OSUM Students Holding Beats for Budapest

The Ohio State University at Marion’s French Club, Le Cercle Francais, will present Beats for Budapest, Thursday, January 26, 7:30 p.m. in Morrill Hall Auditorium. This unique concert event will help raise funds for students’ taking part in the campus’s upcoming Central European Study Tour.

The concert features a host of student and community performers, including: Jherek Cummings, Ohio State Marion’s contemporary a cappella group InChant, Elizabeth Moore, Alex Sheridan, and Dustin Hornbeck. Students, faculty, staff, and the community are invited to come out and support the French Club in their fundraiser. General admission is $5, and $4 for students and those 60 and up. Raffle tickets for prizes and concessions will be available at the event.

Ohio State Marion’s 2012 Study Abroad tour to Central Europe, led by Ohio State Marion faculty member Zuheir Alidib, departs for 10 days on March 15 and features visits to Budapest, Vienna, Prague, and Munich.

Prospect mayor to discuss cutting costs

PROSPECT - Prospect Village Council heard renovation plans from a property owner at its recent meeting.

Jeff Obenour plans to resolve the common wall issue at 150 N. Main St. by fixing or building the common wall, completing the new back wall, anchoring the new back wall to the common wall and renovating the interior.

Mayor Jim Millisor said he wants to have pool managers be certified and have a CPR license for the 2012 swim season. He also discussed having a defibrillator at the pool.

Councilman Ben O'Dell discussed the widening of the Scioto River at the new bridge location, which should help relieve flooding in the village.

Millisor plans to discuss cost-cutting measures for the village at council's next regular meeting, 8 p.m. Feb. 6.

NASA sends science lesson directly to Ridgedale classroom

MARION -- A Ridgedale Junior High School science teacher got some help from NASA on Monday as she talked about the moon and satellites.

Catherine Brennan, who teaches eighth-grade science, took advantage of a free program that lets students hear up-to-date information on NASA missions. The information is relayed by a certified teacher who works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and speaks to classrooms through Skype, a software application that lets users make voice and video calls over the Internet.

Such learning is an example of how educators are using technology to help teach students more up-to-date information than would be available without such applications as Skype.

The lesson was "Mapping the Moon with WALL-E," an interactive project that also featured the Pixar-animated robot from the movie "WALL-E." Students took part in a quick experiment that taught them how NASA uses satellites to map the typography of the moon's surface.

Past that, they got an explainer on some of the newest of more than 60 science missions NASA currently has under way. That includes the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the moon and its Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which has helped produce some of the most precise topographical maps to date of the moon's cratered landscape.

"Before LRO, we actually knew the shape of Mars better than we know the shape of the moon, our nearest neighbor," John Keller, a deputy project scientist at the Goddard center, stated on NASA's website.

Such missions are in the news now but likely won't be in many textbooks yet.

"Science changes in this field quickly," Brennan said. "Textbooks are outdated within a year. I had to find an alternative resource."

She said NASA's educational programs have also helped her show students real-time images of the moon taken with the Hubble Space Telescope.

"I thought it was pretty cool," eighth-grader Monroe Britton said. "Not a lot of people can talk to NASA."

The lessons also introduce some of the technology being used to students who aspire to become scientists.

Eighth-grader Preston Elswick, who hopes some day to be an astro quantum physicist, said he was familiar with the missions but felt honored to get to hear directly from someone who works with NASA.

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