Chicago Council on Science and Technology

A mild earthquake shook northern Illinois this morning.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported a 3.8-magnitude quake at 3:59:33 a.m. centered in a farm field on Plank Road in Elgin near Hampshire and 3.1 miles underground. Initially, it had reported the magnitude as 4.3 with an epicenter about 5.5 miles east of Sycamore.

The quake was felt over a wide area — from Wisconsin to Tennessee — but there were no reports of any damage so far, according to the Kane County and DeKalb County sheriff’s departments, which are closest to the epicenter.

“We got hundreds of calls,” said DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott. “But we have no reports of damage or injuries.”

The magnitude and epicenter were revised after the U.S. Geological Survey studied the “wave forms” from the quake, said Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the geological survey in Golden, Colo.

In a meeting in Washington with leaders of some Great Lakes states, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies laid out an “Asian Carp Control Strategy Framework” to ensure that the fish, known to take over entire ecosystems, do not establish themselves in the lakes.

Environmental policy and awareness is not the exclusive concern of the Union of Concern Scientists. It also wants to create more transparency in the government for policy decisions that affect science.

Courtesy: Medill Reports Chicago Scientists hope funding to develop an electric car battery that breathes air and could eliminate gasoline in the process will come with the $532 million allocated for Argonne National Laboratory in the proposed federal budget. A single car can emit tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. To curb the threat [...]

Using technology developed by Baxter International Inc., researchers at the 26 sites were able to take stem cells from the patients’ bone marrow and inject them directly into the heart muscle to regenerate the damaged areas and increase the supply of oxygen back to the heart. Losordo said the results showed promise in almost every patient.

Courtesy: Michigan State University Newsroom Scientists have long known that high blood sugar levels from diabetes damage blood vessels in the eye, but they didn’t know why or how. Now a Michigan State University scientist has discovered the process that causes retinal cells to die, which could lead to new treatments that halt the damage. [...]

The NSF center for chemical innovation will pursue three research themes: new chemical transformations and catalysis under energetic conditions; materials growth, initially focusing on diamond growth for technological applications; and reactions in liquids.

Damaged cartilage can lead to joint pain and loss of physical function and eventually to osteoarthritis, a disorder with an estimated economic impact approaching $65 billion in the United States. With an aging and increasingly active population, this figure is expected to grow.