For an easy-to-follow guide to the most commonly found minerals on the mine dumps in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, you can't do better than to consult our own Susan Robinson's Mineral Identification Guide for the Copper Country's Poor-Rock Piles. Susan, author of the Rocks & Minerals article series on artists and their work, is an artist in her own right. She wrote and illustrated this attractive brochure as a handy reference for beginning collectors and first-time visitors to Upper Michigan. Look for it at mineral and gift shops in the area. It's a perfect size to slip into your shirt pocket when you go to the Copper Country's Keweenaw Week

The basic statistics for Lucent Technologies' new U.S. research and development facilities are staggering by any comparison. Located just outside Chicago, the aggregate floor space is more than one million square feet. The primary mission of the research complex is the development of core technology for switching and high-speed wireless communications.

To service the voice, data and video network, and the intelligent building systems needs of this ambitious undertaking, an elaborate cabling infrastructure was required. Two high-rise structures are each strung with one million feet of two-strand, single-mode optical fiber cable and an additional three million feet of four-pair Category 6 copper cable. Three copper cables and two single-mode optical fibers are the standard configuration to each of more than 9,000 work areas.

Says Jack McKillip, RCDD, an infrastructure engineer who designed much of the cabling system and oversaw its installation, "The scale and complexity of this project is totally warranted, given the purpose of the new facility and how it relates to the existing operation."

Prior to the construction of the new buildings, Lucent had already established a major data center in an adjacent building, one occupying an entire floor and serving as a central repository of data resources for a worldwide network of Lucent Technologies and Bell Laboratories. From this hub, a mesh backbone of single-mode and multimode fiber extends to seven other nearby buildings, including the two newest structures.

The backbone itself is heavily protected. Redundant fiber, diverse routing, and instantaneous restoration in the face of fiber breaks ensure that the network operates under practically any circumstance. A concrete-encased duct bank, through which the backbone runs, provides a further measure of security.

The internal data network as it is now configured supports 10/100Base-T ethernet. The copper cable will support Gigabit Ethernet and the single-mode fiber has virtually unlimited bandwidth.

The project, as a whole, McKillip says, "was intended to be one of the world's most advanced engineering and scientific laboratories. Fiber to the desktop may seem pretty extravagant, but when you have several thousand engineers collaborating over the network, it really isn't.

"In one sense, it's basically just a huge cabling job," he adds. "There are no routers or servers or redundant memory in any of the closets. There's really no data center in either of the buildings. It's all just switches and wire going back to the main data center across campus.

Lucent prequalified all prospective bidders, arriving at a final choice of Advanced Data Technologies (ADT), where McKillips is a consultant. The company also chose to use the Chatsworth Products Inc. (CPI) rack and cabling management system, which provided for an infinite combination of equipment configurations, along with high-density cable management. In fact, ADT began the massive installation project using CPI's system approach.

"When people first became more conscious of cable management, we started using stand-alone wire-management racks," explains Dave Kelsch, ADT president and Lucent project manager. "But once you get into multiple racks and high density requirements, racks alone don't do the job."

Each floor of each wing is equipped with a modular "telecom room," with a CPI rack system comprised of 14 open rack systems, each containing a combination of Avaya's SYSTIMAX patch panels and Cajun Ethernet switches. Smaller closets containing complements of the same equipment are located in the center wing, which largely supports major conference rooms. In addition, each building has main telecom rooms, with the same type of equipment in each of the basements.

The telecom rooms house all of the equipment and cabling for voice, data and video, as well as intelligent building systems equipment and cabling, which presented an additional challenge. "Everything had to be dead accurate, because of the space constraints," says McKillip.

"Everything fit perfectly," adds Kelsch. "We had hundreds of terminations at each switch and patch panel and all the cable coming in through horizontal runs because there was no raised floor or dropped ceiling. All of the cabling was exposed in the closets. Since this building is a showcase, as well as a work area, the installation had to make the right visual statement, and it does." The final part of the job involved termination of the cable at the desktop, which meant routing individual wires through the floor-to-ceiling Steelcase office furnishings used to demarcate the workspaces.

As Lucent intensifies its research efforts, its new facilities continue to acquire yet more powerful computing engines and to generate ever more network traffic. McKillip says that the basic cable infrastructure will provide capability for unlimited situations. "The capacity at each desktop is more than many large corporations have for their entire headquarters!"

If you believe some pundits and industry observers, widespread deployment of FTTH (fiber to the home) is just around the corner. Some also suggest that recent FCC decisions deregulating new FTTH deployments as well as falling equipment and installation costs are pushing fiber deployment over the tipping point.

Because full fiber loops can carry data at speeds of 100 Mbps, companies can easily provide voice, data and video services over a single line. Controlling this fat pipe would allow the Bell companies to offer complete service bundles to match anything offered by the cable providers. However, there remain substantial barriers to major fiber deployment that suggest copper will remain the industry's workhorse for many years to come.

Cost continues to be the single biggest obstacle to widespread fiber deployment. The CIMI Corporation consulting firm estimates that infrastructure costs for FTTP (fiber to the premises) are about five times as much as DSL in the best case scenario. Current estimates find that FTTP deployment costs are between $150 and $200 per linear foot (including trenching and additional costs such as insurance), depending on the region and population density where deployed.

The Bell companies also have significantly reduced their capex (capital expenditures) funding. Traditionally, access line growth has been the principal driver of capex. However, with access line numbers falling, there has been less money available for network investment. RBOC capital expenditures have been steadily falling since peaking in the year 2000.

Finally, the Bells currently have in place nearly twice the copper they need for current working lines. Largescale replacement projects would trap a tremendous amount of capital in investments that might take years to pay off. These investments can be difficult to justify in the face of declining access line numbers. New deployments of fiber might make sense where there is a need to refurbish or augment the current plant, but where a glut of copper remains, it is difficult to justify the stranding of such a useful asset.

Relying on historical census data to predict future deployment, the optical fiber developer OFS completed a forecast of likely FTTH deployments in the next 10 years. The company forecast just over 20 million FTTH subscribers by 2010. Even in this optimistic scenario, the total would equal only about one-tenth of the phone customers nationwide.

The Evolution of Copper

Most industry watchers are familiar with the mechanics of DSL technology. DSL uses more bandwidth than an analog voice call, making use of frequencies transmitted above 4 KHz. For traditional residential ADSL service, more bandwidth is used for sending information downstream to the user, with fewer channels reserved for sending data upstream. Thus, ADSL transfer rates are faster downstream--perfect for web surfing and similar asymmetric applications.

When these signals reach the CO, the data they represent are aggregated by a DSLAM (DSL access multiplexer), thousands of which are deployed in COs across the country to connect customers to high-speed networks.

DSL is, however, a distance-sensitive technology. The further the user is from a CO, the more degraded the signal becomes and the slower the transfer rate. The extreme distance limit for ADSL service is 18,000 feet, and download speeds up to 8 Mbps are only available to a distance of about 6000 feet. Upstream speeds are typically between 128 kbps and 640 kbps.

One perception of DSL is that it's a mature technology facing near-term obsolescence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creative companies have continued finding new ways to exploit the decades-old legacy copper network. Technologies that will be commercially available within the next year or two will allow data transfer at speeds exceeding 50 Mbps, fast enough for even the most bandwidth-intensive applications.

Companies could use copper to transmit not just voice and data, but also full-motion video over multiple high-definition television channels. These future varieties of DSL promise to surpass current high-speed connections by offering download speeds 30 times higher than what is now commonly available. The following DSL types are either currently in service or will be commercially deployed within the next 12 months (see Table 1):

* IDSL (ISDN DSL) allows symmetric downstream and upstream transfer rates of 144 kbps. The primary advantage of this technology is that it can be provided to customers who are located far from COs.

* ADSL (asymmetric DSL) is what most people refer to as DSL. ADSL is a consumer-class service that allows downloads at speeds up to 8.0 Mbps if the customer is within 6000 feet of a CO. Typically, however, maximum ADSL download speeds are sold and capped at 1.5 Mbps.

* SDSL (symmetric DSL) is a business-class service providing equal upstream and downstream transfer speeds. Unlike ADSL, SDSL requires a second loop separate from the customer's voice service.

Nexans announced it has researched the design of and created a model for 10GBASE-T data traffic over 100 meters of Category 6 copper UTP cable.

Created in a joint project with Penn State University, and funded by the International Copper Association (ICA), this system design models the process data transformation into signal transmission on the cable, the effect of the channel on the signal, and the correction and interpretation of the signal as it is returned to data at the receiving end.

The data used in the model is encoded into a 10-level signal, which is transmitted onto the unshielded twisted-pair cable. At the other end of the system, the signal is recovered by turbo equalization, turbo coding, and additional digital signal processing methods. The model includes the evaluation information in signal eye-patterns and Bit Error Rate versus Signal to Noise Ratio.

A high-fat, copper-rich diet may increase the risk of cognitive decline in older adults, says a study by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The study of 3,718 people, age 65 and older, found that a diet high in saturated fat and trans fats, combined with a high intake of copper, may be associated with an accelerated rate of decline in thinking, learning and memory abilities.

Food with high copper levels include organ meats (such as liver), shellfish, nuts, seeds, legumes, whole grains, potatoes, chocolate and some fruits. Copper pipes may also add trace amounts of the metal to drinking water.

The findings were published in the August issue of the journal Archives of Neurology.

The study participants' cognitive abilities were tested at the start of the study and again three years and six years later. They also provided information about their eating habits.

The city is continuing to get hit by copper thieves to the tune of at least two calls per day, an East St. Louis police detective says.

"Everyday we get something. While some of the reported copper thefts in the past were to businesses, more of the thefts are starting to be to residences," Detective Ken Berry said.

A woman recently reported that someone took her air conditioner from her residence, Berry said.

Theft of copper and other scrap metals is on the rise due to the money they bring, police have said. Many of the thefts go unnoticed or unreported.

"People are going to have to start reporting suspicious activity, or when they hear someone banging on something late at night, carrying trash cans full of scrap metal, or if they spot someone climbing on poles," Berry said.

The thrill of a crowd, high-level competition and prize money were supposed to come back to San Jose bicycle-track racing this year.

Instead, disappointed supporters and cyclists have curtailed races and ditched a plan to promote Friday night events at Hellyer County Park's cycling facility.

Thieves ended the dream for this summer when they cut hundreds of feet of copper electrical wire from the banked, circular velodrome two weeks ago, knocking out the power.

"It really chopped a hole in our strategy for this summer," said Mike Hardaway, president of the NorCal Velodrome Association, which manages races at the track.

Copper in wire, like that used for lights and the public address system at the track, is a hot item for thieves, who sell the metal for scrap. In the last six months thieves have broken into buildings, scaled fences and climbed power poles at least 12 .

Copper wire theft cost taxpayers in Santa Clara County more than $34,000 last weekend, according to police reports and officials.

The increasingly common crime -- believed attractive to drug users because of copper's unusually high price as scrap metal -- already hit the Hellyer County Park bicycle track last month.

Last weekend a school and a county maintenance yard were hit too. Thieves took more than $9,000 worth of copper wiring from both facilities and caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage.

At Anne Darling Elementary School in San Jose, thieves snagged $4,000 worth of copper wiring and caused about $25,000 worth of damage, manager of school construction Steve Adamo said.

Sometime between Saturday night and early Monday morning, someone slipped through a hole cut in the fence surrounding the campus and, likely using an on-site tractor, pulled electric conduits from the building that houses media .

The brand new www.copperconcept.org website is now live. The pan-European website give architects and specifiers the perfect starting point for inspiration and information about the use of copper in architecture. The website is part of a wider campaign which, as a joint venture between the International Copper Association and European copper manufacturers, aims to promote the longevity, flexibility, versatility and design appeal of this distinctive building material.

The distribution of eastern oysters Crassostrea virginica near terrestrial watersheds has led to a general impression that low or variable salinity is imperative for survival. However, freshwater runoff contains numerous mineral elements from geologic deposits that could play significant roles in oyster physiology. Two metals of terrestrial origin, copper and zinc, are accumulated to extremely high concentrations in eastern oysters, even in the absence of anthropogenic sources. As yet, there has been no defendable demonstration of a physiologic function for such high concentrations. Both copper and zinc, however, are accumulated almost exclusively in the amebocytes and calcareous shell of oysters, a unique distribution that implicates a role in the functions of amebocytes. Amebocytes are migratory, diapedetic cells generally recognized to provide nutriment and defense through phagocytosis, killing, and digestion of invading or ingested microorganisms. There is sufficient evidence in existing literature to suggest that copper and zinc directly contribute to these antimicrobial activities. This review presents historical and recent findings that demonstrate a strong affinity of oyster amebocytes for copper and zinc (even in low ambient concentrations), prolonged retention of the metals despite a potential route of elimination, and strong circumstantial evidence of antimicrobial activity by accumulated copper and zinc. It is proposed that oysters actively concentrate copper and zinc as antimicrobial agents to be used in intracellolar and extracellular killing (direct toxicity) as well as extracellular clot formation (precipitation of hemolymph). This potential, combined with evidence of amebocyte involvement in deposition of oyster shell, provides an alternative framework for understanding amebocyte functions, defense activities, and coastal distributions of oyster populations. It also affords some resolution to the apparent contradiction of eastern oysters thriving at seemingly polluted locations.

KEY WORDS: oysters, Crassostrea virginica, marine bivalves, copper, zinc, metals, contaminants, amebocytes, leucocytes, hemocytes, internal defense, immunomodulation, immunosuppression, metal toxicity, sentinel species

INTRODUCTION

Eastern oysters Crassostrea virginica are distributed across the North American coast of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico in bays, estuaries, and coastal zones, most often near sources of fresh water. The proximity to fresh water has often led to a conclusion that oysters require the low or variable salinity provided by freshwater inflow (Cake 1983, Soniat & Brody 1988, Berrigan et al. 1991). Intermittent salinity reductions can deter stenohaline predators such as oyster drills (Loosanoff 1955, Lunz 1955, Hopkins 1956, Wells 1961, Menzel et al. 1966, Berrigan et al. 1991) and can slow incidence of disease caused by the protozoans Perkinsus marinus and Haplosporidium nelsoni (Sprague et al. 1969, Ford 1985, Ford & Haskin 1988, Chu & Greene 1989, Chu et al. 1993, La Peyre et al. 2003). However, there is ample evidence of near-shore, intertidal oyster beds in high-salinity estuaries and coastal zones (Beaven 1955, Gunter & Geyer 1955, Lunz 1955, Nelson 1955, Copeland & Hoese 1966). It is possible then, that eastern oysters are influenced by other factors that accompany freshwater influx, such as terrestrial elements, rather than reduced salinity. Copper and zinc, like many elements in the marine environment, originate from natural terrestrial sources and are delivered to oyster beds in watershed runoff (Prytherch 1934, O'Connor 2002). Runoff with sufficient volume (i.e., streams and rivers) can generate flows that bring elements far and deep into the receiving water where subtidal oyster beds exist. Without such runoff, oysters may be confined to shallow intertidal areas adjacent to land where the elements originate. If this is correct, the availability of terrestrial elements may well be a principal determinant in the distribution of eastern oysters.

Copper and zinc are terrestrial elements of special interest because they accumulate to extraordinary concentrations in eastern oysters. They are accumulated against chemical gradients, even from low ambient concentrations, and are retained within the oyster longer than other metals, despite the apparent availability of an elimination mechanism. Moreover, zinc and copper are exclusively sequestered in oyster amebocytes (Fig. 1). This brings them into direct contact with a cell type credited with many indispensable responsibilities for oyster survival, including antimicrobial activities for defense and nutrition. These considerations implicate a physiologic reliance on copper and zinc that, if true, would support the concept that terrestrial elements are key factors in oyster success and distribution. Furthermore, it would resolve the apparent contradiction that eastern oysters often thrive at relatively polluted locations (e.g., Abbe & Sanders 1986). Fortunately, there is ample information in the literature to examine such a possibility. Because of the highly accumulated concentrations and unique association with amebocytes, uptake and disposition of copper and zinc in oysters has been widely studied.

There are many reasons why you may be looking into copper re-piping for your home, but perhaps the main reason is that you may have found a leak in your home or your water pressure has dropped drastically. Either way, once you have decided to do a copper re pipe job in your home, you will need to decide on what is the best repair for you to do. This simple copper Repiping guide should walk you through some of the basics to get you going in the right direction.

Copper Re piping is used to replace existing pipes that may have rusted or deteriorated over the years. Most homes built over 25 years ago were piped with iron pipes, or galvanized pipes, which were covered with a zinc coating. Over a period of time the zinc on the pipes would break down causing the pipes to rust. Once this process happens it becomes necessary to change to copper repipe. Copper Re-piping is an extensive job and should not be taken lightly. If you choose to do the repairs yourself, then you will need to know some of the basics to get you started. When starting your copper repipe job you will want to make sure that you know where the existing pipe pattern is and make the new copper pipe match the old piping. You will want to run the copper piping right along side of the existing pipes as this will make the whole copper Repiping much easier. Make sure you have the right amount of fittings that you will need such as elbows, adapters and what fitting need to be threaded or not.

You will want to clean the fittings and the pipe, then you will need to use a flux paste, which is an acid that cleans the copper making it solder able. If you are not familiar with soldering then you may want to check with some local companies to see if they can give you some pointers or consult a plumbing company. Cleaning is the most important part before soldering. Once you have cut the existing pipes and solder in the new copper Re piping, your job is complete. Double check, to assure that you have the cold water connected to the cold water pipe and the hot water connected to the hot water pipe.

With how extensive copper Re-piping can be, it may be wise to leave it to the professionals. There are many plumbing companies out there to choose from. You will want to call several and have them come over to assess the problems and give you a quote. It is always best to get several quotes and check the quality or work from the companies you are considering. You can also check with the Better business Bureau to see if the company has had any complaints filed. It does not have to cost a small fortune to do a copper re pipe job in your home. Just weigh the options and the pro’s and con’s of doing the job on your own or hiring someone to do the job.

Weather vanes have been around for centuries, and they have never been more popular and widely used then they are today. A weather vane is a moveable device used to show which direction the wind is blowing. It should be attached to an elevated object, such as a roof, for the most accurate reading. They are often the shape of cockerels or arrows; however, there are a multitude of designs for sale today from horses to dragons. As long as the design is balanced so that half the weight is on either side of its axis and the areas exposed to wind are unequal, it will do the job.

Most simple weathervanes have directional markers beneath the pointer aligned with the geographic directions. The weather vanes can be made up of anything you can imagine to go with your home or garden. People can choose to show off their personal style by choosing a fun design such as a painted puppy or go for a dramatic look with a flying eagle. Ornate designs and fanciful shapes do not always show the real direction of a very gentle wind. This is because the figures do not achieve an unequal surface that is balanced in weight. But, for most of the heavier wind speeds you should be fine.

Weather vanes can be made with a combination of copper and brass, which will age and fade to light silver if left unprotected. Polished copper weathervanes may be sprayed with lacquer or varnish to prevent the copper from oxidizing and to maintain the beautiful high polished copper finish. Aluminum is another popular medium for creating weather vanes that should not rust and can be less expensive than copper. It can also be painted to show off more details creating fun and unique designs.

Once you have decided on the look for your weather vane you will want to choose a logical place to keep it. To obtain an accurate reading, the weather vane must be located well above the ground and away from buildings, trees, and other objects to give a true wind direction. Changing wind direction can be meaningful when coordinated with other apparent sky conditions, enabling the user to make simple short range forecast. Weather vanes are not only useful to the average owner they can also be a nice design element to your home.