Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 25

Tuesday, Aug. 20. 1C34 Insldo this section: claGGifficd pages 4-0 NEW TECH 3-4 TELEVISION 10 FEATURE PAGE 11 DETROIT FREE PRESS Call Science: 222-6619 elemeeftaiFy! Sleuthiiag Glass and pigment turn into marbles How are marbles made? I mean the round pieces of glass, not crystalline limestone. Ted Symons, Davisburg witHi MgMeck tele v' I ir fiw tj ir fjp 3l c- i 7 '-a IIM 7 -if attention on scientific investigations of evidence. In the past decade, the Michigan State Police, which operates seven crime laboratories throughout the state (in Negaunee, Grayling, Bridgeport, Madison Heights, Northville, East Lansing and Grand Rapids) have been "civilianizing" the labs, adding staffers with advanced degrees in chemistry, toxicology, medical technology and biochemistry as well as criminal justice, said Frank Schehr, assistant director of the East Lansing lab.

To speed the experts' work, police have outfitted their labs with state-of-the-art instruments. At the East Lansing lab, for example, scientific investigators use a scanning electron microscope (SEM) daily to examine everything from hairs and fibers to specks of dirt and residues from gunshots. "This is a rather sizable chunk," said laboratory scientist Don Krupp, as he examined a sample of insulation from a safe. "It's about this size," he said, making a dot the size of a typewritten on a notepad. On his viewing screen, the machine produced an image of the sample, magnified several thousand times.

By twisting a dial, Krupp can change magnification from 13 to 50,000 times the item's actual size. Though the machine does more than magnify, that feature alone has helped in some cases, said Schehr. Take the case of a Michigan dentist's disappearing gold. A dentist began missing gold from the supply he used for fillings and suspected the ingots were being pilfered and pawned, said Schehr. State police borrowed the bars and scratched on minute marks, detectable only with the SEM.

The next time gold bars showed up in the local pawn shop, the shop owner called police, the bars were identified as the dentist's and police were on the trail of a suspect. SOMETIMES INVESTIGATORS need more than a close-up picture of a shred of evidence, as when they try to match a paint chip found on a victim with one from a suspect's home. With a technique called energy dispersive spectroscopy, used in combination with the SEM, they can analyze the chip, layer by layer, to find out if the elements in each layer are the same in both chips. In the state police lab, Krupp demon-See CRIME, Page 2C By NANCY ROSS Free Press Science Writer A magnifying glass, a little fingerprint powder and deductive reasoning may have been enough for Sherlock Holmes. But modern sleuths have traded houndstooth caps for white lab coats.

And their crime-solving partners are gas chromatography, mass spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopes and other technological marvels that even Holmes' fertile mind never could have imagined. You might say their Dr. Watson is science. With the sophisticated techniques comes the ability to squeeze more and more information from more obscure bits of evidence. Consider these problems that undoubtedly would have stymied investigators a decade ago: In building its case against an accused war criminal living in Michigan, the FBI wanted to compare his fingerprints with prints on a 40-year-old postcard.

The problem was how to get prints off a card that old. Argon-ion lasers were the answer. The laser causes fingerprint residues to appear luminescent, so investigators can find fingerprints that might not show up with traditional powder and chemical methods. An 18-year-old girl disappeared from a shopping mall 10 years ago. The problem for investigators searching for her is knowing what she might look like today, as a 28-year-old woman.

It's a case for computerized aging. In minutes, a computer program developed by a New York conceptual artist and two computer scientists can add decades to a photo of a face. On a homicide victim, police found a multilayered paint chip that appeared to match paint in a suspect's house. But how can they be sure the paints are the same? A scanning electron microscope gives a close look at the chips and shows whether the thicknesses of the various layers match in the two samples. Then, another instrument attached to the microscope analyzes the chips, layer by layer, and identifies the elements in each.

UNTIL ABOUT 20 years ago, most criminal cases were built primarily on witness testimony. Since the 1960s, however, courts have relied more heavily on physical evidence. As a result, law enforcement agencies have focused more of their VIA 8 fist tjuM A) JL xve- Marbles were named in the 18th Century when they were made from marble chips. Marbles once were made from a variety of materials baked clay, glass, steel, plastic, onyx or ag ate (a fine-grained variety of quartz). Now, they're made mainly of cooled and molded molten glass.

A pigment (cobalt or copper oxide) often is added for color, resulting in patterns with such names as Japanese cat's eye, peppermint stripe, first American, genuine carnelian, rainbow or moonstone." How does an artist or a lithographer come up with the color gold; what's in it? Clinton Starr, Dearborn A Common colors and shades viewed in newspapers and magazines are generally made by any combinations of black, blue, red and yellow. In order to obtain -gold, a fifth printing needs to be made by adding minuscule metallic particles suspended in a transparent medium, like linseed oil. Copper and bronze particles are commonly used. The same process is also called for whenever the color silver is required for illustration. Submit questions to SCIENCE 0 Detroit Free Press, 321 W.

Lafayette Detroit 48231. Gender differences narrowing in dreams The gender gap has been narrowed in one more arena. Now men and women are dreaming more alike. American Health reports women now are just as likely as men to use aggression in their a marked change from the 1950s. The finding is a result of dream studies by.

University of Mis sissippi psychiatrist Milton Kramer, who recorded the dreams of 11 male and 11 female students and compared them with dream studies from the Eisenhower era. Furthermore, women now spend more dream time solving problems than do men, who have reversed an old tendency. Men now dream more about men than women do, a sign that male-bonding has become more acceptable, Kramer believes. Take gas and oil and get earthquakes Removing oil and natural gas from the ground in south Texas may be causing earthquakes in the region, says an expert at the University of Texas' institute for geophysics. The earthquakes, which haven't produced any damage, appear to originate on known faults where they form boundaries of an oil or gas field, Wayne Pennington said.

"What we think is happening is that the faults that are present have been moving naturally but without earthquakes until fluid pressure along them was decreased to a point where the faults would stick and slip in jerky motions, producing earthquakes." Sugar may be used as a fuel source Thickly planted sugar cane, grown as an energy source instead of as a sweetener, could become the principal fuel for several Caribbean nations, a gathering of scientists in Philadelphia was told last week. A doubling of sugar-cane production could meet more than the current energy needs of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Barbados, Florida consultant George Samuels told a seminar of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Samuels admitted that several studies of corn have shown that it costs as much to plant, fertilize and convert it to energy as the energy itself is worth. But he said more efficient mills could make sugar energy profitable. 4- What is the common phrase that means the same as the following sentence? "A totality of articles that coruscate resplendently are not necessarily auriferous." Answer en Pwe 2C A a9, M- Detective Sgt.

Lew Wilson of the State Police fuming technique for revealing fingerprints. Free Press photo by CRAIG PORTER lab in East Lansing demonstrates a Super Glue So much knowledge, so late police to a suspect more quickly, Prinicipe said. When a representative of the Lindbergh family delivered the ransom money to the kidnapper's agent, the meeting could be recorded. Then voice prints from the recordings could be compared with those of suspects. A new method that uses lasers to find fingerprints would be used on all the physical evidence ransom notes, a hand-made ladder discovered near the house, a chisel found under the nursery window, the child's crib and money found hidden in the garage of carpenter Richard Hauptmann, who eventually was convicted and was executed for the crime.

The scanning electron microscope, corn-See LATE, Page 2C Many advances in scientific crime investigation have come in the past couple of decades too late to help in some of the century's best known criminal cases. But investigators can speculate about how those cases would be approached if they happened today. More than 50 years after the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his crib and murdered, Andrew Principe, director of the Northern Illinois. Police Crime Laboratory in Highland Park, 111., re-examined the case in the light of today's investigative techniques. His conclusions were presented at a 1983 meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science and published in that group's journal and in a publication for police chiefs.

Today's. surveillance methods might lead Hiah-tech methods could have been t. useu to examine we ransum iivio, left, which was sent sfter Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped. Teens try their hands at cancer research I .11 IUIJ1.1.U.LII...HW By NANCY ROSS Free Press Science Writer Nine weeks ago, a half dozen bright, but apprehensive, Detroit teenagers ventured into the esoteric world of cancer research.

Chosen from some 50 high school juniors nominated by their science teachers, the six were tapped to spend the summer as research apprentices in a Michigan Cancer Foundation program for talented minority students. Despite their fascination with science, most of the students had never set foot in a research laboratory and had no idea what to expect. "I thought it was going to be boring," said Denise Rivers, an outspoken 16-year-old from Laura F. Osborn High School in Detroit. "I didn't think they would let us do anything.

I thought they'd say, 'Now you do this, and sit and watch this, and see how I do But Rivers and the other students quickly learned the cancer foundation in Detroit expected them to do a lot more than wash test tubes and run errands. "The students work along with scientists, just like associates," explained Dr. Thomas Bednar, program coordinator. "The idea of the program is to give them an idea of what it's like to be a working scientist." That meant conducting research, reading technical papers, attending seminars and, on the last day of the program, presenting their results to an audience of scientists, Detroit school officials and proud parents. The students are paid for their work and are expected to treat the positions as real jobs.

"Right at the beginning of the summer, we always have a little jolt when people realize they're working," said Dr. Gloria Heppner, the foundation's scientific director. Each student was assigned a mentor one of the foundation's 53 senior scientists and a research project. "The goal is to define down a project that's small enough for the student to complete during the summer," Heppner said. But small does not mean trivial.

THIS YEAR'S student project titles included "inhibition of macrophage growth by interferon," "spontaneous fusion of tumor subpopulations," and "antitumor drug discovery." Last week, the students were throwing around terms like macrophage (a type of white blood cell), metastasis (the spread of cancer from its original site in the body) and "genetically identical strains of mice" a big batch of twins," Rivers explained). They described how to use centrifuges, spectrophotometers and hemocytometers as comfortably as their peers might explain how to play a video disk. Even MTV has a different meaning for these kids. Instead of music television the musical video mainstay of many youngsters the young scientists use the intials MTV to refer to mammary tumor virus, a virus that causes breast cancer in mice and is transmitted in their milk. But they weren't always so comfortable with the jargon, much less the duties of a cancer researcher.

"When I was first explained ny project, I thought it See CAMP, Page 4C Free Press pholo by PAULINE LUBENS School who is this summer, a mouse. Denise Rivers, a senior at Laura F. Osborn High vyorking at the Michigan Cancer Foundation looks at a test tube of macrophage cells from.