Hemlock trees through a wide swath of the eastern United States are succumbing to a tiny insect, and Virginia Tech entomologist Scott Salom hopes another tiny insect can stop it. Salom is monitoring a colony of Asian beetles that has been introduced into a stand of hemlocks in the Jefferson National Forest to battle the hemlock woolly adelgid. The adelgid feeds on the needles of hemlocks, leading in a few years to the death of the tree.

"There is no natural predator to the hemlock woolly adelgid in the U.S.," Salom says. "It is defoliating the trees, killing them from New England to North Carolina."

Salom joined with U.S. Forest Service forest health specialists in late July in introducing the colony of the Japanese ladybug Psedoscymnus tsugae into the hemlock stand in Giles County, part of a 10-state study.

The adelgid, which is thought to have been inadvertently introduced to North America from Asia in the early part of this century, made its first appearance on the East Coast almost 40 years ago. It has established itself along the eastern fringe of the range of eastern and Carolina hemlocks and is advancing at a rate of about 15 miles per year.

Virginia Tech researchers create new family of molecules

Leaky lab equipment and Virginia Tech researchers' eagle eyes have resulted in a new family of molecules with potential applications ranging from medicine to optical-electronic devices. Chemistry professor Harry Dorn and post-doctoral fellow Steve Stevenson report in a recent issue of Nature that they can produce C80 fullerenes containing three metal atoms.

Fullerenes are clusters of carbon with an even number of atoms forming a ball-shaped cage. For years scientists had been trying to insert metals into the cages and produce the resulting structure in useful quantities. This effort was to no avail until Dorn and Stevenson discovered that nitrogen was leaking into a chamber where they were experimenting, thus creating a stable metallofullerene with many potential applications that can be produced cheaply and with high yield. They have applied for a patent for their discovery.