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Tuesday, April 29, 2003

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- It was the kind of stuff science fiction writers love.

And it was worthy of Q the fictional British intelligence gizmologist who in every James Bond film, loaded the secret agent with gadgetry.

There were brain scans that help pick out liars, a 4-foot robotic snake that can crawl through rubble on search missions, cameras that see in pitch black.

And there was the traffic gate. Penn State University researcher Zoltan Rado would say only that it's made of material similar to the stuffing in bulletproof vests. But, in a videotape, when a 15,000-pound truck barreled down a Penn State test track at 50 mph and slammed into the gate made of the stuff, the truck was instant scrap metal.

That's just for starters.

"It can stop a 50,000-pound truck in three feet," Rado said.

The gear that turned fiction into reality was the backdrop as collegiate officials pitched a federal Homeland Security official on hiring Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh to make science work against terrorism.

Think of the traffic gate stopping a car bomber, or imagine see-in-the-dark technology patrolling a border crossing.

"There is a large number of things we can use, and what we have to understand is how they can be brought to bear," said Charles McQueary, the new undersecretary for science and technology with the U.S. Homeland Security Department.

McQueary, former president of General Dynamics Advanced Technology Systems, calls the research "a mission."

"And those who want to know 'What's in it for me,' instead of 'What's in it for America' will be shortchanging themselves," he said as conferees left a three-hour meeting yesterday

For the record, though, what's in it for the research universities that land a piece of the Homeland Security work could be huge.

For starters, according to McQueary, "a substantial fraction" of the $803 million penciled into his part of the Homeland Security budget for the 2004 fiscal year.

Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, Pitt and Penn, aligned under the name Keystone Alliance -- www.keystone_alliance.org -- made their pitch yesterday, one of a series of sales talks that McQueary will be hearing from schools across the nation.

Robert McGrath, Penn State associate vice president for research, termed the Keystone Alliance "powerhouse universities" with dovetailing research efforts. .

There was Penn's research that allows scientists to look at brain scans and, by mapping the portions of the brain at work, get a good idea of when somebody is lying.

There was a listening device that easily fit inside a baseball, with most of the ball's innards still intact, which could be fired into a building for eavesdropping.

Christina Gabriel, Carnegie Mellon's chief technology officer, told of the robotic helicopter small enough to fit on the smallish dais with her, smart enough that it was enlisted 19 months ago to fly over the United Airlines Flight 93 crash scene in Somerset County and map the area.

Carnegie Mellon undergraduate Kris Borer helped show off robotic snakes, still evolving into more refined pieces of gear, that can crawl through tight spaces, even shimmy upward and look at the world through television camera eyes.

And there were the things that fall short of the gee-whiz category but still are powerful defense weapons: analyses done to map terrorism financing, battling back against disabling computer attacks, more batter-proof concrete and traveling weather stations that track where, for example, a chemical cloud might head.

American interests were hit by terrorist attacks before Sept. 11, 2001, "and not a lot was said," U.S. Rep. John Peterson, R-Venango County, told yesterday's gathering.

"We sort of, in my view, never took that challenge as a country," he said.

Now, as the nation prepares to muscle up its technological defense, McQueary said, "We're less vulnerable ... than we were on Sept. 11."