Lisa Durso's contest-winning product, Eco-Auto, is a soy-based car wax that brings out the original color in vehicles' plastic, vinyl and rubber.

Student's car-care product wins contest

Soy-based wax keeps cars sparkling

By Sandi Alswager, IANR News and Publishing

University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate student hopes automotive care products become more environmentally friendly.

Lisa Durso of Lincoln, a food microbiology doctorate student, developed an environmentally sound car-care product that won the 2001 Innovative Uses of Soybeans Contest. The contest, sponsored by the Nebraska Soybean Board and the university's Industrial Agricultural Products Center, was open to students at all Nebraska colleges and universities.

Durso's product, Eco-Auto, is an all-natural, soy-based car maintenance product. It brings out the natural color in cars' plastic, vinyl and rubber and helps restore their original luster and shine, she said.

"People are always going to have automobiles," Durso said. This product will help make car care more environmentally sound.

"What I learned the most is what people can do with soy," she said. "Almost anything can be done with soy. That's so cool."

Durso said she's had this idea for years.

"I like the idea of a well-maintained vehicle but I am also reluctant to buy products that may be harmful to the environment or my health," she said. "I have spent many hours in auto-parts stores searching for environmentally friendly solutions only to leave empty-handed. Trips to the local food or natural product stores were equally unsuccessful."

Durso's product isn't commercially available, but she is exploring production and marketing possibilities.

Durso developed the product, which has nothing to do with her field of study, on her own. She doesn't have a chemical background, she said.

"People thought I was crazy," she said.

However, Eco-Auto is a winner, and Durso will be honored at the Nebraska Soybean Board's meeting Nov. 12 at the Country Inn & Suites in Lincoln. She'll receive $3,500.

Norm Husa, Nebraska Soybean Board chairman, said the contest offers new uses of soybeans through research and development of any part of the soybean, which may be the meal, oil or use through plastics.

"That's the main purpose: to develop new products made from soybeans to make it more profitable for soybean farmers," Husa said. "It may be a small project that takes a thousand bushels of soybeans or something bigger that uses a million bushels. Hopefully, we can have another new use for soybean products."

Loren Isom, technical assistance coordinator for the university's Industrial Agricultural Products Center, said the focus of the contest is to stimulate creativity among students and develop innovative and new uses for soybeans.

Durso learned how to develop and analyze the market potential of a new product, he said.

"This contest allows students to explore their entrepreneurial skills and be creative," he said. "It offers learning books can't and out-of-the classroom experience. As an end result, it proves and enhances employable skills."

The Industrial Agricultural Products Center is part of NU's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Next year's contest Entries for the 2002 contest will be accepted until March 1, 2002. Winning, runner-up and honorable-mention prizes are available for top entries from Nebraska college and university students. This year only the winning award was given. There is no entry fee. Contestants may work with an adviser or professor, individually or as a team. Entries must include a written report describing the product and how it was developed, the projected market impact of the product and a product sample. Entries will be evaluated by a team of UNL faculty and the Nebraska Soybean Board. The board will present the award. For more information, visit the Web site at http://agproducts.unl.edu/co ntest.htm or contact Isom at (402)472-8187 or lisom@unl.edu.

Researchers Dan Wedin, left, and Johannes Knops had their grasslands study published in the Oct. 25 edition of Science. Their seven-year study dealt with species biomass and biodiversity, showing that land with more diversity had greater biomass.

Study: Biodiversity key to grasslands' health

By Tom Simons, University Communications

More evidence for the importance of biodiversity to ecosystems has been shown in the results of a recently completed grasslands study published in the Oct. 25 edition of Science, the weekly journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the seven-year experiment, a team of scientists that included Johannes (Jean) Knops and David Wedin of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that on average, 16-species plots attained 2.7 times greater biomass than plots planted with one species. Moreover, the importance of biodiversity increased over time.

The scientists planted 168 plots at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek Natural History area north of Minneapolis in 1994 with either one, two, four, eight or 16 species chosen randomly from a pool of 18 grassland perennials that are native to the area.

Knops, an assistant professor of biological sciences, said the team documented what happened in each of the plots, recording how the plots functioned, how much above-ground and below-ground biomass was created, what happened with nutrient uptake, water relationships and insect herbivory, all with an eye to answering the basic question of what does biodiversity mean to the health of an ecosystem.

"We wanted to know, does the species number really matter?" Knops said. "We published papers in 1996 and 1997 on earlier experiments that basically showed that it does, but that raised a huge controversy. This paper basically resolves that debate, I would think."

Critics of the earlier studies said the results could have been the result of statistical averaging. In simple terms, the doubters said that if some monoculture plots were planted with a productive species and others with a nonproductive species, the average biomass would be somewhere between the two. However, if the species were planted together, the productive species would take over and the average biomass for the multispecies plots would be high.

The experiment described in this Science magazine, Knops said, should answer those doubts. The scientists identified the five least-productive species in 2000 and excluded from analysis plots containing any combination of just those species. They tested the hypothesis that the most-productive species determined the effects of diversity by analyzing in 2000 only plots that contained at least one of the nine most-productive species in monoculture. They found that total biomass remained significantly dependent on species number and group composition and became more so during the course of the experiment.

"We found that species complement each other," Knops said. "Some species might be active early in the growing season, some late in the growing season. Some might do well in dry years, others in wet years. Some might be hit by grasshopper outbreaks. But together, they might complement each other. What we saw over the first couple of years was what you would expect from statistical averaging, but over time, species interaction strongly matters."

"We answered a basic ecology question, but it's also partly applied ecology," Knops said. "For instance, most Nebraska rangelands have fewer plant species now than they had 100 years ago. Abandoned agricultural fields in Minnesota have on average one to five species per square meter, compared to a prairie in good condition that will have 20 to 30 species per square meter.

"The basic question is how does that matter long-term for sustainability, productivity and basically everything. When you reduce diversity, the ecosystem becomes unstable, sensitive to things like climate changes and insect outbreaks. If you have higher diversity, you have a buffer."

In addition to Wedin, Knops' team included lead author David Tilman, Peter Reich, Troy Mielke and Clarence Lehman of the University of Minnesota. Wedin is an associate professor of ecology in the School of Natural Resource Sciences in Nebraska's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Professors David Harwood, left, and David Watkins are two members of an international team of scientists who have found evidence that links the Earth's orbit with growth cycles of the East Antarctic ice sheet. The results of the study were published in the Oct. 18 issue of Nature.

Planet's orbit affects ice sheet, study says

By Tom Simons, University Communications

An international team of scientists working on the margin of the Antarctic ice sheet have found evidence that ties oscillations in Earth's orbit to growth cycles of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

The team, which included three UNL geoscientists, a future Nebraska geosciences professor, a former Nebraska graduate student and an undergraduate student, drilled three cores in the seafloor and recovered 1,500 meters of sediment that was deposited between 33 million and 17 million years ago. Using a variety of dating techniques to analyze the sediment, the scientists found three examples of orbitally influenced changes in the size of the ice sheet between 24.1 million and 23.7 million years ago, near the boundary of the Oligocene and Miocene epochs.

The scientists identified two periods of sea-level fluctuation of 30 to 40 meters on 40,000-year frequencies that correspond with variations in the obliquity, or tilt, of Earth's axis. They also found that late in the period, there was an instance of sea-level fluctuation at a 100,000-year frequency that matches the variation in the shape, or eccentricity, of Earth's orbit.

The results were published in the Oct. 18 issue of Nature, the international weekly journal of science.

"We've been fortunate in drilling close to the Antarctic ice sheet in that we get extremely rapid sediment accumulation rates, which help us to record these events fairly well. The tape recorder of time was running pretty fast. We've been able to date these rocks very closely, which enables us to tie them to specific orbital and global geochemical events," said David Harwood, Stout chair of stratigraphy at Nebraska and a co-author of the Nature paper.

"We were actually pretty surprised to note that we could see progressive changes in the environment that were of 40,000-year duration. That's pretty good in terms of the geologic record, to get down to that time scale when you're looking at events 20 million years ago. It's given us a window in to the variable nature of the Antarctic ice sheet during this period."

Among the other co-authors of the paper were David Watkins, professor of geosciences at UNL, and Chris Fielding of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who will join the Nebraska faculty next year as the Coffman chair in geosciences (endowed by a matching gift to the Othmer Fund).

The findings published in Nature came from a recently completed five-year international effort, the Cape Roberts Project. But Harwood and his colleagues have already begun to expand their Antarctic research with the development of the ANDRILL Project. They anticipate drilling eight holes in four seasons and spanning a 10-year period. The U.S. contribution to the Cape Roberts Project and support for ANDRILL is provided by the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. The science management office for ANDRILL will be based at Nebraska.

Using a new approach and new technology, scientists in ANDRILL plan to drill through the floating ice shelf in 1,000 meters of water (compared to 300 meters in the Cape Roberts Project), which would allow them to go further back in time.

"Some of our drilling targets go back 40 to 50 million years, reaching the time period before the onset of the ice sheets," Harwood said. "Other targets are when the ice sheets were dynamic. We want to know the nature of their oscillations. We're also looking at very high-resolution studies of the last 100,000 years to understand how global climate works."

Harwood, who is the first chair of the project, said the results of ANDRILL will be plugged into climate and ice-sheet computer models to help fine-tune them to be better predictors of future climate change. He said another important element of the project will be educational outreach.

"During the Cape Roberts Project, NSF's Teachers Experiencing Antarctica program sent teachers to Antarctica each year. They wrote journals and e-mailed them across the country, kept logs and built a Web site for students and teachers. We'll do this and more with ANDRILL. That has to be a key part of it."