Wednesday, April 23, 2014 VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 29 www.uicnews.uic.edu facebook.com/uicnews twitter.com/uicnews NEWS UIC youtube.com/uicmedia For the community of the University of Illinois at Chicago Photo: Timothy Ngyuen Curtis Granderson, UIC business grad and former Flames baseball player, takes a day off from the New York Mets to throw out the first pitch at the opening of the stadium he helped build. More on page 12. New pitch for baseball at UIC, in Chicago INSIDE: Profile / Quotable 2 | Campus News 4 | Calendar 8 | Student Voice 9 | Crossword / Police 10 | People 11 | Sports 12 Physicist Dirk Morr says ‘Star Trek’ Is massage therapy good for you? Lights, camera, action! UIC gets Tamar Heller wants people with led him to science Yes, researchers say its closeups on film, TV disabilities to be healthier Profile, page 2 News, page 5 News, page 6 People, page 11 2 UIC NEWS I www.uicnews.uic.edu I APRIL 23, 2014 profile Send profile ideas to Gary Wisby,
[email protected] Physicist Dirk Morr finds scientific facts in science fiction By Gary Wisby Scotty emulators can’t beam anybody up — not yet, anyway — but much of what “Star Trek” showed us 50 years ago as sci- ence fiction is scientific fact today, says UIC physics professor Dirk Morr. One example: Lt. Uhura’s earpiece, forerunner of the now- ubiquitous Bluetooth device. Nanoprobes, which turned people into borgs on the show’s “Next Generation,” are used to save lives today, in- jected to “attach to cancer cells — they’re metallic so they heat up very rapidly and destroy the cells,” Morr said.