ST. PAUL, Minn. ? The historic Union Depot will reopen to the public this weekend, 41 years after the last train pulled out of the station and downtown rail service ended.
Union Depot officially reopens to the public Saturday after a $243 million makeover that officials hope will anchor a public transportation renaissance and revitalize the area, Minnesota Public Radio reports (
http://bit.ly/TJ9n23
).
St. Paul has some impressive spaces. There's the cavernous sanctuary of the Cathedral of St. Paul and the Capitol rotunda that soars over the state's political heart. But the 80-foot arch that spans the Union Depot's football-field sized waiting room was the jewel of the city's commerce when it opened in 1924.
"Absolutely. This is the waiting room. The grand room, and we've developed this not unlike when James J. Hill had the vision, it's a transit hub," said Jim McDonough, a Ramsey County commissioner and chair of the county's Regional Rail Authority, the agency that's been behind the rebuilding.
"That's what it's designed to be. Intermodal. Buses, bikes. Passenger service, light rail and it's going to function extremely well."
The depot closed when the last Amtrak train pulled out on April 30, 1971. The waiting room was boarded up, gutted and last served as cold storage for a fleet of mail carts from the post office next door. But a decade-long effort by Ramsey County, the federal government and St. Paul boosters has restored it, right down to matching the original jazz-age gold-tinged paint job, banded with maroon blossoms across the ceiling.
"We spent a lot of money figuring out what that color was and then figuring out how to make it, because how you do paint now compared to how they did paint ? the recipe is a lot different," McDonough said. "But they're really confident that that's the color. And that color was intentional... it was to represent the grain fields of Minnesota."
But the restoration isn't about keeping up appearances. Boosters hope the Union Depot will help put downtown St. Paul back on the map after a century in Minneapolis' shadow. The depot is within sight of the Lower Landing, once the gateway to travel and shipping on the Mississippi River. Union Depot is also just blocks from the former headquarters of the Hill railroad empire. Backers hope the depot will again make the city a transportation center.
The first service to return will be Metro Transit, set to stop about 300 buses each weekday on what once was a train platform at the station.
"We think there's going to be a continuing growing market, and those people who are not necessarily connecting to get to downtown St. Paul," said Brian Lamb, Metro Transit general manager. "Because a lot of those routes will have kind of traversed the core of downtown St. Paul, but from one regional area to another."
Jefferson Lines intercity buses will service the depot next year, and Amtrak's Empire Builder will restore service to a brand new rail platform a few months later. The Green Line light rail trains will stop in front of the station starting in 2014.
Planners hope to eventually add commuter trains from as far as Hastings and Hinkley, and high-speed rail connections that stretch to Chicago and beyond, potentially putting St. Paul on the frontier of ground transportation.
Even near-term improvements might be possible, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said.
"We think there's an opportunity to have more trains between Chicago, not even necessarily high speed," Coleman said. "We have the Amtrak Empire Builder that goes through right now twice a day. But we'd like to see a couple of more daily trips added on the train."
The county has hired Jones Lang LaSalle, the company that runs the Chicago, New York and Washington D.C. train stations, to manage the remodeled depot.
Mark Hunter with Jones Lang LaSalle said they would like to make the Union Depot a destination in its own right, like other well-known historic train stations.
"Certainly the goal is to have that consistent daily traffic throughout Union Depot, and once you have that you can activate retail," Hunter said. "You'll have lots of events throughout the year, and it just becomes a gathering place for the community."
???
Information from: Minnesota Public Radio News,
http://www.mpr.org
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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(Reuters) - Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Josh Brent was charged with manslaughter on Saturday after the car he was accused of driving while drunk crashed and killed teammate Jerry Brown Jr, in the second tragedy involving NFL players in a week.
Police in the Dallas suburb of Irving said that Brent, 24, was driving at high speed on a state highway at 2:21 a.m. when his car flipped and then caught fire. The car slammed into an "outside curb, causing the vehicle to flip at least one time before coming to rest in the middle of the service road," police said.
Brown, who had been in the passenger seat, was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital a short time later. Brent suffered "minor scrapes" and was booked into the Irving jail, where he remained on Saturday awaiting arraignment, police said.
"Officers at the scene believed alcohol was a contributing factor in the crash," police said, adding that Brent was given a sobriety test. "Based on the results and the officer's observations and conversations with Price-Brent, he was arrested for driving while intoxicated," Irving police spokesman John Argumaniz said at a news conference.
Brown, 25, was a linebacker on the professional team's practice squad but had not played any games with the Cowboys. He had played in one NFL game for the Indianapolis Colts this season before joining the Cowboys.
Brown also played for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League in 2011 and for two Arena Football League team, the Jacksonville Sharks in 2011 and the San Antonio Talons in 2012. Arena football is played indoors on a smaller field than NFL or Canadian outdoor football.
Brent, 24, has started in five games for the Cowboys and played 12 this season since regular starting defensive lineman Jay Ratliff was sidelined with injuries.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones issued a statement expressing his condolences to the family of Brown, who was originally from Missouri.
"We are deeply saddened by the news of this accident and the passing of Jerry Brown. Our hearts and prayers and deepest sympathies are with the members of Jerry's family and all of those who knew him and loved him."
Brent remained in jail on Saturday and his bond will be set at his Sunday morning arraignment, police said. The drunk driving charge was upgraded to intoxication manslaughter, a second degree felony which is punishable in Texas by two to 20 years in prison and a fine up to $10,000.
When police arrived on the scene of the accident after several 911 calls, part of the car was on fire. The 2007 Mercedes sedan was resting on its roof in the middle of the road, and Brent was dragging Brown out of the burning car, said Irving police spokesman John Argumaniz at a news conference.
Police believe, based on gouge marks and other physical evidence at the scene, that Brown was driving faster than the posted 45 miles per hour speed limit.
Argumaniz said the Texas police are still looking for witnesses to the crash, which did not appear to involve any other vehicles.
"There were people on scene," he said. "However, it's our understanding that no one saw what took place. They drove up after the accident."
Brent has been arrested for drunk driving before. While he was on the University of Illinois football team, he was arrested February 23, 2009, on a drunk driving charge, according to Champaign, Illinois, county records. He spent time in the county jail and was suspended from the team, according to local media reports. He eventually left school and was drafted by the Cowboys.
The Cowboys team, which has struggled to live up to high expectations this season with 6 wins and 6 losses, is playing the Cincinnati Bengals in Cincinnati on Sunday.
The tragedy comes as the NFL is still reeling from the death of Kansas City Chiefs starting linebacker Jovan Belcher, who shot his girlfriend to death one week ago before driving to the team's training facility and killing himself in front of the coach and general manager.
(Reporting by Karen Brooks; Editing by Greg McCune and Jackie Frank)
Let Texas Ballet Theater?s The Nutcracker, a perennial favorite, become the dazzling star atop your family?s holiday tree. From the moment the lights dim, you will be transported to a magical place that is filled with waltzing snowflakes, a flying carpet, a glittering swan sleigh, battling mischievous mice, adorable children and breathtaking dancing. This production is beloved by audiences of all ages.
On Wednesday afternoon, the New York Times published a story written by Catherine Saint Louis claiming that public libraries were now devoting precious resources to a new threat: bedbugs nesting inside the spines of hardcover books and making their way into public libraries like Norway rats stowing away on dusty ships.
The piece, which drew understandable horror on Twitter on Thursday morning, was the seventh most emailed New York Times story by Thursday afternoon.
But Reluctant Habits has talked with many of Saint Louis?s sources and has learned that the Times article is misleading.
Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition
The president who has had, perhaps, the most surprising year is none other than No. 34, Dwight Eisenhower. Continuing a recent reappraisal by historians, Jean Edward Smith published a well-received and largely admiring biography of Eisenhower in February. Now, as another campaign season has just ended, Evan Thomas offers Ike's Bluff, a perceptive analysis of the Republican president?s penchant for combining patience and secrecy to avoid nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
The central premise of Thomas? book is that the staid 1950s were anything but and, in turn, the grandfatherly, confused Eisenhower was, in fact, a shrewd operator who never let anyone ? including his son ? know whether he would use nuclear weapons. Maintaining inscrutability allowed Ike to avoid war at a time when the world?s two superpowers flirted with what later came to be known as mutually assured destruction.
Or, as Thomas writes of the man who first found fame leading the D-Day invasion of 1944, ?Ike was more comfortable as a soldier, yet his greatest victories were the wars he did not fight.?
Unlike Smith?s biography, Thomas opts against a full life story in favor of his presidency. And the book delves into a narrower topic than just the White House years, as its main emphasis is on foreign policy. Defense spending (it was Eisenhower, of course, who rued the ?military-industrial complex,? presciently so), diplomacy, occasional saber-rattling and plenty of CIA miscalculations proliferate.
Equally important, this history charts the personal ups and downs of Eisenhower amid the mounting pressures of nuclear threats. The warm, genial figure the public saw as their president simmered behind the scenes. Eisenhower had a quick-trigger temper and bore a series of ailments while trying to cope with the stresses of the presidency.
As commander-in-chief, Ike endured a heart attack, a stroke, and intestinal surgery during his two terms in office. The effects of international summits and various standoffs with the Soviets and others caused Eisenhower debilitating stomach problems and other sicknesses.
To be sure, Eisenhower was hardly a saint. He lived in a male-dominated world and could be cold to subordinates and family members alike. His dutiful wife, Mamie, once said, ?I have one career and his name is Ike.? Still, he loved her and, in many ways, relied on her, as well as on his personal secretary, Ann Whitman.
Ike proved too loyal and was loath to fire anyone. And the charge by many critics that as president he was often absent is at least partially true. Thomas recounts typical workdays of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., followed by a regular informal meeting with secretary of state John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower would indulge in a pre-dinner cocktail and spend his hours after dinner reading Western novels or painting. And, most days, he practiced or played golf, or both.
Flexible silicon solar-cell fabrics may soon become possiblePublic release date: 6-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Barbara K. Kennedy science@psu.edu 814-863-4682 Penn State
For the first time, a silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities has been developed that has been shown to be scalable to many meters in length. The research opens the door to the possibility of weaving together solar-cell silicon wires to create flexible, curved, or twisted solar fabrics. The findings by an international team of chemists, physicists, and engineers, led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, will be posted by the journal Advanced Materials in an early online edition on 6 December 2012 and will be published on a future date in the journal's print edition.
The team's new findings build on earlier work addressing the challenge of merging optical fibers with electronic chips -- silicon-based integrated circuits that serve as the building blocks for most semiconductor electronic devices such as solar cells, computers, and cell phones. Rather than merge a flat chip with a round optical fiber, the team found a way to build a new kind of optical fiber -- which is thinner than the width of a human hair -- with its own integrated electronic component, thereby bypassing the need to integrate fiber-optics with chips. To do this, they used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials directly, layer by layer, into tiny holes in optical fibers.
Now, in their new research, the team members have used the same high-pressure chemistry techniques to make a fiber out of crystalline silicon semiconductor materials that can function as a solar cell -- a photovoltaic device that can generate electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct-current electricity. "Our goal is to extend high-performance electronic and solar-cell function to longer lengths and to more flexible forms. We already have made meters-long fibers but, in principle, our team's new method could be used to create bendable silicon solar-cell fibers of over 10 meters in length," Badding said. "Long, fiber-based solar cells give us the potential to do something we couldn't really do before: We can take the silicon fibers and weave them together into a fabric with a wide range of applications such as power generation, battery charging, chemical sensing, and biomedical devices."
Badding explained that one of the major limitations of portable electronics such as smart phones and iPads is short battery life. Solar-boosted batteries could help solve this problem. "A solar cell is usually made from a glass or plastic substrate onto which hydrogenated amorphous silicon has been grown," Badding explained. "Such a solar cell is created using an expensive piece of equipment called a PECVD reactor and the end result is something flat with little flexibility. But woven, fiber-based solar cells would be lightweight, flexible configurations that are portable, foldable, and even wearable." This material could then be connected to electronic devices to power them and charge their batteries. "The military especially is interested in designing wearable power sources for soldiers in the field," Badding added.
The team members believe that another advantage of flexibility in solar-cell materials is the possibility of collecting light energy at various angles. "A typical solar cell has only one flat surface," Badding said. "But a flexible, curved solar-cell fabric would not be as dependent upon where the light is coming from or where the sun is in the horizon and the time of day."
Pier J. A. Sazio of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and one of the team's leaders added, "Another intriguing property of these silicon-fiber devices is that as they are so compact, they can have a very fast response to visible laser light. In fact, we fabricated fiber-based photodetectors with a bandwidth of over 1.8 GHz."
###
In addition to Badding and Sazio, other researchers who contributed to this study include lead author Rongrui He, Todd D. Day, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, Justin R. Sparks, and Venkatraman Gopalan from Penn State.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Penn State's Materials Research Institute Nano Fabrication Network, and the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
[ Katrina Voss ]
CONTACTS
John Badding: 814-777-3054 (mobile), jbadding@pearl.chem.psu.edu
Pier J. A. Sazio: 44-23-8059-3144, pjas@orc.soton.ac.uk
Barbara Kennedy (PIO): 814-863-4682, science@psu.edu
IMAGES
High-resolution images associated with this research are online at http://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2012-news/Badding12-2012.
CAPTIONS
1. A cross-sectional image of the new silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities. Shown are the layers -- labeled n+, i, and p+ -- that have been deposited inside the pore of the fiber.
2. A coiled strand of a meter-long solar-cell junction fiber, thinner than the width of a human hair, which has been created by a team of chemists, physicists, and engineers led by John Badding at Penn State University.
CREDIT
Badding lab, Penn State University
GRANT NUMBERS
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/G028273/1 and EP/I035307/1), National Science Foundation (DMR-0806860 and DMR-1107894), and the Penn State Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (NSF DMR-0820404)
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Flexible silicon solar-cell fabrics may soon become possiblePublic release date: 6-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Barbara K. Kennedy science@psu.edu 814-863-4682 Penn State
For the first time, a silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities has been developed that has been shown to be scalable to many meters in length. The research opens the door to the possibility of weaving together solar-cell silicon wires to create flexible, curved, or twisted solar fabrics. The findings by an international team of chemists, physicists, and engineers, led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, will be posted by the journal Advanced Materials in an early online edition on 6 December 2012 and will be published on a future date in the journal's print edition.
The team's new findings build on earlier work addressing the challenge of merging optical fibers with electronic chips -- silicon-based integrated circuits that serve as the building blocks for most semiconductor electronic devices such as solar cells, computers, and cell phones. Rather than merge a flat chip with a round optical fiber, the team found a way to build a new kind of optical fiber -- which is thinner than the width of a human hair -- with its own integrated electronic component, thereby bypassing the need to integrate fiber-optics with chips. To do this, they used high-pressure chemistry techniques to deposit semiconducting materials directly, layer by layer, into tiny holes in optical fibers.
Now, in their new research, the team members have used the same high-pressure chemistry techniques to make a fiber out of crystalline silicon semiconductor materials that can function as a solar cell -- a photovoltaic device that can generate electrical power by converting solar radiation into direct-current electricity. "Our goal is to extend high-performance electronic and solar-cell function to longer lengths and to more flexible forms. We already have made meters-long fibers but, in principle, our team's new method could be used to create bendable silicon solar-cell fibers of over 10 meters in length," Badding said. "Long, fiber-based solar cells give us the potential to do something we couldn't really do before: We can take the silicon fibers and weave them together into a fabric with a wide range of applications such as power generation, battery charging, chemical sensing, and biomedical devices."
Badding explained that one of the major limitations of portable electronics such as smart phones and iPads is short battery life. Solar-boosted batteries could help solve this problem. "A solar cell is usually made from a glass or plastic substrate onto which hydrogenated amorphous silicon has been grown," Badding explained. "Such a solar cell is created using an expensive piece of equipment called a PECVD reactor and the end result is something flat with little flexibility. But woven, fiber-based solar cells would be lightweight, flexible configurations that are portable, foldable, and even wearable." This material could then be connected to electronic devices to power them and charge their batteries. "The military especially is interested in designing wearable power sources for soldiers in the field," Badding added.
The team members believe that another advantage of flexibility in solar-cell materials is the possibility of collecting light energy at various angles. "A typical solar cell has only one flat surface," Badding said. "But a flexible, curved solar-cell fabric would not be as dependent upon where the light is coming from or where the sun is in the horizon and the time of day."
Pier J. A. Sazio of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom and one of the team's leaders added, "Another intriguing property of these silicon-fiber devices is that as they are so compact, they can have a very fast response to visible laser light. In fact, we fabricated fiber-based photodetectors with a bandwidth of over 1.8 GHz."
###
In addition to Badding and Sazio, other researchers who contributed to this study include lead author Rongrui He, Todd D. Day, Mahesh Krishnamurthi, Justin R. Sparks, and Venkatraman Gopalan from Penn State.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, Penn State's Materials Research Institute Nano Fabrication Network, and the United Kingdom's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
[ Katrina Voss ]
CONTACTS
John Badding: 814-777-3054 (mobile), jbadding@pearl.chem.psu.edu
Pier J. A. Sazio: 44-23-8059-3144, pjas@orc.soton.ac.uk
Barbara Kennedy (PIO): 814-863-4682, science@psu.edu
IMAGES
High-resolution images associated with this research are online at http://www.science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2012-news/Badding12-2012.
CAPTIONS
1. A cross-sectional image of the new silicon-based optical fiber with solar-cell capabilities. Shown are the layers -- labeled n+, i, and p+ -- that have been deposited inside the pore of the fiber.
2. A coiled strand of a meter-long solar-cell junction fiber, thinner than the width of a human hair, which has been created by a team of chemists, physicists, and engineers led by John Badding at Penn State University.
CREDIT
Badding lab, Penn State University
GRANT NUMBERS
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/G028273/1 and EP/I035307/1), National Science Foundation (DMR-0806860 and DMR-1107894), and the Penn State Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (NSF DMR-0820404)
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
December 8
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Public release date: 6-Dec-2012
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