An independent student newspaper serving Iowa State since 1890
IOWA STATE DAILY City Council to discuss rentals, flooding
10.23.2018 Vol. 219 No. 047
TUESDAY
A new beginning for VetMed
BY TALON.DELANEY @iowastatedaily.com Short-term rentals such as Airbnb may be illegal under the city’s rental regulations. To resolve this issue, the Ames City Council is starting their Tuesday meeting at 4:45 p.m., giving the council an extra hour and fifteen minutes. “Those who are contemplating this type of business venture or who are concerned about short-term rentals in their neighborhood are encouraged to attend the meeting,” according to a city-issued press release. The regulation passed in May and limited the amount of rental properties in the neighborhoods surrounding Iowa State’s campus to 25 percent. The regulations were amended in August to allow rental properties to continue if they existed as early as Oct. 27, 2017, or if a homeowner was only renting certain rooms of their property. The council is concerned about whether this rental cap applies to short term rentals like Airbnb, so the decisions will determine whether or not short-term rentals are allowed in three categories: The first category suggests homeowners “could offer a room in their owner-occupied residence,” the second declares “an owner-occupied home could be rented in its entirety for no more than 90 days a year,” and the third category explores whether someone can buy a home for short-term renting only, according to the press release. The council will also discuss using public funding to fix flooding issues in the city’s infrastructure. They will vote to renovate land alongside 1008 S. Duff Ave. and 1016 S. Duff Ave. These areas border Squaw Creek and saw nominal flooding over the spring and summer seasons. Ames saw high amounts of rainfall throughout 2018, so much that the city issued a public warning in October urging residents to stay safe during storms. The results of the annual Ames satisfaction survey will be revealed at the meeting. These results are gathered from 536 participants in a personal questionnaire. Respondents were part of two categories: Iowa State students and permanent Ames residents, and each group returned 268 surveys. The population of Ames in 2017 was 66,498, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Respondents were asked their opinions on adjusting tax rates and altering law enforcement activity, to record their personal happiness levels on a 1-4 scale.
JORDYN DUBOIS/ IOWA STATE DAILY New Iowa State dean of veterinary medicine, Dan Grooms, gets to know students in the vet school. Grooms started his position as dean on Oct. 1.
BY JORDYN.DUBOIS @iowastatedaily.com Growing up just north of Columbus, Ohio, Dan Grooms lived on a farm in an agricultural community. Grooms was inspired to give veterinary school a thought after watching the work that his two uncles did as veterinarians. Dan Grooms started as the Stephen G. Juelsgaard Dean of Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine on Oct. 1.
“I think growing up on a farm with cattle and dogs and cats and everything, animals were always a part of our family’s life,” Grooms said. But Grooms can point to the specific experience when he knew he wanted to become a veterinarian. When he was younger, Grooms showed cattle at country fairs through 4-H and FFA. One day, a steer ended up gorging himself on corn, which is a problem for cattle because their first stomach is a fermentation bag. All the corn
in the first stomach ferments very quickly and produces bad things for the steer. Grooms’ local veterinarian, Bill Taylor, came to the farm to help save the steer. Although his steer was unable to be saved, Grooms remembers the dedication of the veterinarian. “What I remember is how hard he worked, and the fact that he came back every 6 to 8 hours to try and treat the steer,” Grooms said. “That made an impression on me with how
hard he worked to help my animal and hopefully save his life.” Grooms received his Bachelor of Science from Cornell University in 1985, followed by his degree in Veterinary Medicine from Ohio State University in 1989, and finally his doctorate in veterinary prevention medicines from Ohio State in 1997. As an expert in infectious disease for cattle, Grooms said he was really attracted to the idea of infectious
GROOMS
PG4
ISU physicists study Higgs boson BY BRIAN.MACKLEY @iowastatedaily.com For the last 10 years, Iowa State physicists Chuhui Chen, Jim Cochran and Soeren Prell have been collaborating with physicists around the world on the Large Hadron Colliders ATLAS experiment. The ATLAS experiment, which is taking place at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, has recently announced after years of searching, they have observed the Higgs boson decay into a pair of bottom quarks. In a general sense, a “quark” is a subatomic particle that is believed to give protons and neutrons of an atom their masses. There are six different types of quarks and physicists are trying to find how the Higgs boson gives these quarks and other particles their masses. After only discovering Higgs in 2012, this observation of its decay into two bottom quarks is a breakthrough in understanding the elements of the Higgs boson. This discovery could also lead to further discoveries, including the discovery of dark matter.
“There is four times more dark matter in the universe than visible matter, almost all of the universe is dark and there is a lot of stuff that we have no idea what it is,” said Prell, professor of physics. The experiment has required physicists to rely on hundreds of computers and detectors to observe large sums of data, then to sort it out and simplify it . Currently at Iowa State, physicists have been working on developing quality and control tests, as well as procedures to help upgrade the innermost layer of the ATLAS detector. Weighing approximately 7,000 tons and being 151 feet long, the ATLAS detector is a lot like a large digital camera that observes the proton collisions that occur in the Large Hadron Collider. Due to radiation damage, as well as the creation of better technology, the parts within the detector need to be swapped out periodically for the experiments to become more precise. “It is such a big detector and so complex you really don’t want to replace things once they are in there, so we intend to build the inner component of the detector and leave it there for the next ten years,” Prell said. “That is why it needs vigorous quality control checks to make sure that, yes, this can last
COURTESY IOWA STATE NEWS SERVICE A diagram of the ATLAS particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in the CERN laboratory.
the next ten years until the end of the experiment.” The team at Iowa State is also currently working on analyzing the current data in search of new physics. Iowa State doctoral student Carlos Vergel Infante is currently in Switzerland, taking shifts working on the experiment. “We and our group make an effort to send every graduate student for at least some period, typically a year, to the actual experiment,” Prell said. “It’s very different whether you are far away and only look at data in your own lab than actually go to the real experiment.”