RECENT RANKINGS (September 1996)

1st, least amount of debt per graduate ($2,323) in nation, U.S. News & World Report.

3rd, best college value in nation, Money Magazine and U.S. News & World Report.

16th, quality ranking (only Texas-based institution in the top 40), U.S. News & World Report.

3rd, number of freshman National Merit Scholars enrolled, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

RICE AUTHORS

The most widely known Rice author is Texan Larry McMurtry ('60), who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel in 1986 Lonesome Dove. In 1995, the Rice campus, as well as some staff and students, were featured in the current release of Evening Star, a cinematic prequel for his novel Terms of Endearment. Directed by Robert Harling, the movie features Shirley MacLaine, Bill Paxton, Juliette Lewis, Miranda Richardson, and Jack Nicholson.


STUDENT CELEBRITIES

Senior Allison Price Fine (Hanszen) was featured as one of Glamour magazine's "Top 10 College Women" for 1996. (The 1994 "Top 10 College Women" list included Rice student Angela Hunt.) Ms. Fine, with majors in history, religious studies, and Middle East Studies was recognized for her leadership in the Hanszen Refugee Service Project and her efforts to broaden understanding of Palestinian culture.

RICE IN CYBERSPACE: OUR MOST POPULAR WEB SITES

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology instructor Alan Thornhill is the creator and supervisor of "The Center for Conservation Biology Network," an international meeting place for issues of biology. His purpose is to help develop the technical means for protecting, maintaining, and preserving biodiversity by bringing together the fields of education, science, government policy, and economics. This web site, sponsored jointly by Rice and the University of California at Irvine, averages 300 daily users from as far away as Spain, Finland, Malaysia, and Gabon. Contact: http://conbio.rice.edu.

Information about new ventures in nanoscale science and technology are available at Nobel Prize winner Rick Smalley's home page. Contact: http://cnst.rice.edu/reshome.html.


RHODES SCHOLARSHIP HIGHLIGHT

Student Association president and graduating senior Maryana Iskander is among the 32 Americans chosen for the 1997 class of Rhodes scholars. Maryana is the 8th Rice student to be named a Rhodes Scholar and the first since 1972. Criteria for Rhodes scholarships include high academic achievement, integrity, leadership, and athletic prowess. This year, 990 applicants to England's prestigious Oxford program were from the U.S.


SOME RECENT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES

In 1985, Richard E. Smalley, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry, Robert Curl, chemistry professor, and graduate students, Jim Heath and Sean O'Brien (along with British scientist Harold Kroto), discovered carbon 60, named buckminsterfullerene because of its resemblance to the geodesic dome built by R. Buckminster Fuller for the 1967 World's Fair. Because the molecules are soccer ball shaped, they have been nicknamed "buckyballs." They are the third major form of carbon, after diamond and graphite. Curl, Smalley, and Kroto received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery.

In 1995, Smalley created a method for making carbon tubes whose diameters are so tiny that one million would stack just one millimeter high; these fibers are expected to be the strongest fibers ever made, 100 times stronger than steel. These findings are central to work in the interdisciplinary field of nanoscale science and technology - a field with significant potential impact on human society in the 21st century. Buckminsterfullerenes are extraordinarily stable and nearly impervious to radiation and chemical destruction. The molecule may provide the basis for new - super strong yet light - materials, semiconductors for computers, new drug delivery systems, affordable solar cells, and semiconductors.

Also in 1995, physics professor Randall Hulet and his team, Jeffrey Tollett (1995 Rice doctoral graduate), Curtis Bradley and Cass Sackett (graduate students), created a new form of matter - one postulated by Albert Einstein 71 years ago but, until the Rice group and groups at two other colleges created it, was never proven. The Bose-Einstein condensate shows that by cooling gaseous atoms to a temperature barely above absolute zero, the atoms slow down so much they condense into a cloud, causing individual atoms to lose their identities and behave collectively. This better understanding of atomic matter has substantial implications for new technologies.

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