Iowa State University


Inside Iowa State
June 27, 1997

News briefs

First Lady lauds ISU bookmark
"Keep it straight -- don't cross- contaminate," "Don't wait -- refrigerate," and "If in doubt, throw it out."

These food safety slogans caught the attention of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at the Food Safety Education Conference held last week in Washington, D.C.

The slogans are part of a food safety education initiative at Iowa State. The project is headed by researchers Jim Huss, Pat Redlinger and Peggy Sherry from the College of Family and Consumer Sciences' Families Extension.

The slogans are designed to educate the public on how to properly purchase, store, prepare, cook and serve food.

The first lady advised conference participants to use Iowa State's project as an example, keeping food safety information simple and clever.

Tips and information from the ISU food safety initiative can be found on the Web at: http://www.exnet.iastate.edu/Pages/families/fs/homepage.html.

Pizza with a sweet touch
Victory was sweet, PizzaSweet to be exact, for 11 ISU food science students competing in the Institute of Food Technologists' Student Product Development Competition.

The students developed PizzaSweets, a snack roll designed as an after-school treat for children. The roll features pizza sauce filling on one end and sugar and cinnamon filling on the other end. The snack earned the team $500 and a second place finish in the competition held June 15, in Orlando, Fla. This is the second year an ISU team has made the final round of the competition, which is sponsored by M&M Mars.

PizzaSweets are low-fat, with zero saturated fat, zero cholesterol and 180 calories per serving. The team is working with the ISU Research Foundation to trademark the name and idea, and market its idea to the food industry.

Professorship honors student who invented fax process
A new professorship in the department of electrical and computer engineering honors the former grad student who invented the digital encoding process that led to the development of the first generation of low-cost fax machines.

Department officials created the David C. Nicholas Endowed Professorship of Electrical and Computer Engineering with part of the department's share of royalties on the fax invention. Nicholas received bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from Iowa State in 1967, 1968 and 1971.

The new professorship will be filled this month by Arun K. Somani, professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.

"This professorship allows us to recognize Dr. Nicholas' great contributions and recruit faculty with a superior record in areas of national importance like computer architecture and computer communications," said S.S. Venkata, department chair. "Dr. Somani clearly is a leader in his field and we want to capitalize on that expertise."

ISU team wins OM world finals
An Iowa State student team won in their division at the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals with designs for three small cars that ran a course popping balloons and a skit performed in conjunction with the cars.

OM is an international problem-solving competition that emphasizes teamwork and creativity. Iowa State hosted the world finals in 1990, 1994 and 1996.

The Iowa State team of seven students designed three small cars using different power sources: battery, spring and elastic. Two years ago, the team placed third, last year second and this year the team won the competition in Division 4, for college students.

The competition was this month at the University of Maryland.

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URL: http://www.iastate.edu/general/Inside/1997/0627/briefs.html Revised 6/26/97