Taubman Center master’s students Matthew McCabe, Kelsey Sherman, Amber Ma, Gayatri Sahgal, and Dana Schwartz, have won the mid-Atlantic regionals of Policy Solutions Challenge USA, a competition that encourages public policy students to develop innovative solutions to U.S. policy problems. The Taubman team will compete in the finals in Washington, D.C. on March 22 and 23, facing off against teams from seven other policy schools.

A group of researchers, including graduate student Jennifer Davis, have unlocked the genetic and molecular mechanisms behind a part of the process to break down plant biomass into the precursors of biodiesel or other commodity chemicals. These might one day be used to produce alternatives to petroleum. The potential of this “biorefinery” technology is limited by the fact that most microorganisms cannot break down lignin, a highly stable polymer that makes up as much as a third of plant biomass. Streptomyces bacteria are among few microorganisms known to degrade and consume lignin.

Nicholas Gidmark, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology is part of a team to determine that even in the same animal, not all bites are the same. A new study finds that because the force in a muscle depends on how much it is stretched, an animal’s bite force depends on the size of what it is biting. The finding has direct implications for ecology and evolution.

Postdoctoral researcher Nicola Hawley is part of a team to study the increasing prevalence of obesity in American Samoa. The results recently published in the journal Pediatric Obesity may not be confined to Polynesian populations, said the authors. American Samoa’s prevalence of obesity in infancy may be the harbinger of a slower-moving trend in the same direction in developed nations.