Science and Technology

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Entry Category: Science and Technology

Hunter, Carl Glenn

Conservationist Carl Glenn Hunter achieved prominence in two branches of the Arkansas outdoors—its fauna and its flora. Activities with wildflowers of the state made him a household name in Arkansas and beyond after his retirement as a wildlife biologist. Carl Hunter was born on August 30, 1923, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He graduated from Little Rock High School (now Central High School) in 1941 and received a bachelor of science in agriculture degree from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1945. In college, Hunter worked part time for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission (AGFC); he became a full-time employee in July 1945. He was one of the first hires of the agency after it …

Hydroelectricity

Hydroelectric power is the electricity generated by the gravitational force of falling or flowing water through a turbine connected to a power generator. The three major types of hydropower facilities include reservoirs (high dams), in-stream (low dams), and pumped-storage. The most common type is the high dam, which creates significant reservoirs behind the dam (e.g., Hoover Dam). In 1882, the world’s first hydroelectric power station, located in Appleton, Wisconsin, produced 12.5 kilowatts of electrical power. Also in the early 1880s, a similar facility opened in New York City. Since these early facilities, hydroelectric power from the nation’s waterways has proliferated. Hydroelectric development in Arkansas can generally be grouped into three time periods—1924–1930; 1944–1973; and 1988–1999—and under three sponsoring agencies: Arkansas …

Hymenoptera

aka: Ants
aka: Bees
aka: Wasps
Hymenopterans belong to the Phylum Arthropoda, Subphylum Labiata, Superclass Hexapoda, Class Insecta, and Order Hymenoptera. It is a large order of insects with over 150,000 described species comprising the sawflies, woodwasps, ichneumonids, chalcids, wasps, bees, and ants. In addition, there are over 2,000 extinct taxa. The order ranks third in the top five orders of insects in terms of total number of species. Many examples of this order are found in Arkansas, including the invasive fire ant. The Hymenoptera are divided into two suborders: the Symphyta (which have no waist) and the Apocrita (which have a narrow waist). Symphytans include the horntails, sawflies, and parasitic wood wasps. They have an unconstricted junction between the thorax and abdomen and a serrated …

Ictaluridae

aka: Catfishes
aka: Bullheads
aka: Madtoms
The Ictaluridae is a family of North American native fishes belonging to the Class Siluriformes. The Ictaluridae family also belongs to the Superorder Ostariophysi, the second-largest superorder of fish. This diverse group, present on all continents except Antarctica, contains 10,758 species—more than twenty-eight percent of known fish species in the world and seventy-two percent of all freshwater species. The family proper includes about seven genera and fifty-one species, some commonly known as bullheads, catfishes, and madtoms. As such, it is the largest family of freshwater fishes endemic to North America. In Arkansas, they are easily recognized as the only fishes in the state with four pairs (two on the snout, two on the end of maxillae, and four on the …

Information Galore

aka: Infogo
Information Galore, Inc., (a.k.a. Infogo) of El Dorado (Union County) was the first commercial Internet service provider (ISP) in Arkansas. Although the company was short-lived, it had a notable impact upon economic and educational initiatives in southern Arkansas, as well as parts of Texas and Louisiana. Infogo was founded by six individuals. John Gray was a world-famous geologist who was appointed to serve on the Arkansas Geological Commission (now Arkansas Geological Survey) several times by Governor Bill Clinton and who did work for the United Nations. Gray, along with Watt McKinney, Leon Wood, William L. (Billy) Cook, and Robert McKinney each invested $5,000. Joe Brazeal was a board member of ARKnet, the state’s educational computer network, and provided technical expertise …

Insects

Insects account for over half of all species described thus far worldwide, and they are the dominant form of life in terrestrial environments. It is estimated that 35,000 to 40,000 species of insects live in Arkansas, including around 10,000 species of beetles, around 9,000 species of flies, nearly 8,000 species of bees and wasps, and around 5,000 species of moths and butterflies. The remainder make up small orders such as the bristletails, mayflies, dragonflies and damselflies, cockroaches, mantids, termites, stoneflies, grasshoppers and crickets, earwigs, stick insects, book and bark lice, chewing and sucking lice, and true bugs and lacewings and their relatives. It is still not uncommon to find species in Arkansas that are unnamed and new to the scientific …

Instructional Microcomputer Project for Arkansas Classrooms (IMPAC)

The Instructional Microcomputer Project for Arkansas Classrooms (IMPAC) was an innovative program that helped make emerging microcomputer technologies a key component of education in Arkansas. Influential across the nation, IMPAC was cited for excellence by Electronic Learning, Instructor Magazine, Pro Education, Information Week, the National Governors Association, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, Nelson B. Heller & Associates, and the Southwest Education Development Laboratory. A number of Arkansas educators made significant efforts in laying a foundation for the use of microcomputers in instruction, as well as providing for technical support and workshops for teachers and school administrators, K–12. New technologies of the 1980s included networking microcomputers, the progression toward online resources, computer-assisted instruction and multimedia, and instructional management software for …

Invasive Animals

aka: Alien Animals
An “invasive species” is defined as a species that is non-native (or alien) to the ecosystem under consideration and whose introduction causes or is likely to cause economic or environmental problems or harm to human health. It typically matures and reproduces quickly and increases its geographic range rapidly, establishing populations and persisting over large areas. There are several reasons for this spread, including favorable environmental conditions and lack of natural predators, competitors, and diseases that normally regulate their populations, allowing invasive species to thrive. Invasive biota not only includes a variety of plants but also incorporates a wide variety of invertebrates and higher taxa from their native sites. As invasive species extend and dominate ecosystems, they invariably reduce native biodiversity …

Invasive Plants

aka: Exotic Plants
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service, an invasive species is “a species that is non-native or alien to the ecosystem under consideration and whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” As such, there are a suite of negative effects from exotic plant species that include replacing rare and endangered species, hybridizing and competing with native species, killing trees and shrubs, altering hydrological patterns and stream function, preventing forest regeneration, possibly containing toxins that may be lethal to certain animals, changing fire patterns, and harboring pathogens. The cost to control invasive species and the damages they cause to property and natural resources in the United States is …

Irons Fork Experimental Forest

Shortly after experimental forests were authorized for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS)—an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—by the McSweeney-McNary Forest Research Act of 1928, the Ouachita National Forest (ONF) reached out to the USFS’s Southern Forest Experiment Station (SFES). The ONF staff members wanted the SFES to develop an experimental forest to help them learn about managing the shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata)–dominated forests of the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas. In early 1931, the SFES dispatched a three-man crew to examine possible locations on the ONF, but they did not find any areas they thought were suitable for silvicultural research. The ONF and the USFS’s Washington DC office persisted, and a few years later the SFES suggested an experimental forest on a large tract of virgin and cutover timber along the Irons Fork …

Ivory-billed Woodpeckers

aka: Campephilus principalis
Long believed to be extinct, the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) was apparently rediscovered in the Big Woods of east Arkansas in 2004. More than sixty years after the last confirmed sighting in the United States, a research team announced on April 28, 2005, that at least one male ivory-bill survived in the vast bottomland swamp forest. Published in the journal Science, the findings included multiple sightings of the elusive woodpecker and frame-by-frame analyses of brief video footage. The evidence was gathered during an intensive year-long search in the Cache River and White River National Wildlife Refuges in eastern Arkansas, involving more than fifty experts and field biologists working as part of the Big Woods Conservation Partnership, led by the Cornell …

Izard County Tornado of 1883

A tornado tore through north-central Arkansas on November 21, 1883, killing around eleven people, injuring dozens, and devastating Melbourne (Izard County) and LaCrosse (Izard County). The storm’s path started about a mile and a half southwest of Melbourne and moved to the northeast, the width of its devastation ranging from 200 yards to three-quarters of a mile wide. When it reached the Izard County seat of Melbourne at around 4:00 a.m., most people were in bed. A newspaper reported that “for five minutes nothing could be heard but the roar of the winds, the crash of falling buildings, drowning the shrieks of the terrified inhabitants.” The home of former sheriff and Melbourne merchant and cotton buyer John Hinkle, located two …

James, Douglas Arthur

Douglas Arthur James served as a professor of biological sciences at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) from 1953 to 2016. He was considered the authority of the birds of Arkansas, co-authoring Arkansas Birds with Joseph C. Neal in 1986, and became one of the state’s leading conservationists in the second half of the last century, helping to start the Arkansas Audubon Society in 1955 and the Arkansas Audubon Society Trust in 1972. He arranged the first meeting of what would become the Ozark Society, which was responsible for saving the Buffalo River from damming. Starting with studies of scrubland birds in northwestern Arkansas, James expanded to studying scrubland birds in Africa, Nepal, and Belize. He was …

Jumping Bristletails

aka: Archeognatha
aka: Microcoryphia
The Archaeognatha (formerly Microcoryphia) are an order of apterygotes belonging to the Superclass Hexapoda, Class Insecta, Subphylum Labiata, and Phylum Arthropoda. They are known by various common names, such as jumping bristletails. The order is cosmopolitan and includes about 500 species (thirty-three species within twelve genera are Nearctic) in two families (Machilidae and Meinertellidae). None are currently evaluated as being a conservation risk. Little is known about the archaeognaths of Arkansas, as only Machiloides banksi and Pedetontus gershneri have been reported from the state, both from Mount Magazine (Logan County). Among extant arthropod taxa, they are some of the most evolutionarily primitive insects. The fossil record of Archaeognatha is sparse and often represented by fragmentary material. They first appeared in …

Junction Bridge

The Junction Bridge is a lift-span bridge crossing the Arkansas River between downtown Little Rock (Pulaski County) and North Little Rock (Pulaski County). One of six bridges linking the two downtowns, the Junction Bridge was originally constructed as a railroad bridge in 1884; it was rebuilt in 1970, then converted to serve as a pedestrian bridge in 2008. Its southern end rests upon the geological feature that gave the city of Little Rock its name. The Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad and the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad created a partnership in the early 1880s, envisioning a route that would stretch from the Gulf Coast to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). A new bridge across the Arkansas …

KATV Tower

The KATV tower was a 2,000-foot-tall (609.6 meters) television antenna that stood just north of Redfield (Jefferson County), about one-quarter mile east of Interstate 530. Before its collapse in 2008, the tower ranked among the tallest manmade structures in the world and stood as a prominent local landmark, marking the approximate halfway point for drivers traveling between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). Upon its completion on the late summer of 1965, the KATV tower was the third-tallest manmade structure in the world, surpassed only by the KVLY-TV and KXJB-TV television masts in North Dakota. By 2008, it shared the rank of fifth-tallest manmade structure in the world, as it was the first of many other 2,000-foot-tall …

Klipsch, Paul Wilbur

Paul Klipsch was an American engineer and audio pioneer whose work in acoustics gave rise to speaker technologies that radically enhanced sound quality for music lovers around the world. His factory was based in Hope (Hempstead County), and his achievements led to his induction into the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame in 1997. According to the Klipsch Museum, Paul Klipsch and Thomas Edison were the only two people from the audio industry to receive that honor since 1946. Paul Wilbur Klipsch was born on March 9, 1904, in Elkhart, Indiana, to Minna Eddy Klipsch, who was a homemaker, and Oscar Colman Klipsch, who was an instructor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Paul Klipsch moved with his family to …

Kudzu

Kudzu (Pueraria lobata) is an invasive vine characterized by aggressive growth and clusters of grape-scented purple flowers. It was recognized as a weed in 1972 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). A native plant of Asia, kudzu has been used for over two millennia in Asian cooking and medicine. Kudzu was introduced to the United States at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876) and to southerners at the New Orleans Exposition (1884–1886). Kudzu’s foothold in the American South is largely the result of the efforts of Charles Pleas, Channing Cope, and the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). Pleas owned Glen Arden Nursery in Chipley, Florida, along with his wife, Lillie. After Pleas discovered kudzu’s usefulness for livestock forage and as a …

Kuroda, Paul Kazuo

Paul Kazuo Kuroda, professor of chemistry at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), brought international attention to scientific research in Arkansas by correctly predicting the presence of naturally occurring nuclear reactors nearly twenty years before the first discovery of a reactor of this kind in the Oklo Mines in the Republic of Gabon in west-central Africa. Paul Kuroda was born on April 1, 1917, in Kurogi, Fukoka Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan, the only child of Kanjiro Kuroda—a school teacher, official at the Ministry of Education, and noted calligrapher—and Shige Kuroda. Kuroda earned BS and doctoral degrees in pure chemistry from Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) in 1939 and 1944, respectively. Upon completion of his doctorate, …