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Show DAILY THE CHRONICLE UTAH CAMPUS kW llf ft lit WYNNE PARRY Chronicle Feature Writer Eagles spend the winter near the Great Salt Lake. Perhaps if asked they right questions they would have a lot to say. The rare birds have yet to find their voices. But the molecules in their bodies may speak for them. And instead of posing a direct question to the birds, researchers can scrutinize their feathers, or even their breath to find out where the birds flew from or what they eat. "You can't go and ask them, but you can ask their tail feathers,", explains James Ehleringer, a biology professor at the University of Utah. Every year visitors from around the world converge on the fifth floor of the Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Research Building, the site of Ehleringer's lab and the Stable Iso- tope Ratio Facility for Environmental Research (SIRFER). Students and researchers come to learn how to get answers from equally unlikely places. They bring with them souvenirs from home their national flags and the air they exhale. Ehleringer hangs the flags in a corner of a room and captures their breath in a tube. JAMES GARDNER Chronicle Feature Editor For this week's Web Sitings, going to induce a little So skip back with me, if you will, seven years. Blurry time travel scenery warps your peripheral vision...your ears - beige-painte- CHRONICLE e. FEATURE EDITOR rj isMb Atoms in their breath betray where the new arrival came from. As something moves around changing its diet, its travels are recorded as parts w its body grow sequentially, Ehleringer explains. "That sequential thing could be the hair on a person, the shell of a mollusk. It could be a tree ring," he says. Atoms of carbon are not always identical, their weight can vary. The same is true of oxygen, hydrogen and other elements. Different forms of an atom are called isotopes. Eating and drinking incorporates isotopes from the environment into the tissue of an organism. In addition, some biological processes favor certain isotopes. The history of person, a bison or tree lock is recorded in their hair, wood, and even teeth as isotopic signatures. Four massive machines do the legwork of determining the composition of samples. Three of the four sit in a small room near Ehleringer's office. d surDistributed over their faces are dials, lights and monitors showing graphs decorated by sharp spikes. They emanate tangible white noise. The collection of international flags is perceive a bizarre hissing, a sound and alien, muffled, backward weird...and here we are. 1994 Genocide revs past the one million mark in Rwanda. Nelson Mandela becomes president of South Africa. U.S. Troops march into Haiti ostensibly to restore a legal government. The IRA declares a cease-firAnd in the midst of this worldwide vacillation between peace and violence, the Internet is becoming an item for public consumption. It's i I Ml flf$fiL- I 0 J I LjJ pinned compactly in the corner by the door and just insiae it rests w'iira. f SrcS SIRFER's manager. pelX-- " have Behind Ike sits Big Dog. I if -- . y New Molecular Ciues Answer Many Questions A I FT In P of the instrumentation room describing projects that have used isotopic analysis. The first outlines a high school student's V project. Cook explains that the girl drank a M sugar solution and then recorded the com position of her breath for several hours afterward, tracing her metabo see DETECTIVE, page ders, "isn't that the name of the manape race subservient to horses Orange." And this is the case for just about JAMES GARDNER U Another shows cross sections of tree trunks explaining that isotopic signatures can be locked into places more permanent than the atmosphere. Isotopes captured in the wood reflect the rain that nurtured them. Records of rainfall extend back only a century, but the rings of Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs could add nearly another 400 years to the record. A third poster discusses the drug trade, by soft whisperings about a billionaire named Gatest Yahoo.com is all the rage. y "Yahoo?" a literati won- Web-surf- If lism. She repeated the measurements two days in a row, the first without exercise and the next after working out. and used to sublimate and satirize human beings in Swift's Gulliver's Travels" A perusal of the Yahoo index presents the nascent with a highly categorized world of I feel giddy yes knowledge. I when discover that I can giddy click on "movies" and eventually find and print out a small rendition of the poster from the film "A Clockwork tech-war- $ NdV. "That's the biggest one they make," Cook says, explaining the name. Windy Ike, Big Dog and the other two scrutinize not only human respiration but also carbon dioxide, which is the "breath from ecosystems," Ehleringer says. Instead of focusing on an individual valley or a single plant, the workings of an entire landscape can be revealed with air samples taken from a plane. Samples are being taken from over North America and the rainforests of South America. Among other things, their analysis can tell where the ecosystem's water is coming from and if there is enough of it. Posters hang from the wall outside the wall been used primarily as a system of. communication and means of disseminating information between scientists for decades. New advancements in personal computing make it accessible to everyone. Media mention of the phenomenon is invariably trailed J - er . black-and-whi- JGARDNERCHRONICLE.UTAH.EDU te 581-704- any movie out there. Television shows have fan sites dedicated to them, too. You want to know just sideexactly how old Scooby-Doo'- s kick Shaggy is, and the answer is right there at your finger tips. In a moment of vulnerability, I confess to you in an extended diatribethat I'm still having a really hard time getting excited about the Web. I'm on this rigorous personal campaign that's see WEB, page 1 10 10 |