Notables

The Ithaca College School of Music is throwing a musical birthday bash for Karel Husa at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York City Monday, March 4, at 8 p.m. The concert honors Husa's 80th birthday, which was celebrated earlier this year. Husa, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer, is professor of music emeritus at Cornell, and he also taught music composition at Ithaca College. The concert features performances by the Ithaca College Wind Ensemble, under the baton of Steven Peterson, and the Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra conducted by Grant Cooper. Guest artists include pianist Charis Dimaras, soloist on Husa's Concertino. The program also includes the wind ensemble performing Husa's Concerto for Wind Ensemble; the symphony orchestra will perform Celebracion, Portrait and Music for Prague. For more information about the concert, contact the IC School of Music at 274-3366, or call Alice Tully Hall at (212) 875-5050.

Watt W. Webb, the S.B. Eckert Professor in Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics, was the national lecturer at the Biophysical Society annual meeting in San Francisco, Feb. 23-27. Webb's talk was titled "Multiphoton Imaging the Molecular Dynamics of Living." He discussed using multiphoton microscopy to measure the metabolic state of living systems. By using living cells from a section in the hippocampus of mouse brains, Webb and his colleagues have been able to image actual cell activity. At the meeting, he described how the dynamics of the changes of metabolic state in living brain cells during anoxia and recovery of the brain on re-oxygenation can be shown in a timed series of images. These images, created in the Webb laboratory by Karl Kasischke, Sam Hess, Harsh Vishwasrao and Kevin Hodgson, show the rapid oxygen depletion in active layers of the hippocampus and faster recovery in quiescent regions on re-oxygenation.