north carolina state

Chris Knight's avatar

It instantly became one of the most classic moments in sports history.

Coach Jim Valvano’s North Carolina State – a scrappy team that had fought tooth and claw in defiance of all the odds – against University of Houston for the 1983 NCAA Basketball Championship. Houston: the team of “Phi Slamma Jamma”. Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. No wonder one sports writer said that “Trees will tap dance, elephants will race in the Indianapolis 500 and Orson Welles will skip dinner” before Jimmy V’s Wolfpack would beat the Cougars.

But we all know what happened. With seconds left in the game and the scored tied at 52, State’s Dereck Whittenburg made a desperate launch of the ball. Lorenzo Charles was right at the basket, caught the ball and dunked it hard!

North Carolina State had done it! And in those wild seconds after the buzzer, Coach Valvano – overwhelmed ...

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And it might be coming to market in “five years or sooner!” according to Dr. Jay Narayan, the thinkin’ dude who came up with it.

From the article at Thinq…

Future solid state disks may finally be able to catch up with the large capacities of mechanical hard drives, thanks to an ingenious project by a scientist at the North Carolina State University.

Dr Jay Narayan has developed a silicon storage chip that stores data in magnetic nanodots, or quantum dots; tiny structures that can measure just 6nm in diameter. Each nanoscale dot stores a single bit of data, but you can squeeze so many dots onto a small area of silicon that the university says that a single chip can “store an unprecedented amount of data.”

Dr Narayan says that the technology could enable you to “store over one billion pages of information in a chip that

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Chris Knight's avatar

Some cutting-edge stuff coming out of North Carolina State University: researchers there have created a chip the size of a human fingernail that can store… get this… a TERABYTE of data!

In layman’s terms that’s about 20 high-definition DVDs or 250 million pages of text.

The engineers made their breakthrough using the process of selective doping, in which an impurity is added to a material whose properties consequently change.

Working at the nanoscale, the engineers added metal nickel to magnesium oxide, a ceramic. The resulting material contained clusters of nickel atoms no bigger than 10 square nanometers — a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers. The discovery represents a 90% size reduction compared with today’s techniques, and an advancement that could boost computer storage capacity.

Click here for the official press release from Dr. Jagdish “Jay” Narayan and his team at N.C. State., including how the processes ...

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“Trees will tap dance, elephants will ride in the Indianapolis 500, and Orson Wells will skip breakfast, lunch, and dinner before State finds a way to beat Houston.”

— Dave Kindred
writer for The Washington Post
April 4th, 1983

It became, and remains to this day, the defining sports moment of the modern era.

It was twenty-five years ago tonight, on April 4th, 1983, that North Carolina State won the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, in what has become regarded by many as the single greatest basketball game ever played and one of the biggest upsets in the history of athletics.

It also produced some of the most memorable sports images to be ever televised or photographed.

What can be said about that game that hasn’t already over a quarter-century? Nobody was expecting the Wolfpack of NC State to take down Houston. Guy Lewis’s Cougars – dubbed “Phi Slamma ...

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Tomorrow night ABC will premiere Masters of Science Fiction, an anthology show featuring film adaptations of… well, science fiction stories! The show is being narrated by Stephen Hawking, which alone should say something about how classy this project is. And then there is the acting talent the producers have brought onboard: Malcolm McDowell, Terry O’Quinn (who also plays Locke on ABC’s show Lost), and Brian Dennehy are just some of the faces that we’ll be seeing during the show’s initial four-episode run.

The first installment has a lot of local interest because it originated with a professor at North Carolina State University. John Kessel’s short story “A Clean Escape” will star Sam Waterston and Judy Davis in a post-Apocalyptic tale of the near future about a psychiatrist who’s trying to help a man with curious lapses in memory.

I haven’t read the original short story yet, but my ...

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There’s a very disturbing piece in the News & Observer by Holly Brewer, associate professor of early American history at North Carolina State University. I had no idea this was happening in North Carolina schools, until I read her article. According to Dr. Brewer, North Carolina public schools are no longer giving high school students even a basic education in American history prior to the Revolution…

RALEIGH – While few of us have noticed, the state Department of Public Instruction has gutted history education in North Carolina. As a result of a decision taken largely without public input or comment, high school students no longer learn about Colonial and Revolutionary American history unless they take Advanced Placement classes. Required U.S. history in high school now begins with George Washington’s presidency and ends with that of George W. Bush. It is crammed into one semester (on block scheduling) instead of

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Yee-haw!!! 85-80 over Duke in overtime in the first round of the ACC Tournament.

I’m just now finding out about this! I can’t believe that I missed this game! AAAARRGGGHHHH…

Speaking of N.C. State, tomorrow is March 10th. That’s my Dad’s birthday. March 10th is also the birthday of Jim Valvano. He would have been 61 tomorrow. Can’t believe it’s been almost fourteen years already since he was taken from us. I can’t tell you how many people I saw crying the day he died.

Goodness gracious: has it really been almost a quarter-century since that night in Albuquerque?

Valvano was one of my heroes. And he still is. This excerpt from his speech at the ESPY Awards – just two short months before he died – shows some of why that is…

“When people say to me how do you get through life or each day, it’s the

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