News Items

This Scientific American article explores the purported benefits of corn-based plastics (also known as polylactic acid, or PLA) over the more conventional petroleum-based plastic.  The results may surprise you.

Although PLA is technically renewable, saves oil, and is less polluting to manufacture, its biodegradability is far from perfect.  It's also a headache for recyclers because PLA "contaminates" the conventional plastic recycling process.  The two must be separated, leading to higher costs for recycled plastic and lower overall demand.

Some experts have also suggested that the marketing of PLA as "green" plastic has led to rampant overpackaging and a proliferation of single-serving plastic containers.

A related 2006 Smithsonian Magazine article can be found here.

Northwestern University researchers led by Teresa Woodruff, director of the Center for Reproductive Research at the University's Feinberg School of Medicine, are approaching women's infertility from a new direction.

Woodruff and her team are looking at ovaries themselves, and how eggs are selected for ovulation, rather than the more traditional methods of studying genes and hormones. Frank Miller, professor of radiology at Feinberg, and his colleagues are developing a new way to image ovaries, allowing researchers to closely study an organ that, being small and deep, has previously been difficult to examine.

Woodruff's research was recently funded by a $6.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Scientists attending the opening of the first World Science Festival in New York City had harsh words for US politicians and the low priority they have given science in recent years.  Critics chided the government's stagnant federal funding for research, and the views of some officials that intelligent design is a scientific alternative to evolution.

Somewhat surprisingly, even the 2008 presidential candidates seem reluctant to tackle the tough scientific issues facing our country. The Science Debate 2008 initiative, supported by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and hundreds of universities (including Northwestern), has invited the Clinton, McCain, and Obama camps to an organized debate on issues of science and technology. Thus far, none of the candidates have agreed to participate.

In what several scientists have termed “winning the astronomy lottery,” Princeton researchers were able for the first time to witness a supernova, or the explosive death of a star, as it happened.

Supernovae happen when the hydrogen fuel powering the star’s nuclear reactor “furnace” runs out.  During a star’s lifetime, hydrogen is converted to helium, then to oxygen and carbon, then finally to iron.  As this process nears its end, the star’s core becomes so heavy that it collapses on itself and explodes.  The explosion sends the matter of the star - carbon, oxygen, iron, nitrogen, and other elements - hurtling into space.  It is theorized that many elements on Earth, including those that make up our bodies, originated from supernovae.

As is true with many scientific discoveries, good fortune played a key part in the observation.  Researchers were observing the remnants of an old supernova in the galaxy NGC2770 using an X-ray telescope when the new supernova occurred.   The initial x-ray blast of a supernova is the earliest event in the explosion, and had never before been captured.

Even in the cosmos, it pays to be looking in the right place at the right time!