Grandpa's Story: A Comb, Penknife And Handkerchief
by NPR Staff | July 19, 2013 — 12:33 AM
Photo courtesy of Lynne Bruschetti Leonard Carpenter in Kentucky, where he grew up, in the early 1940s. Jack Bruschetti was born in 1999, the same year his grandfather, Leonard Carpenter, died from Alzheimer's disease. But 13-year-old Jack wanted to know more about his grandfather, who worked as a tire builder for BFGoodrich in Akron, Ohio, where he also raised his family. "It was very important for him to be in control at all times," Jack's mom, Lynne Bruschetti, said to him during a visit to StoryCorps in Atlanta. "We lived in the city, and we had very tiny yards, and he didn't use a lawnmower. He used clippers because he wanted every blade of grass to be exactly the same height. We could play in the driveway, on the sidewalk, in the middle of the street, but we were not allowed in that showplace yard of his." Lynne said her father — who was 86 when he died — always kept a comb, handkerchief and penknife in his pockets. "And the handkerchief was always clean and pressed, and he would use a handkerchief not to blow his nose but to clean. If there was like a mark on the side of our house, he would wipe it," she recounted. "And when I was a teenager, I was starting to lose respect for your grandpa Leonard." Lynne said she resented her father for "always wanting to keep the house perfect and always being in control, and I was starting to realize that he wasn't that educated." Carpenter became president of the board of trustees of Park United Methodist Church and served as president for a few years. When the trustees met, he would take apples. "First he would pull out his handkerchief and he would wipe the apples and make them shiny," said Lynne, who is 51. "And then he would pull out his penknife. And he'd always cut so that there was just one long apple peel. And as they're arguing, he would slice the apple, put it on the penknife, and hold it out to each member of the trustees. And every meeting, they would eat apples together. "And they started getting trust back. And so he had that ability," she continued. "He didn't have a lot of money. He didn't have a lot of education. But he had that handkerchief, and he had that penknife in the trustee meetings. "And people did start to get along. He was an important part of that."
Nerd Nation Nerds are ridiculed, but Kishore Hari says they're just people with a passion for learning and sharing.
By Kishore Hari
Comic-con is complete again. Over 140,000 made the pilgrimage to San Diego to buy comic schwag, listen to movie stars, but mostly wait in lines. And for one week, the airwaves were filled with mildly condescending commentary about nerds, defining them as immature, celebrity crazed, Star Wars worshipping groupies.
Well, I have a confession. I'm a nerd. And I bet you're a nerd too.
My shelves aren't filled with action figures still in their boxes, my closet isn't overflowing with dusty comic books, and I've never camped out overnight to catch a first showing of some movie. I don't fit into that stereotype - I'm just a regular nerd.
Specifically, I'm a science nerd. You can find me most nights at science events: learning about the search for dark energy or exploring the intricacies of taxidermy. I spent last weekend talking yeast genetics and its application to brewing.
Geek, dweeb, dork, techie, goober - the label doesn't really matter. I just love learning and I take my passion to ridiculous, borderline obsessive, lengths. That's the defining characteristic of nerds - relentlessly exploring the minutia of some thing just for the pure joy of it.
Nerds are the best people to be around - living and loving life, dedicated to learning and sharing, and often times make a lasting positive impact on the world. They keep our water clean, are developing new treatments for disease, and make sure that you can hear this broadcast wherever you are. Nerds just make this world awesome.
I guarantee there is some "thing" you love to a fault. It might be a little weird, you may not be that good at it, but you absolutely love it and lose yourself in it. As nerd hero Wil Wheaton so eloquently put it, it's the way you love that thing, whatever that is for you, that makes you a nerd.
So when you hear about "those" crazy nerds that swarmed comic-con in San Diego - ignore the stereotype and see it as a call to action to proudly show off your inner nerd.
And the original Star Wars was really awesome.
With a perspective, I'm Kishore Hari.
Kishore Hari is the Director of the Bay Area Science Festival at UC - San Francisco.
Om Nom Nom: T. Rex Was, Indeed, A Voracious Hunter CHRISTOPHER JOYCE and JESSICA NAUDZIUNAS July 16, 2013 3:16 AM http://www.npr.org/
Mind The Teeth: Fossils indicate that Tyrannosaurus rex was an active hunter, in addition to being a scavenger. And in Jurassic Park, it also had a sweet tooth for lawyers.
Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps one of the most famous animals to have ever roamed the Earth. This huge, fierce, meat-eater has graced Hollywood films as the perpetual villain, and it has played a notorious role in the science community that studies it, too.
Despite its vicious depiction in pop culture, paleobiologists have debated the feeding behavior of T. rex over the last 100 years, ever since the first evidence of the animal was discovered in the early 1900s. Some scientists have a bone to pick with the tyrant king's predatory reputation, and have suggested the dinosaur was actually a scavenger — more like a vulture when it came to whetting its appetite.
“ Bones fossilize really well, but unfortunately behavior really doesn't.
- Greg Erickson, professor anatomy and vertebrate paleobiology, Florida State University
But results from a recent discovery might settle this debate. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Kansas paleontologist David Burnham and one of his graduate students report a strange-looking fossil with something buried between two tail bones from a duck-billed, plant-eating dinosaur called the Hadrosaur.
After they scanned it with a medical imaging machine, they figured out it was a tooth.
"Once we realized it was a tooth, we looked at each other and said, 'Wouldn't it just be great if it was a T. rex?' " Burnham says.
As luck would have it, it really was a Tyrannosaur tooth. T. rex teeth are very distinctive: they're sharp, serrated and long. Some scientists call them "lethal bananas."
Burnham and his team were excited because this tooth that was stuck in a portion of tail bone might have been the piece of evidence they needed. "We'd finally be able to put the nail in the coffin for the scavenger theory."
A T. rex tooth in the tail doesn't prove the dinosaur actually killed the Hadrosaur. Maybe the Hadrosaur was already dead and the T. Rex just found it, chowed down on the carcass, and broke off a tooth. But in this case, the Hadrosaur's bone had fused around the T. rex tooth, a sign that the would had healed. So apparently the Hadrosaur survived an attack and got away, with a tooth stuck in its tail.
More About T. Rex
When the T. rex skeleton was first put on display, it was presented standing vertically, in this Godzilla-like pose, as seen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History around 1950. Recent studies show the dinosaur actually kept its body horizontal.
"It's the bullet from the smoking gun," Burnham says. "Here you have attempted murder and here we are able to identify the perpetrator." Another damning piece of evidence, Burnham notes, is that the wound is on the tail, which is typical of where predators bring down running prey.
A mangled piece of proof like the Hadrosaur bone isn't easy to come by, says Greg Erickson, a professor of anatomy and vertebrate paleontology at Florida State University.
"Bones fossilize really well, but unfortunately behavior doesn't," he says.
That might be why proof of T. rex's eating habits has been so difficult to pin down, and why scientists are somewhat in the dark when it comes to definitively pegging T. rex as a strict predator.
The real T. rex may have been a more complicated animal than the one depicted in Hollywood films like Jurassic Park. Like most predators today, the dinosaur was probably both predator and scavenger.
"So what T. rex did more of is really the key, and to me this debate is not solved," Erickson says. "From this, all we can say is 'Yes, T. rex acted like a predator.' We have cases where there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of duck-billed dinosaurs that died, and these animals were clearly fed upon by Tyrannosaurs. We find tooth marks and shed teeth among the skeletons."
This all might seem to be an academic debate, but there is a real-world reason why scientists want to know what T. rex ate and when. Knowing more about the T. rex appetite might help explain the prehistoric food chain from millions of years ago, and how one big dinosaur influenced it.
How T. Rex Moved
The video below was created by computer scientist Professor Kent A. Stevens and physicist Dr. Scott Ernst. Stevens and Ernst combine paleontology and computer animation to create 3D dinosaurs for interactive Web applications, television and prominent natural history museums in New York, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Tokyo. Currently, they are reconstructing how sauropods may have walked based on trackways recently found in Switzerland.
