponsored research administration,
including proposal review, award negotiation, instructional stewardship,
cost analysis, training and development, and various compliance functions.
The office has been organized so that it will be easier, simpler and
faster to use than the two offices it replaced.
Previously, two different offices, with each reporting to a different
administrator, had handled grants. The Office of Research Services had
reported to Tony Waldrop, the vice chancellor for research and administration,
while the Office of Contracts and Grants had reported to Nancy Suttenfield,
vice chancellor for finance and administration. The new office will
report to Waldrop.
When they announced the change in February, Suttenfield and Waldrop
said the new office will bring unified responsibility, greater efficiency
and enhanced teamwork for both pre-award and post-award services. All
of the functions of the OSR will be located at
440 West Franklin Street.
"The new OSR will be a one-stop shop for all sponsored research
administration needs," said John Case, executive director of contracts
and grants. "This will expedite processing proposals and awards
to sponsors, and provide training and development opportunities for
the researchers as well as the departmental administrators involved
in the process."
Consolidating functions into one office eliminates the need for researchers
to know what office is responsible for the various research transactions
and takes the guesswork out of processing proposals and awards, Case
said.
And by making it easier to apply for and get funding, researchers should
reap an added bonus: more time to devote to their actual work.
For more information, contact Case at 966-2542 or john_case@unc.edu
University Gazette
