New UA baseball coach might be chosen today

The search for a new baseball coach is expected to come to a close this week with a final decision announced by athletic director Jim Livengood.

Livengood said the search has been narrowed down to two people and there is a good chance the coach will be picked by today.

"The two most obvious people for the position are assistant coach Jerry Stitt and University of New Mexico head coach Rich Alday," Livengood said. "I believe that the race will be between them."

Jerry Stitt has been an assistant coach at the UA since 1979. The Wildcat offense set three Pacific 10 Conference Southern Division records that season, with 776 hits, 542 runs and a team batting average of .328. In the 90s, Arizona has a batting average of .311, the best in the Six-Pac.

Alday's team had a record of 29-26 in 1995, finishing second in the Western Athletic Conference with a record of 27-9. This summer, Alday, a former coach at Pima Community College, will be an assistant coach of the United States Olympic Baseball team.

-Melanie Klein

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7-ton magnet will allow lab to track pollution

A 6-cubic-foot, 7-ton magnet lowered through the roof of the Physics and Atmospheric Sciences Building Friday will give a UA laboratory the potential to track radioactive waste and study Alzheimer's disease.

Through a grant from the National Science Foundation, the Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory will upgrade its facilities, which include a world renowned prototype for radiocarbon age dating.

In addition, the magnet will allow researchers to measure the pollution created by the reuse of nuclear fuel, which is dumped into the ocean and elsewhere, said A.J. Timothy Jull, geosciences research scientist.

In the future, the magnet will be used to show the relation between aluminum and Alzheimer's disease and where aluminum goes to in the human body, Jull said.

The magnet is expected to be operational within six months, due to reconstruction of the lab to accommodate it.

-Shoshana Burrus