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Area has banner year for produce
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‘We will be out of our minds with joy to welcome you back’
By Giles Bruce gbruce@ljworld.com
An improved produce growing season seems to have all types of people in the Lawrence area happy after two years of extreme drought. Everyone from local produce growers and shoppers to school gardens to food banks have benefited from an increase in production of fruits and vegetables this year, which was helped along by increased rain and relatively cool summer weather. Bob Lominska, who grows produce in North Lawrence and southern Jefferson County for the Rolling Prairie Farmers Alliance, said it’s been a banner year for plants like cucumbers, green beans and tomatoes. While Lawrence still is a few inches below average in terms of precipitation, it has received significantly more rain than in the past two years. “If we could count on average, this would be paradise,” Lominska said. “Sometimes rainfall happens 6 or 7 inches in one day, then we go six weeks without a drop. If it fell evenly, it would be wonderful.” Since Please see PRODUCE, page 2A
KU football kicks off
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BISHOP SEABURY ACADEMY SOPHOMORE ALEENA PLOTNIKOV gives a tearful hug to biology teacher Christopher Bryan during a school assembly to bid farewell to Bryan, who is being deployed to Afghanistan to serve as a chaplain. “He’s just always there for us, and he always has time to talk to us whenever we need him,” Plotnikov said of Bryan.
A tearful farewell as teacher heads to Afghanistan for a year “
By Peter Hancock
When we take citizen-soldiers away from their home and we deploy them, we take them away from their temple, their church, their mosque, their synagogues, and we make it very hard for them to have free exercise of their religious beliefs. And so we have chaplains to ensure that that freedom still exists.”
phancock@ljworld.com
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PAULA SENDISH, OF WALDORF, MD., mother of KU football player Cassius Sendish, takes photographs inside of Memorial Stadium on Friday in anticipation of her son’s first game at KU. With Sendish, from left, are Cassius’ sister, Denita Willet, and aunt, Valerie Reardon. Ten of Cassius’ relatives are coming from Maryland to watch KU’s first game of the season today against South Dakota. See Sports for more on the game.
Students and faculty at Bishop Seabury Academy gathered for a special assembly Friday afternoon to say bon voyage and good luck to Christopher Bryan, a popular science teacher and assistant football coach. Later next week, the man they’ve all known as Mr. Bryan will assume his other role as Capt. Bryan, a chaplain in the Missouri National Guard. And by Thanksgiving, he and his fellow soldiers in the 1107th Aviation Group, an aviation repair unit, of the
— Capt. Christopher Bryan, chaplain and high school teacher Missouri National Guard will be deployed to Afghanistan. “Part of our mission will be to pack up all the parts and tools that have been used these last 12 years and bring that home,” said
Bryan who, in addition to being a biology teacher, is also an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. “So there’s a very certain sense in which I’m going to take care of the people who will
close the door on that part of the mission and bring them home.” This won’t be Bryan’s first National Guard assignment that has taken him out of school, but it is the first to take him out for virtually an entire school year, and it’s his first tour of duty as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. “He’s been deployed to Honduras and some state duty in Missouri,” his wife, Cris Bryan, said. “It’s going to be hard to watch him go away for a year, but I know he’s doing a good work, so I’m proud of him.” Please see TEACHER, page 2A
What if they lived again? KU prof weighs in on ‘de-extinction’ topic By Ben Unglesbee
“
said. “It’s about the cool-
I jumped at the opportunity est idea I’ve ever been because the idea is so cool. involved in.” Welcome to Ice Age Park. For It’s about the coolest idea I’ve a handsome ticket price you can Patenting a mammoth Scientists watch woolly mammoth herds graz- ever been involved in.” bunglesbee@ljworld.com
ing on the plains, saber-tooth tigers stalking them from a distance. You can lounge around with giant sloths after lunch and feast on mastodon steaks for dinner. This place is still science fiction, but advanced biotechnologies being developed today have made more feasible than ever the possibility of restoring species that disappeared from the planet thousands of years ago. Kansas University law professor Andrew Torrance was asked to speak recently at a Stanford University conference on “de-extinction,” or reviving extinct species with technology. Torrance holds a doc-
— KU law professor Andrew Torrance torate in biology and worked as a lawyer representing biotech firms, credentials that made him the perfect fit for his work at KU, where he teaches classes on biodiversity and biotechnology law. They also qualified him to talk at Stanford about the legal implications of de-extinction, a topic he had considered only as an extreme hypothetical when talking about conservation with his law students. “I jumped at the opportunity because the idea is so cool,” Torrance
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already have cloned a member of an extinct species, a kind of wild goat called the Pyrenean ibex. But there’s a big difference between cloning one animal and re-creating an entire species en masse. Doing so would probably require a combination of biotechnologies that exist today, among them cloning, genetic modification and synthetic DNA. Whether de-extinction would be used to create elaborate theme
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Perspective on poverty An emphasis on marriage and a decrease in out-of-wedlock births are two main recommendations from Gov. Sam Brownback’s task force on reducing childhood poverty. Page 3A
Vol.155/No.250 26 pages