March 19, 2024

Feature

Car Talk

Traffic is cruising along an interstate at highway speed when a sudden, unexpected event forces drivers to slam on the brakes. Some motorists dive onto the shoulder to avoid rear-ending the car ahead of them. There's a good chance you've either seen it happen during an anxious glance in your rearview mirror or done it yourself. Read more »
Published on 3/18/2024

Jazzing it Up

The struggling University Mall in Tampa was a sad scene, with empty anchor stores, dusty potted plants and stained carpets beneath the benches. JCPenney left in 2005, followed by Dillard's in 2008, Macy's in 2017 and Sears in 2018. Built in 1974 just west of the University of South Florida campus, the mall had acquired a seedy reputation. Read more »
Published on 3/14/2024

Big Fish

Halfway down the Florida Keys, a bit before the city of Marathon, the busy Overseas Highway for a short stretch becomes a road amid the rustic. No gas stations or supermarkets, no souvenir shell stores, no sandal shops. The dense vegetation sometimes gives way to glimpses of the Florida Straits to the south or Florida Bay to the north. Read more »
Published on 3/12/2024

Adapting Anchors

Fifteen years ago, Michele “Mik” Oca was living in his native Italy and working in entertainment marketing and design when he got a call from the White House. Incoming President Barack Obama was toying with the idea of replacing the bowling alley at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with a basketball court — and Oca, who'd carved out a niche for himself designing bowling products and alleys, was invited to submit a redesign plan to convince the president to keep the lanes. Read more »
Published on 3/11/2024

Good Vibrations

Blake Richardson created a vibrating wristband that gently rouses firefighters when they get an emergency call. The device is designed to reduce the stress of traditional fire alarm systems, which can take a toll on first responders' health. Read more »
Published on 3/11/2024

Revving Up

Each spring, hundreds of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts roar into Daytona Beach for a 10-day street party known as Bike Week. Read more »
Published on 3/8/2024

Florida Icon: Jacqueline Quinn

Environmental engineer at Kennedy Space Center who holds 12 U.S. patents, many involving soil contamination technology; inductee in the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Titusville; age 56 Read more »
Published on 3/8/2024

Ballpark Upgrades

The Daytona Beach City Council agreed to spend $30 million on upgrades as part of a new 20-year lease with the Daytona Tortugas, the minor league class A affiliate of Major League Baseball's Cincinnati Reds. The agreement includes a pair of five-year renewals. Read more »
Published on 2/29/2024

Gulf Cable Expansion

Gulf Cable, one of Northwest Florida's largest and fastest-growing manufacturers, is getting much larger. Read more »
Published on 2/28/2024

Building Blocks

Palm Springs in central Palm Beach County became the debut site for Renco USA's first housing complex — four buildings totaling 96 units — made with molded, interlocking blocks the company calls “Lego-like.” Miami-based Renco says its building method is cheaper, faster and 23 times stronger than concrete. Read more »
Published on 2/27/2024

A Growing Need

Lynda Neuhausen was walking with her family up the stairs to their seats at Tropicana Field to watch the Tampa Bay Rays play when her symptoms first began. “I got to the top and had turned gray,” she recounts, “I couldn't breathe ... and I felt like I was going to pass out.” That moment in 2005 was the beginning of a long journey towards diagnosing and treating hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a genetic heart disease, which culminated in a heart transplant in 2021. Read more »
Published on 2/27/2024

Unlocking Stem Cells' Cardiac Benefits

More than 20 years ago, University of Miami heart transplant cardiologist Joshua Hare became convinced that stem cells infused into heart attack patients would turn into new, healthy cells to replace damaged ones. So far, that hasn't happened. But Hare, founding director of the university's Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute, still believes that stem cells represent a future in which cardiac care involves less medication and fewer surgeries. Read more »
Published on 2/26/2024

Conservation Boost

The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the Gainesville-based Alachua Conservation Trust $25 million for its Lake to Lagoon conservation program in Flagler, Lake and Volusia counties. The award will help support the use of research-based management practices and advance land protection in the region. Read more »
Published on 2/26/2024

A Second Chance at Life

One Friday night in 2019, Roy Reid fell asleep on the couch while watching a movie. “At about two in the morning, I wake up with the worst pain I've ever had in my life — as if someone had punched a hole through my chest,” Reid says. “I run into the bedroom, wake up my wife and say, ‘I think I'm having a heart attack, we need to get to the emergency room.'” Read more »
Published on 2/26/2024

Knight's New Leader

A veteran journalist and Miami native has been tapped as the president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Former USA Today publisher Maribel Perez Wadsworth spent more than 30 years working as a journalist, starting as an editorial assistant for the Associated Press in 1994. She spent 26 years with Gannett, moving to its corporate offices in 2009 to work on digital and audience transformation. Read more »
Published on 2/22/2024

Fine Arts

An international center for the arts is coming to Naples. Theater in the Garden, a multipurpose space featuring a 900-seat indoor theater and outside amphitheater in a landscaped setting, will be the first location of the Luciano Pavarotti Foundation outside of Italy. Read more »
Published on 2/21/2024

Defending the Shore

Their inventors compare them to air bags or speed bumps in the sea. And they just might be the future of fighting coastal flooding in Florida. They're called Seahives, and they're a new kind of artificial reef being developed and field-tested by researchers at the University of Miami. They're 18-foot-long, hexagonal-shaped hollow tubes that get stacked in pyramid-like shapes on the seafloor just offshore. The 2,500-pound concrete structures are perforated to allow seawater to flow through them. Read more »
Published on 2/21/2024

AI, Captain

Years ago, serial entrepreneur Nathan Heber and his wife, dermatologist Jordana Herschthal, took a bareboat charter — where you rent a boat and crew it yourself — in the British Virgin Islands. “We were very underqualified. We were new sailors,” Heber recalls. But, he adds, “We had the time of our lives.” Read more »
Published on 2/21/2024

Road Doctor

As an engineering student, University of Central Florida Professor Necati Catbas studied structural damage caused by earthquakes. He wanted to learn how buildings could be made more resilient and safer. Read more »
Published on 2/21/2024

Donor Science

Artificial intelligence might be all the rage these days, but Michael Peterman was an early adopter of the technology. In the early 2000s, the Naples native was working at a Fort Myers company called AccuData and started closely watching what tech giants like Amazon and Netflix were doing with all the data they were collecting. “It was around the time when some juggernauts in Silicon Valley were launching their early forms of machine learning,” he says. Read more »
Published on 2/21/2024

AI's Emerging Role in Cardiac Care

Sumit Verma is a board-certified specialist in cardiac electrophysiology and cardiovascular disease with Baptist Health Care in Pensacola. In a recent interview with FLORIDA TREND, he discussed the impact that... Read more »
Published on 2/20/2024

AI in Action

As we go about our daily lives, artificial intelligence is everywhere. It's sorting through our e-mail for spam and recognizing our faces to unlock our smartphones. It's tracking our steps and reminding us to take deep breaths. It's mapping out the best route to get to that business meeting across town and rerouting us in real time when traffic gets snarled. Read more »
Published on 2/19/2024

Florida Icon: Lee Brian Schrager

I always worked in restaurants. When I was 10, 11 years old, I used to bag Chinese takeout food, Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights, in a local popular Chinese restaurant. I worked in snack bars and movie theaters. I worked at Swensen's ice cream parlor, (and was a) valet car parker at a fine-dining restaurant. There was always something about the hospitality industry. The people in it are very special. And you know, I've always enjoyed wine and food. Read more »
Published on 2/19/2024

Detecting Trouble

The sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) incidents with Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin and college basketball player Bronny James brought national attention to the often-fatal heart problem. Without quick CPR or automatic external defibrillator use to get the heart beating again, 90% of people who go into SCA outside of a hospital will die. Read more »
Published on 2/15/2024

Education Guru

Education was calling for Adam Giery. His mother was a teacher — he always dreamed of following in her footsteps — and he was inspired by his own teachers. “I'm a product of an American public education system that just wouldn't expect less from me,” Giery explains. “My teachers were there for me, my teachers set a very high bar and when given the choice to pursue a profession, ‘teacher' felt like the answer.” Read more »
Published on 2/14/2024

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