Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917-1996) was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. Her career started at age 17 when she won the Apollo Theater’s Amateur Night contest on November 21, 1934, after which she began performing with the Chick Webb Band and recording under the Decca label. It was with Decca that Fitzgerald’s 1938 song “A-tisket, A-tasket” reached number one on the Billboard charts. With Webb’s passing in 1939, Fitzgerald began recording under the name Ella Fitzgerald and Her Famous Orchestra. She went on to become the “First Lady of Song,” one of the most famous jazz musicians of all time.
Looking for more information on legendary women of jazz? The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, the world’s largest jazz archive, has posted the finding aids it produced through a CLIR Hidden Collections grant to arrange and describe the collections of five women in jazz: Wilma Dobie, Ella Fitzgerald, Abbey Lincoln, Annie Ross, and Victoria Spivey.
While Drs Eveleigh and Warhol were at the Eagleton workshop, the Rutgers Daily Targum (university newspaper) ran a cover story on our efforts to get an Official State Microbe for New Jersey! Great timing!
John Warhol and Doug Eveleigh participated in the Scientists in Politics workshop at the Eagleton Institute on Nov 29. It was a great networking experience and we were able to share our experience with getting a State Microbe with the other attendees. Great news is that now Chancellor Molloy has his own Periodic Table of Microbes poster for his office wall!
75th anniversary of streptomycin is coming up. Get ready for a celebration!
Microbiology at the NJ Historical Commission Forum
Monmouth University hosted the NJ History Forum where I talked about the great history of New Jersey and Microbiology on behalf of my colleagues at Rutgers.
One presentation is titled The 75th Anniversary of the Discovery of Streptomycin (upcoming in 2019); the other is titled An Official New Jersey State Microbe! Streptomyces griseus. The revolutionary antibiotic streptomycin was discovered as a product the microbe Streptomyces griseus isolated from New Jersey soil.
Authors of the presentations are Douglas Eveleigh, Jeff Boyd, Jessica Lisa, Max Haagblom, and John Warhol.
To learn more about microbiology, check out the book:https://tinyurl.com/Warhol-Small-Guide. It costs less than a burger and a Coke, it lasts longer, and is more fun!
The NJ Microbe had another milestone when the Assembly Science, Innovation, and Technology all voted in favor of the bill.
Thank you to all the people from around the world who contacted the legislators on behalf of the microbe.Thank you to the Assembly members who voted for it and all the bill’s sponsors.
NJ Assembly legislation A3650 will be heard before the Science and Technology Committee on Monday Sept 17. It’s taken a lot of work to get it to this stage. Thank all of you who helped!
And, you can get the world’s most entertaining science book on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/Warhol-Small-Guide It costs less than a burger and a Coke, it lasts longer, and is more fun!
This is part of the team that worked hard on getting recognition for microbiology in New Jersey.
We are actually standing on a mosaic that depicts several of the Official State Symbols of New Jersey, only the Gold Finch shows in this photo. Everyone entering the State House sees these icons. Symbolism is important!
We have been getting a lot of positive press and electronic media following the unanimous vote of the New Jersey Senate on July 27. It’s nice to see an article in an actual newspaper! This ran in the Sunday Asbury Park Press on page 2 on July 29, 2018.
On June 14, the NJ Senate State Government. Wagering, Tourism & Historic Preservation Committee voted Yes unanimously on S1729, which names Streptomyces griseus as the State Microbe of New Jersey. This is another big step in becoming the first state after Oregon to have an official microbe, and an excellent way of acknowledging the great science that’s been done in NJ.
This makes it official, we’re presenting at the Microbe 2018 annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
It just struck me that this is an entirely new area of research and activism. Oregon was successful in getting a State Microbe, but I can’t get anyone there to return my phone calls or emails. I think I’m the only one doing this systematically.
The Rutgers Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology had an amazingly great day on April 28th. The booth was staffed by students and faculty all day and had lines of people waiting to learn more about the State Microbe and microbiology in general. State Microbe T shirts were very popular. Thank you to everyone who participated!
We collected nearly 400 signatures on a petition to our legislators in support of A3650 and S1729, the legislation that designates Streptomyces griseus as the New Jersey State Microbe.
For a variety of reasons, this was an extremely busy semester, and I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my open tabs (I had several hundred open at one point!). An irrecoverable browser crash killed any possibility of ever doing even an omnibus record of what I’ve been reading and thinking about — but I do have a tiny number of highlights from the semester that I will link here just to close the…
It’s October 31st, and in my family, that means more than just Halloween. It’s my mom’s birthday. So while I’ve spent most of October celebrating the spookiest month of the year, today I’m reserving space for something more important.
That’s how I ended up reading Standing Tall, a choice I never would have picked for myself, simply because I’m not usually interested in sports. My mom, however,…
There’s a reason why you don’t see rotary motors or joints in nature: at anything above the molecular scale, too much stuff has to be permanently attached to too much other stuff for any of it to be freely rotating in the way a mechanical wheel or axle is. The more bioinspiration you want to work into a robot, the more of an issue this becomes, which is why it’s particularly impressive that researchers at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., have managed to put four silicone-based wheels with air-powered motors inside of them on a robot that’s as soft as a Crocs shoe.
Most squishy robots with pneumatic muscles exert force on the environment through bending: a pneumatic chamber that’s constrained on one side will curve when inflated, which generates enough motion that robots can walk around on legsandpick things upwith grippers. Directional motion like this is very common in nature: most of your muscles work this way, exerting force one way over a finite distance, in cooperative opposition to another muscle that exerts force the other way. You also have muscles that work together in peristalsis, in which synchronized contractions and relaxations generates a propagating wave. This is how you swallow food, and also how worms and snails move.
ProfessorAaron Mazzeo’s group at Rutgers has cleverly adapted this peristaltic motion into a rotary actuator: a motor that can turn continuously, powered only by pneumatic actuators inflating and deflating themselves in sequence. The video is 5 minutes long, but worth watching to understand how this works.
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