"Robots Help Heart Surgeons"
It was called open-heart surgery because a doctor had to open the patient’s chest — a foot-long incision, splitting the breast bone — to get to the heart. Last December, a robotic system being tested in Penn State’s College of Medicine let surgeon Ralph Damiano do a heart bypass through "pencil-sized ports." A slender endoscope (like a camera) was inserted into the 70-year-old woman’s chest and held by a voice-controlled robotic arm. Two other robotic arms held surgical instruments which Damiano, sitting at a video console, manipulated to suture the tiny blood vessels. The system "enhances a surgeon’s hands much like a microscope enhances a surgeon’s eyes," explains its inventor, Yulun Wang of Computer Motion. Damiano had tested Wang’s system for two years before receiving FDA approval to try it on ten human patients.

"Nine Mile Run"
Nine Mile Run is among the most degraded streams in the country. It’s flooded by storm runoff, polluted by leaky sewer lines. And it borders the largest undeveloped site in the Pittsburgh area — 17 million cubic yards of slag from the steel industry, 200 acres of piles 200 feet high — on which city planners want to build 1,200 houses. They also want to connect an existing park to the Monongahela River with a 100-acre corridor of open  space. Penn State’s Environmental Resources Research Institute was recruited by artists at Carnegie Mellon University to help them be the "voice for open space" as the city’s plans develop. (Other collaborators include the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Allegheny County). The ERRI researchers studied how to restore the stream and control its bank and bottom erosion, as well as how to create or enhance wetlands.

"Traffic Flow"
It’s the tourists. Folks who don’t know the roads who lock up traffic. To see if that’s really true — to learn how drivers’ behavior does affect congestion — Penn State’s Pennsylvania Transportation Institute has set video cameras on three State College streetcorners. The data collected will let civil engineer Ageliki Elefteriadou create traffic operations models with much finer detail than is currently possible, which should lead to better traffic management.

"Top Technology"
Piezoelectric crystals swell or shrink when zapped with electricity. If squeezed or pulled, they give off a jolt of their own. And now they do it ten times as well. A new type of crystal discovered by Thomas Shrout and Seung-Eek Park at Penn State’s Materials Research Laboratory could improve such things as ultrasound and sonar. Their discovery was picked one of the top 25 technologies of 1998 by Industryweek.

"Green Milk"
Save the Bay, we hear, but how? Now you can do it by buying milk. "Chesapeake Milk" costs more, but that premium — about a penny a pint — rewards dairy farms that pass strict water-quality evaluations. Not only do these farmers sell quality milk, they keep the cows out of the stream and the barnyard runoff out of the Bay. "Most shoppers don’t ask what happens to the manure," says soil scientist Les Lanyon, Penn State’s representative in the Dairy Network Partnership that set up this Environmental Quality Initiative. "Consumers need to think about the whole food system, not just about themselves."

Research/Penn State is published by the Vice President for Research. Contents copyright 1998 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-3303. Contact the editor for permission to reprint.