00:00:30 For some people it seems all they have to do is look at food and they put on weight.

00:00:50 But others eat all they want without having to worry about calorie counts.

00:00:54 It's a mystery that intrigues nutritionists.

00:00:56 They're keenly interested in trying to figure out why some people become fat and some people

00:01:00 don't on apparently similar energy intakes and energy expenditure levels.

00:01:05 To try to unravel this mystery of metabolism, how our body chemically produces heat or energy

00:01:11 from food, Dr. Broadwell is developing a live-in calorie counter at the USDA Research Center

00:01:17 in Maryland.

00:01:18 The room calorimeter is home now for a test robot, programmed to simulate heat in the

00:01:23 air given off by a human.

00:01:25 But when completed, volunteers will live in the chamber, arrays of sensors, directly

00:01:31 and indirectly charting their heat output, the calories they burn.

00:01:34 There are heat sensors in the floor, the ceiling, and the four walls.

00:01:38 These measure heat being radiated out.

00:01:41 These are picked up and stored in a computer.

00:01:45 For the indirect calorimeter measurements, we're measuring the amount of oxygen consumed

00:01:49 and the amount of carbon dioxide produced.

00:01:52 And from those measurements, we can calculate indirectly the amount of energy a person is

00:01:57 expending.

00:01:58 The human volunteers will spend from two to six days in the calorimeter under controlled

00:02:03 conditions.

00:02:04 These individuals will be kept on constant diets, constant energy intake, constant levels

00:02:08 of energy expenditure or exercise or activity.

00:02:11 In this way, we would hope to get some insight into how different people metabolize different

00:02:18 sources of energy.

00:02:20 And possibly, through various biochemical measurements, why some probably utilize these

00:02:27 energy sources more efficiently than others or less efficiently than others.

00:02:32 When completed, the USDA's live-in calorimeter will be the most sophisticated in this country

00:02:37 for measuring, and hopefully better understanding, the chemical mystery of human metabolism.

00:02:43 On the science scene, I'm Alan Smith.

00:02:48 Had he lived in ancient Greece, John Barianos of Rockville, Maryland, might well have been

00:03:18 one of its master artisans.

00:03:20 For he specializes in the classical restoration of historic buildings and creating original

00:03:26 interiors and exteriors in the Grecian style.

00:03:29 Yet, he doesn't work in stone, wood, or metal.

00:03:32 His materials, like the new facade of this Washington, D.C. hotel, are modern-day synthetic

00:03:38 look-alikes.

00:03:39 This is chemical material that lasts longer than stone.

00:03:44 This sturdy material is molded, not carved, from what chemists call a composite, plastic

00:03:49 reinforced with synthetic fibers.

00:03:52 For the hotel facade, the process begins by applying a solution of special chemical resins

00:03:57 mixed with fine sand.

00:03:59 When built up, the resin solution in the mold is covered with a fiberglass backing.

00:04:04 The fibers absorb the solution, and when totally saturated, the now composite is left to cure.

00:04:10 After hardening, it comes out of the mold ready to go up.

00:04:14 It looks like carved sandstone, but it's far lighter and extremely tough.

00:04:18 It's weather resistant, pollution resistant, and it lasts forever, over a thousand years,

00:04:24 maybe more.

00:04:25 The Hay-Adams Hotel is but one Barrianos restoration.

00:04:29 From Capitol Hill to private homes, his exterior and interior handiwork is found throughout

00:04:34 Washington at the White House, the Treasury Building, the National Gallery of Art.

00:04:41 Overseas, he's created interiors for a king's palace, and all primarily from chemically

00:04:47 formulated composites.

00:04:49 But the greatest ambition of John Barrianos is one day to reproduce one of the lost seven

00:04:54 wonders of the ancient world, the statue that towered long ago over a harbor in his Greek

00:05:00 Island homeland, a 500 foot replica in bronzed composite of the mighty Colossus of Rhodes.

00:05:08 From the science scene, I'm Alan Smith.

00:05:38 The two gentlemen who just walked in are Purdue University chemists, and they're checking

00:06:08 out a colleague at work in his lab.

00:06:11 The colleague is a robot, the first of its kind in the world.

00:06:14 Max, as he's called, is freeing up graduate chemistry students from tediously routine

00:06:19 experiments once they've worked out a basic chemical reaction.

00:06:23 We feel it's important because we want to have a technology which enables the graduate

00:06:29 student to get on to more creative things.

00:06:33 Graduate chemistry is, what you might say, has a lot of the same kinds of repetitive

00:06:38 processes that go on time and time again.

00:06:41 And this robot will take a reaction and run small variants of it, changing one variable

00:06:46 at a time, perhaps the solvent, the temperature, the time, and see how that affects the overall

00:06:51 yield, the production of a given laboratory chemical.

00:06:55 Max, the automated chemist, may run through a routine 16, 32, or 64 times, whatever necessary,

00:07:02 and then finally choose the best chemical process.

00:07:05 And then the graduate student can go on to the next reaction in the series and does not

00:07:11 have to spend his time running the same reaction time after time after time.

00:07:15 Dr. Fuchs acquired the robot through industry, where some 200 work in analytical chemistry

00:07:20 in sample preparation.

00:07:22 Purdue's requirements are different.

00:07:24 So another Purdue chemist, Dr. Gary Kramer, an instrumentation specialist, had to transform

00:07:29 Max into an organic chemist.

00:07:31 He's done this with such success that our tireless technician can work around the clock

00:07:36 unattended without a glitch or a shattered test tube.

00:07:40 Almost everyone that sees it in operation likes it.

00:07:43 It seems to be kind of the neatest thing since electric trains.

00:07:46 Yes, on the Purdue campus, you might say, Max has become the BMOC, the big man of chemistry.

00:07:54 On the science scene, I'm Alan Smith.

00:08:31 Tetracycline is an antibiotic developed by 20th century scientists for combating infection.

00:08:58 Imagine the surprise then when anthropologists working with analytical chemists found traces

00:09:04 of this so-called modern drug in the naturally mummified remains of Nubians who lived in

00:09:09 the Sahara almost 1,500 years ago.

00:09:12 They were taking the tetracycline, but it's unlikely they were taking it intentionally.

00:09:16 It's more likely that they were getting it by accident when they were consuming soured

00:09:19 grain or molded grain that they've been storing in the ground.

00:09:23 The bacteria molding the grain was producing tetracycline in the mold.

00:09:26 Dr. Van Gerven is among academic quinces, some with calibers, others chemistry, who

00:09:32 are studying hundreds of these desert-preserved mummies, many of them of children.

00:09:37 Tetracycline traces were a surprise, but whatever benefit, other findings showed life was harsh

00:09:42 and short for these Nubians of the northern Sudan.

00:09:46 Strikingly enough, only half of them were dead before their 10th birthday.

00:09:51 Mean life expectancy was only about 28 years.

00:09:55 We know they suffered from a variety of nutritional problems.

00:09:57 They were anemic and ironed.

00:09:59 Their diet was low in protein.

00:10:00 They had protein malnutrition.

00:10:03 Their growth was being stunted during parts of their lives.

00:10:07 The children, as evidenced in their teeth and their bones, had recurrent episodes of

00:10:11 stress where their growth was being interrupted.

00:10:13 We see all this evidence in the remains.

00:10:16 While life was cut short by disease and malnutrition, one man survived to 32 despite this and more.

00:10:22 He was stabbed between his fifth and sixth rib, probably entered the lung.

00:10:27 His back has been broken.

00:10:29 There are at least five vertebra fused together.

00:10:32 And his hip was broken and dislocated.

00:10:35 His lower limb was broken.

00:10:37 This may have all happened at one time.

00:10:38 The thing is he lived to survive it.

00:10:40 We see healing in every one of these areas.

00:10:42 Through mechanical and chemical analysis of the mummies, especially of the young, we're

00:10:46 seeing a unique record of disease and malnutrition's effect on health and development.

00:10:51 And perhaps with this, science may better help the children of today's world who face

00:10:56 similar afflictions.

00:10:58 On the Science Scene, I'm Alan Smith.

00:11:21 Watch what happens when a fluorescent light bulb hits concrete.

00:11:42 The Federal Food and Drug Administration says that can't happen.

00:11:45 Not where food, pharmaceuticals, or cosmetics are processed.

00:11:49 There, lamps have to be encased to prevent dangerous shards of glass from contaminating

00:11:54 a product should a bulb accidentally break.

00:11:57 There are several ways of doing this.

00:11:59 But one unusual new way for protectively coating fluorescent lamps came about indirectly for

00:12:04 Jim Noland, who operates a small Shrewsbury, New Jersey, plastics coating plant.

00:12:09 We were experimenting with coating glass bottles.

00:12:12 And we coated a lamp.

00:12:14 And we threw it against the wall and it contained all the glass.

00:12:17 We thought this would be a great idea for coating fluorescent lamps.

00:12:21 Mr. Noland isn't a chemist, but working with chemists who are plastics experts, he's developed

00:12:26 an automated coating process using a special kind of plastic called cerlin.

00:12:31 The fluorescent lamp, heated to more than 500 degrees, is bathed in a powdered resin

00:12:36 of cerlin.

00:12:37 This, when baked, melts around the glass, producing a clear, protective seal.

00:12:42 Cerlin is probably best known for its use in covering golf balls, which will give you

00:12:46 an idea how tough cerlin can be.

00:12:51 It's clear.

00:12:52 It's tough.

00:12:53 It has elongation.

00:12:54 In other words, this material will stretch and give when this lamp is broken.

00:13:01 After coating, the lamp is cooled by water, tested, and then ready for shipment to a food

00:13:05 or perhaps a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

00:13:08 If it accidentally breaks on an assembly line there, this won't happen.

00:13:13 Just how tough is this chemically produced shatter shield coating?

00:13:16 Well now, watch this.

00:13:23 On the science scene, I'm Alan Smith.

00:13:41 Technology could be supplying us with all the material we need for all our rubber products.

00:13:47 On the science scene, I'm Alan Smith.