I remember this! Couldn't put my finger on it when I was reading about the Stanford study earlier.

The new study, however, is a controlled one that raises mealworms strictly on styrofoam and compares their health to a control generation. It's more about the fact that they can digest styrofoam continuously and with no ill effects than that they can do it at all. After all, worms that die of plastic toxicity or something after a couple days (perhaps bc the bacteria wear themselves out) aren't a very effective solution.

Yes, it's quite interesting to see how they go from whether they can eat this to whether they can survive on it.

Incidentally, I presume that was merely a slip of the tongue, but since it so often causes confusion, I should point out that mealworms aren't 'worms' (annelids), but insects (coleopterans--i.e. beetle larvae).

Stanford's press release reads like they discovered this plastic eating mealworm like a new idea but it really wasn't. To me the new study is just a continuation of the previous discovery.

Also, there are so many Intel ISEF awarded research projects each year. But most of them seem to have gone nowhere. Rarely, some of them turned out to be very good ideas many years later. I wonder what the disconnect is.

Well, science certainly builds on itself incrementally, and the further exploration of an existing idea is no less valid a direction of study than a "new" idea. As for the ISEF stuff... well, who knows. Hopefully it gives young folks a bit of a push in the right direction, though.

I wish I had access to the full paper, though - it may be that they referenced the 2009 study but Stanford didn't think it necessary to include that in the press release - which is, after all, a press release.

More references: * Intel ISEF 2009 Best of Category Award of $5,000 for Top First Place Winner - I-Ching Tseng [3]

* Mealworm science project could help environment [4]

I have no access to the Stanford paper - paywalled so I am not sure if paper have credited this 16-year-old girl's discovery at the time.

[3]: https://member.societyforscience.org/document.doc?id=74

[4]: http://taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=51062&ctNode=427

I downloaded the paper. It does not credit the highschool student's discovery. The authors take credit for the discovery themselves:

"Recently, we reported that waxworms (the larvae of the Indian mealmoth or Plodia interpunctella) were capable of chewing and eating PE films, and two bacterial strains capable of degrading PE were isolated from the gut of the worms, i.e., Enterobacter asburiae YT1 and Bacillus sp. YP1. During the same research period, we found that mealworms, the larvae of the mealworm beetle or Tenebrio molitor Linnaeus (a species of darkling beetle), which are much larger in size than waxworms (typically approximately 25 versus 12 mm in length), can eat Styrofoam as their sole diet."

They seem to have duplicated the 2009 highschool student's work. Here is the highschool student's abstract:

"The observation that mealworms might be able to feed on styrofoam sparked a curiosity to answer whether mealworms could digest styrofoam, and if so, how could they remain alive. First of all, these mealworms were fed in different kinds of food to insure the mealworms can digest styrofoam. The results showed that mealworms can indeed feed on styrofoam only. The hypothesis of this study is that microbes inside the digestive tracts of mealworms are responsible for the decomposition of styrofoam. To further test this hypothesis, microbes from the digestive tracts of mealworms were cultured at 37 C in LB medium under anaerobic conditions. There were many kinds of microbes isolated. From those microbes, a kind of bacteria forming red colonies was confirmed responsible for decomposing styrofoam. The growth conditions and strain characteristics of the bacteria forming red colonies were further examined. These results imply that the red bacteria isolated from the digestive tracts of mealworms may shed light on solving the serious environmental pollution caused by styrofoam."

https://apps2.societyforscience.org/abstracts/project.cfm?PI...

I would say that the use of the phrase "we reported" is acknowledging that it is someone else's work. At my University such words have specific meaning.

Even assuming that's true, is it really too much to ask for the student to have a credit? Plenty of papers that build on work by non-academics do that.

The Stanford researchers could have been unaware of the Taiwanese student's work. It would not be surprising given the volume of scientific work that gets published every year. Independent discoveries happen all the time.

Literature surveys usually happen during research or before publishing. It's hard to miss something.

I don't know any other way to respond to this than to flat out contradict you: it is easy to miss something, even in a specialized subject where you know the 15 other groups working on similar stuff. Things are hidden in M.Sc. theses, Ph.D. theses and even papers with titles that didn't lead to you to suspect there was something relevant for your specific subject in them. There's just too much being published.

Google is your friend.

While I think you for the links, what's the use of the bracket notation if you're just putting the link on the same or next line? It's meant for footnotes, yes?

thanks. fixed

So what happened here? Did the Stanford team not notice, or just ignored the student's earlier discovery?

It was proably not published in a "propper" way, so it's ok. There are bizare idears who is the first to publish something, for example that pre-print don't count, because ... well I don't know.

This was not some amateur discovery. This was 2009 Intel International Engineering Science Fair's top prize for Microbiology category.

I would be surprised if those award winning high schoolers had no assistance from professors to teach them how to do research and write papers.

And here the Stanford paper performed a long term study on mealworms and a styrofoam diet as opposed to a control. As for why they didn't reference the previous discovery, it could be for a couple of reasons:

1. The primary author(s) were not distinctly aware of the discovery.

2. If nothing was published in the 2009 Intel International Engineering Science Fair, then there is little to reference. Referencing a news article in a journal is not often considered good practice, and in many cases can be considered unacceptable.

This is a case where I would say "do not attribute to malice...", as I don't see any direct benefit to the researchers for excluding this reference in their paper. Their study focuses on long-term results, not merely "mealworms can eat styrofoam, news at eleven."

EDIT: Formatting

Again, other than the news article, this is the official winning announcement: https://member.societyforscience.org/document.doc?id=74

I would be very surprised that Intel IESF awarded prize to research projects without a paper! Also, from the links referenced above, I clearly saw the high schooler was presenting in a whiteboard with her research paper with diagrams.

Granted, I am unsure if the paper was published in any established academic journals/magazines etc. or gone through any peer reviews. But considering she was a 16-year-old at the time, with only more than a year of research into this subject matter and with a fairly accurate conclusion.