What's on today

Whereas most discarded plastic water and beverage bottles (those imprinted with a number 1 within a triangular arrow) can be recycled , the resulting second-generation plastic is generally unusable for making new plastic bottles. This is because the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) thermoplastic polymer used to make the original bottles is often made with the help of metal oxide or metal hydroxide catalysts that linger in the recycled material and weaken it over time. [More]

[ This special issue podcast is longer than the usual 60 seconds. ]

Last week, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for energy held its inaugural conference in Washington, D.C.--a direct response to a growing sense that the U.S. is losing its technology lead when it comes to the race for cleaner ways to produce and use energy. "We have a Sputnik moment right now. We are losing our technology leadership and we are falling behind."

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Editor's Note: Journalist and crew member Kathryn Eident and scientist Jeremy Jacquot are traveling on board the RV Atlantis on a monthlong voyage to sample and study nitrogen fixation in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, among other research projects. This is the sixth blog post detailing this ongoing voyage of discovery for ScientificAmerican.com .

Imagine you’re in space, floating high above the Earth. Picture the world’s oceans, glimmering sapphire under the heat of the sun and the protection of the ozone layer. Look closer, there’s a patch of brown in the middle of all that blue. It’s a bloom of phytoplankton called Trichodesmium , a “world famous” nitrogen fixer. [More]

Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things­--at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used functional MRI to evaluate brain activity in 15 devout Christians and 15 nonbelievers as the volunteers assessed the truth or falsity of a series of statements, some of which were religious (“angels exist”) and others nonreligious (“Alexander the Great was a very famous military ruler”). They found that when a subject believed a statement--whether it was religious or not--activity appeared in an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is an area associated with emotions, rewards and self-representation.

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Everyone knows that obesity is bad for your health. Packing on the pounds, we’re told, leads to all sorts of medical problems: high cholesterol, insulin resistance, greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. But researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center see things a little differently. In a paper in the journal Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism [see http://bit.ly/bKaP33 ], they argue that being fat can actually protect us from these disorders. [More]

There’s a story about a truck driver who passed the long, lonely hours in his big rig knitting sweaters. His hands thus otherwise occupied, he steered with his knees. A highway patrol officer noted this behavior and set out after the truck driver. As the cop got close, he commanded via his vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Pull over.” To which the trucker shouted back, “No, it’s a cardigan.”

Though not a bona fide law-enforcement officer myself, I sometimes act in loco centurion while on the road. I do this by sharing safety tips with distracted motorists, such as “Slow down!” or “Pick a lane!” or, my go-to line, “Get off the phone!”

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(Durham University) Scientists have found evidence of a catastrophic event they believe was responsible for halting the birth of stars in a galaxy in the early Universe.

(National Science Foundation) After more than three decades of service to researchers and staff stationed at the bottom of the world, the dome at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was deconstructed this austral summer.

(Cornell University) Consider this T-shirt: It can monitor your heart rate and breathing, analyze your sweat and even cool you off on a hot summer's day. Or a solar-powered dress that can charge your ipod or MP4 player? This is not science fiction -- this is cotton in 2010.

(Vilcek Foundation) The Vilcek Foundation is pleased to announce the granting of the 2010 Vilcek Prize for Biomedical Science and the Vilcek Prize, for Creative Promise. Both prizes are awarded only to foreign-born American citizens to reflect the guiding philosophy, values, and mission of the Vilcek Foundation and its founders -- Dr. Jan and Marica Vilcek -- who immigrated to this country from Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.

(JAMA and Archives Journals) An analysis of comparative effectiveness studies finds that few compare medications with nonpharmacologic interventions, and few examine safety or cost-effectiveness, according to a study in the March 10 issue of JAMA.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) A group of scientists propose today in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters to define the Rosenfeld as a unit for electricity savings, after the man seen by many people as the godfather of energy efficiency, Arthur Rosenfeld.

(Optical Society of America) In the future, getting a broadband connection might be as simple as flipping on a light switch. In fact, according to a group of researchers from Germany presenting at OFC/NFOEC 2010 later this month, the light coming from the lamps in your home could one day encode a wireless broadband signal.

(New York University) New York University's Subhash Khot, an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has received the National Science Foundation's 2010 Alan T. Waterman Award, which is given annually to an outstanding young researcher in any field of science and engineering supported by NSF.

(Kansas State University) Dolores Takemoto, a K-State professor of biochemistry who was researching protein kinase C gamma in the lens of the human eye, found her work taking a fascinating turn when she discovered a correlation between the protein Coonexin46 and hypoxia -- a deficiency of oxygen which kills normal tissue cells. Takemoto believes the findings will lead to serious advancements in treating retinoblastoma, a cancer that forms in the tissue of the retina.

(Purdue University) For decades, the traditional practice in animal testing has been standardization, but a study involving Purdue University has shown that adding as few as two controlled environmental variables to preclinical mice tests can greatly reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.

(Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres) The extremely strong earthquake in Chile on 27 February this year was a complicated rupture process. Scientists ofthe GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences analyzed the first 134 seconds of the quake.

(VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland) Kemira Oyj and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland will establish a Centre of Water Efficiency Excellence to Finland. The present Finnish competence of the water sector is being gathered into one center. The aim is to construct a new and unique competence of the water sector in Finland and to create new business opportunities for companies in the environmental technology sector.

(Case Western Reserve University) Melissa Knothe Tate, of Case Western Reserve University, and Ulf Knothe, of the Cleveland Clinic, have shown that the stem-cell rich periosteum sheath around bone can be used to mend serious bone loss faster and more simply than bone grafts. The pair has developed an artificial periosteum that can be implanted in patients who have too little of the natural covering left.

(University of Warwick) An international team of astronomers, including Professor Tom Marsh and Dr. Danny Steeghs from the University of Warwick, have shown that the two stars in the binary HM Cancri definitely revolve around each other in a mere 5.4 minutes. This makes HM Cancri the binary star with by far the shortest known orbital period. It is also the smallest known binary.