DAILY LOBO new mexico
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
WEDNESDAY February 4, 2015 | Vo l u m e 1 1 9 | I s s u e 9 5
Looking into ‘meteor-rights’
CONCERT REVIEW
White noise rocks Popejoy By Jonathan Baca
Paul Talley / Daily Lobo
Carl Agee holds up a meteorite from the collection at Northrop Hall. Agee serves as the director for UNM’s Institute of Meteoritics.
UNM scientist Agee studies the authenticity of extraterrestrial rocks
By Lena Guidi
In 2011, Carl Agee received a rock in the mail from a meteorite collector in Morocco. At the time, nobody knew what it was or where it had come from. Even for Agee, director of UNM’s Institute for Meteoritics, the rock’s origin remained a mystery for quite some time. “This collector sent it to me because no one knew what it was, and it took me months of laboratory analyses to figure it out,” Agee said. At the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, he tested the rock’s chemical composition, isotopic composition, and mineralogy to determine its makeup.
“From all of those different lines of evidence, the picture that emerged was that it was a meteorite from Mars,” he said. Now, Agee is being funded by NASA to study the meteorite, known as NWA 7034, or “Black Beauty” for its dark color. There are several reasons why NASA is interested in Black Beauty. Tests showed that it contains 10 to 30 times more water than any previously studied Martian sample. Agee and his team also found that the meteorite is composed of a variety of minerals, ranging from 4.4 to 2.1 billion years old. “There are different fragments of the Martian crust all together
in the same meteorite in addition to the water, so there’s a record of the surface processes on Mars for about two billion years,” Agee said. Black Beauty is also notable, Agee said, because it is very similar to the rock samples that are currently being collected by the two rovers on Mars, which use a robotic remote sensing technique to identify the rocks’ composition. “Black Beauty finally forms the first tangible meteorite link to the rocks that NASA’s rovers are sampling in outcrops on Mars,” Agee wrote in the Universities Space Research Association’s report for the Eighth International Conference on Mars. He notes that the meteorite
provides insight into volcanic activity on the planet, which is one of his research specialties. While Agee is best known for his work in meteoritics, he was originally trained as a geologist, which is how he began researching volcanoes. He said he became interested in planetary geology while working on his doctoral degree at Columbia University. “If you’re trained in geology, planets are like whole new worlds to map out and understand,” Agee said. After finishing at Columbia, he
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Film center offers off-beat movies By David Lynch
Every week, some students make sure to catch a mid-week movie screening of a film they may have missed a few months prior for only a few bucks at UNM’s theater. What many may not know about are the films offered by the Southwest Film Center, an agency of the Associated Students of UNM which brings relevant and diverse films, both old and new, to UNM for students to experience. Luis Gómez, executive director of the SWFC, said the theater offers less mainstream films for the less mainstream movie enthusiast. “We have a really diverse campus, so not everyone is going to go for the traditional types of entertainment,” Gómez said. “The SWFC offers that to the alternative crowd — people who are seeking something a little bit different, and want to experience something that isn’t ordinarily shown all over town.” Not wanting to settle for sim-
ple screenings, the SWFC strives to make movie showings interactive events that are educational, entertaining and oftentimes both. Gómez said that in the past, the SWFC has teamed up with the Anime Club for a cosplay contest during a screening of the Miazaki film “Howl’s Moving Castle”, in which 90 cosplayers participated. For “Up Heartbreak Hill”, which was filmed in New Mexico, the center invited the filmmaker to speak about the challenges of being a Navajo in today’s world. This semester, Gómez said that the SWFC is partnering with the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance to bring a large and highly regarded event to UNM — the Telluride Mountain Film Festival. “It’s a really big film festival that travels all around the world, including Antarctica,” Gómez said. “We’re going to be only one of two venues in New Mexico to show that.”
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The Southwest Film Center plans to show a variety of films over the course of the semester that reflect a wide array of movie styles, themes, and messages. Feb. 5 through 8 – “Milk” Feb. 12 and 15 – “If A Tree Falls” Feb. 13 and 14 – Telluride Mountain Film Festival Feb. 19 through 22 – “Dear White People” Feb. 26 through March 1 – “Modern Times” Feb. 27 through March 1 – ”À Nous La Liberté” March 19, 21, and 22 – “Ways to Live Forever” March 26 through 29 – “Toy Story” April 2 through 5 – “East of Eden” April 9 through 12 – “Fed Up” April 16 through 19 – “Birdman” April 23 through 26, with a special free screening on April 25 on Johnson Field – “Jurassic Park” Showing times for each day, as well movie descriptions, can be found online http://www.unm.edu/~swfc/schedule/index.html.
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Jack White is a modern Renaissance man, imbued on a molecular level with the raw and gritty history of American music. Since his seminal, stripped down band The White Stripes began blowing up Detroit’s garage rock scene in the early ‘90s, White has been breathing new life into the blues with his vicious brand of guitar virtuosity. Last time Jack White was scheduled to grace the Duke City, the show was unexpectedly cancelled days before, due to “sister”/exwife/band mate Meg White’s “clinical exhaustion.” Thousands of devastated fans received full refunds, and were forced to wait. Tuesday night White was finally back, bringing down a packed house at Popejoy Hall. The booking was a major coup for UNM’s Student Special Events — just a few nights ago he was playing a sold out show at Madison Square Garden. Despite the fact that this crowd was a fraction of the size, White and his five fellow band members gave everything they had, and gave UNM a revelatory rock ‘n’ roll experience that will not soon be forgotten. Starting off the evening was Los Angeles Latin psych-funk band Chicano Batman. Though not well known outside California, it quickly became clear why they were chosen to accompany White for a leg of the Lazaretto tour. With tight, melodic, super-funky guitar riffs over Latin rhythms with a drizzling of Doors-esque organs, the four-piece band did a great job warming up the crowd. If Santana and The Mars Volta had a mutant, four-headed child, it might look and sound a lot like Chicano Batman. The group played a tight, energetic set, swinging elegantly from Latin funk grooves to psychedelic instrumental freak-outs. After intermission, every person in the audience was standing on their toes in electric anticipation for White. The mood in the crowd was summed up perfectly by concert-goer Barry Blonder: “If you’re going to sit down, go home. This ain’t a poetry reading.” When the curtains parted, there he stood, wearing a dark Western shirt tucked into black jeans and a pompadour like a dark Elvis. He has shed the red and white candy stripes of his early career, but it was immediately clear that his sound and his attitude, if anything, has only gotten bigger and nastier. Without uttering a word, the band launched into “Lazaretto,” the title track of the tour and his latest solo album. The sound in the small
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