Nobel laureate to speak today

CHAPEL HILL -- F. Sherwood Rowland, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer, will speak at UNC today.

Rowland comes to UNC for the fourth annual Carolina Climate Change Seminar.

He will give a free technical talk, "The CFC-Ozone Story," at 11 a.m. in the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building auditorium.

Rowland's best-known work is the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other man-made gasses contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer, which protects living organisms from UV solar radiation.

These findings, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Paul Crutzen of The Netherlands and Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, brought about international changes in the chemical industry.

CFC-based aerosols have been banned in the United States and other industrialized countries since 1978.

Golden LEAF gets $10K grant

CHAPEL HILL -- The Golden LEAF Foundation has awarded the N.C. Institute for Public Health a $100,000 grant to support the N.C. Telehealth Network project.

The institute is the service and outreach arm of UNC's Gillings School of Global Public Health.

The project will establish a dedicated high-speed broadband network connecting the state's health-care providers. The network is being developed in three stages -- health departments and free clinics in phase I; public non-profit hospitals during phase II; and private health-care providers in phase III.

The Golden LEAF grant will go toward phase II funding, to assess and qualify public nonprofit hospitals to receive $6.1 million from an earlier Federal Communications Commission award. These funds will cover 85 percent of the subscription costs of hospitals' network connections and services.

John Graham, project coordinator and the institute's deputy director, said that with the completion of Phase II, virtually every rural and underserved community that depends on one of the state's 104 public community hospitals would benefit.

"Ultimately this system will save lives," Graham said. "The network will enable the adoption of instructional and medical technologies that will improve medical care. Examples of these technologies include multimedia medical education tools, Web-based electronic health records and health information exchanges, and high-resolution medical image transmission."

Graham said the broadband network positions public nonprofit hospitals to secure federal stimulus funding as early adopters of electronic health records and should help create both telecommunications and health-care jobs.