Consumers Start Using Coverage Under Health Law

“I’ve had some heart palpitations, and my mom’s side has a history of heart problems starting early,” she said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “So it’s mostly just to double-check that everything is O.K.”

Ms. Hornbach, who has had breast cancer and retired early from the technology industry, said that insurance companies in Arizona had refused to cover her until about two years ago, when she got a policy with monthly premiums of $285 and a deductible of $5,500 a year. Last month, using the federal insurance exchange, she bought a midlevel silver plan with lower premiums and deductible.

“It’s a better policy — lower out-of-pocket, more choice of doctors,” she said. “This is a very happy day.”

Consumers around the country began using coverage provided by the new health care law on Wednesday, the same day that Medicaid expanded to hundreds of thousands of people in about half the states. Many provisions of the 2010 health care law offering new benefits and protections to consumers, including those with pre-existing conditions, also took effect.

Hospitals said they were getting ready for an influx of newly insured patients, but many health care providers said the pace was slower than usual because of the New Year’s holiday. In a typical report, Clay Holtzman, a spokesman for Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, said the system’s hospitals were not seeing an immediate surge.

“We might at some point down the road, since we have spent a lot of time informing uninsured patients of their options under the exchange and expanded Medicaid,” Mr. Holtzman said in an email. “But it depends on if those patients chose plans that include us.”

Swedish is one of the largest hospital systems in the region, but Mr. Holtzman said it had been excluded from the networks of providers used by the two largest health plans on the state’s insurance exchange.

Some people using their new insurance discovered that they could be responsible for substantial co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs.

Nancy M. Schlichting, the chief executive of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, said that one patient who visited the emergency room of the system’s flagship hospital on Wednesday tried to fill a prescription and found that the co-payment would be $84 — more than she was accustomed to paying. She got a similar drug with a lower co-payment, illustrating the need for patients to pay close attention to details of their drug coverage, Ms. Schlichting said.

In San Antonio, at a 24-hour Walgreens store, only a few vehicles were lined up at the drive-through window at midday, and no one was waiting in line to pick up prescriptions at the indoor pharmacy counter.

“It’s dead,” said Leslie Castillo, a pharmacist on duty. “We’ve had a few regulars come by, but no one has come in today with a new insurance card or wanting us to look up their benefits under Obamacare.”

One reason, Ms. Castillo said, was that most doctors were not seeing patients on the New Year’s holiday. But she added, “We’ll probably be packed tomorrow.”

Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, said: “Today is a historic occasion for the health care community. The coverage expansion kicks in for hundreds of thousands of people in New York State and millions across the country, who will enjoy the comfort of knowing they won’t have to worry about health care bills if they get sick.”

Danny Cottrell, the owner of a pharmacy in Brewton, Ala., said he had helped several people sign up for coverage. One customer, who has $3,500 to $4,000 a year in prescription drug costs, qualified for federal subsidies and chose a plan with a premium of about $300 a month and an annual deductible of $500.

“He will definitely come out ahead,” Mr. Cottrell said. “He will save at least $7,500 a year on medical bills.”

Dr. Michael W. Cropp, the president of Independent Health, an insurer in Buffalo, said, “I anticipate a lot of uncertainty and confusion and some frustration” as consumers begin to use their new insurance policies.

“The website for the New York exchange is now working for most enrollment purposes,” Dr. Cropp said. “But I have concerns about how funds will flow from the federal government to health plans for members receiving federal subsidies.”

Expecting a continued battle over health care, the White House moved Wednesday to recruit volunteers for its campaign to defend and promote the law, which is likely to be a defining issue in many congressional races this year. A White House website invites supporters and beneficiaries of the law to provide their names, email addresses and personal experiences.

“Whether you have new coverage today or know someone who does, we want to hear your story,” David Simas, an aide to President Obama, said in an email to people who had expressed interest in the issue.

Jessica Santillo, a White House spokeswoman, said the invitation was part of a systematic new effort by the administration to “highlight stories of everyday Americans benefiting from the law.”

The administration hopes to encourage enrollment and reverse public opinion polls that show approval of the health care law lagging behind disapproval.

Lisa Maria Garza contributed reporting from San Antonio, and Kimiya Shokoohi from Los Angeles.

App Smart: Using the Masses to Improve Apps

Weather apps, for example, sometimes have data only for cities or towns far from a specific location. The Weathermob app, free on iOS, tackles that by sourcing weather reports from people who are exactly at the spot you are interested in visiting or knowing more about. Users submit weather information from their location, as well as other data, like their mood or what they’re doing.

As I write this, for example, some users in the app’s “nearby” page have shared photos from a beach not far away where it is 70 degrees and sunny, and they’ve added a smiley tag to the photos. There is also an option for adding comments, which means those beach partyers could add information, like “Come and visit here — a band is playing in an hour.”

This aspect of the app is entertaining but not particularly useful — I can take a step outside and get most of that information. But the app is searchable for information on other locations. When I looked up a town that I would be visiting, for example, Weathermob users reported that it was 66 degrees, and the app’s detailed forecast page reported an 11 percent chance of rain the next day.

Entering your own weather report is easy. You dial through a rotating list of weather icons to one that matches what you see. Then you select a mood and an icon from the “it’s weather for...” list, which includes oddities like a sea gull or a cricket bat. You can also add a comment, photo or video. It’s fun to use, but the app depends on users’ actively taking part to deliver meaningful information — and that’s not necessarily going to cover every location.

Weathersignal, a free Android app, takes crowdsourced weather reporting one step further by using sensors in your phone or tablet to assess the local weather conditions. Your device effectively becomes a miniature weather station. The makers stress that the app is experimental and that not every Android device has the right sensors. With the right device the app can collect data like air pressure, ambient temperature and even brightness. But even then, Weathersignal is quite basic and has a few quirks — like telling me my Nexus 7 is sitting in 37-degree Fahrenheit weather, when it’s plainly a warm day.

But as more people use the app, the team should be able to refine the algorithms to make better calculations and predictions about current and future weather. For now, this app as something amusing to contribute to, not a reliable weather app based on crowdsourced data.

If you are trying to learn a new language, it is worth trying Duolingo, a great example of a crowdsource app. The app is like many that teach languages, with guided lessons on vocabulary, verb use and pronunciation. It’s graphically very attractive, with straightforward menus. There is also a rewards scheme that makes learning a new language a gamelike experience.

But where other apps simply test your new language skills on preset examples, Duolingo takes another approach. As you move through the lessons, either in the app or on the complementary Web site, you may find yourself being asked to translate other Web sites or documents. This means that you’re part of a crowdsourced translation engine — a point of pride when you get something right, and probably no harm done if you get it wrong, since the app will rely on the wisdom of the crowd. The apps, on iOS and Android, are free, but at the moment available only for students of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Find it difficult to make a decision? Then you might want to download Seesaw, a crowdsource app that is all about decision making. If you’re undecided on something, Seesaw can poll your social network friends with a simple click-to-vote mechanism.

If you’re considering a new haircut, for example, you could put photos of four different haircuts into a status update on Seesaw and submit a question like “Which one is best?” Your Seesaw friends, added from your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account, can click on the picture they like best. They can also add a comment, if so inclined. It’s simple and easy to use, and you may be surprised by the answers. The app is photo-centric, though, so it may not suit all types of questions. It’s free on iOS.

Finally, check out the crowdsource video app Pixorial Krowds on iOS and Android, an app for sharing video of an event or location. The idea is that if you’re attending something like a music festival you can see what’s going on from other attendees’ perspectives. The interface is a little confusing, but the app is free.

Crowdsourcing apps are most useful when you actively take part and share data. But do check the apps’ privacy policies to be certain that you’re comfortable sharing the information that you are submitting.

Quick Call

Yahoo’s Fantasy Football apps have just been updated with a valuable new feature: They can now connect users to a live draft and even set up mock drafts. If you’ve never played fantasy sports, now is a great time to try out Yahoo’s free app on iOS and Android.

Letters: Using the ‘Third Ear’

To the Editor:

Re “As Ideas Swirl, It Pays to Use Your Third Ear” (Corner Office, July 21), in which Joyce F. Brown, president of the Fashion Institute of Technology (and a psychologist by training) described her management style:

It’s refreshing to see a college president so productively embracing a concept described by the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik in his book “Listening With the Third Ear” 65 years ago.

Surely, many F.I.T. students and faculty members benefit from Dr. Brown’s use of her “third ear” — listening carefully “to understand the nuances” of others — as do patients when psychoanalysts and other mental health practitioners follow Reik’s lead.

Business and political leaders, like everyone else, have third ears. If ever there was a time to use them, to listen more closely, it’s these economically and militarily perilous days.

MURRAY GELMAN

Manhattan, July 21

The writer is a psychoanalyst.

Corner Office: Joyce Brown of F.I.T., on Using Your ‘Third Ear’

Q. What was your plan for your career when you were younger?

A. I always knew I wanted to go into psychology. I’m a psychologist by training, which I think is a tremendous help in everything I do.

Q. How so?

A. Among the more important things I learned in pursuing the degree in psychology was an appreciation of an organization’s interrelationships. I think you have to follow process even if you’re not being a bureaucrat. I don’t want to be bound by the process, but I think respecting the process is important — respecting what everybody’s role is — then figuring out how to make everybody work together.

One thing that emerged from the training, and what I do day to day, is to understand who’s responsible for what and to make sure I don’t then ask someone else to do that person’s job. It’s very easy to slip and do that. You can involve others, of course. They may have a suggestion that’s easy enough to incorporate, and then everybody owns a little piece of it. But you have to be clear about who’s responsible. Otherwise, people will cross wires, and that will create a ripple effect that’s totally unnecessary.

Q. Other ways that you draw on your training in psychology?

A. I am convinced that I have a third ear. I listen, and I really pay attention and try very hard to understand the nuances. I tell people that I will listen to what they say, and will try to incorporate what I can from their suggestions if I think they fit the objective we’re trying to achieve. If we’re not going to do what they’re suggesting, I’ll tell them why. I think people deserve that. I will tell you why, and then we will proceed. I think it works, because people feel that they were listened to, and were given the respect of an answer about why I might disagree. You gain a lot by being respectful of people’s ideas.

Q. Talk about some other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years.

A. It’s important not to choose alliances too early. There are always issues and camps that develop in any organization. You may think you understand them, but you don’t.

I don’t really think there are people who wake up every morning wanting to tear things down in an organization. But there are people with strongly held beliefs who are driven by various things — maybe their own need to be in the limelight, or maybe some deep philosophical belief.

Q. What have you learned from other leaders you’ve observed?

A. I had people who were very helpful to me, who saw something they thought was worth developing, and they created opportunities for me. Their ability to analyze and to be thorough and to think about the impact of one decision versus another was interesting and helpful to watch.

I also saw a lot of things I knew I didn’t want to do. Some people were emotional, histrionic, intolerant and wanted to humiliate people. I also saw people who didn’t pay attention to detail, which I think will sink you every time. My staff calls me Dr. Detail — lovingly, I’m sure. That doesn’t mean I micromanage, but I need to know the details. Things can come around and bite when you don’t pay attention to the real substance.

I’ve also seen people who didn’t respect process. They reached down into the ranks and had other people doing things that marginalized the people they needed to rely on to really get the job done and move the organization forward.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities do you look for? What questions do you ask?

A. I’m really interested in who you are and if you fit in with the culture, with the team — how committed you are to the objectives and goals we’ve set, the vision we have. I like to know how they got here, so I always ask what they thought they were going to do when they were younger, when they went to college.

Why did you choose your major? What did you think you were going to do? What was your vision for your career? How did you get where you are? What were the various things that happened along the way, because invariably it wasn’t a straight line. Then I like to know a little bit about where people grew up. Are they living in the same place they grew up, or did they leave their hometown to come to New York? Are they adventurous? Are they a risk-taker? What’s their passion about? What’s driving them?

Q. What are you listening for?

A. I’m listening for passion. I’m listening for a commitment to being the best, to being successful, and a commitment to something larger than themselves, not just their personal success. That kind of drive really does blossom into one’s work ethic and attitude and approach.

Q. Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. It’s kind of subtle, but I don’t like when people tear other people down because they’re not owning what might have been their mistake. If you don’t take any risks, you certainly won’t make any mistakes, but you’re not going to get that far, either. So it’s O.K. to make a mistake. You just need to own your mistake. That’s a bad sign for me if somebody doesn’t.

The other thing I don’t like is people who waste other people’s time. They’ll have meetings with no point — everybody has to come together just because you can call them all together. Then, at the end of the day, everybody’s just wasted an hour and a half, and there’s no point to the agenda. Maybe they’re just trying to show they’re in charge of something that they really don’t fully understand. So they might ask 25 questions, or even 10, when they didn’t need to ask any. Ultimately when people can’t answer all their questions, it does sort of make them seem much more smart and more important.

But it doesn’t really work when what you’re trying to do is build a well-oiled machine. All they had to say was: “How can I help you? Let’s figure this out.” They need to be committed to something beyond themselves.

Corner Office: Joyce Brown of F.I.T., on Using Your ‘Third Ear’

Q. What was your plan for your career when you were younger?

A. I always knew I wanted to go into psychology. I’m a psychologist by training, which I think is a tremendous help in everything I do.

Q. How so?

A. Among the more important things I learned in pursuing the degree in psychology was an appreciation of an organization’s interrelationships. I think you have to follow process even if you’re not being a bureaucrat. I don’t want to be bound by the process, but I think respecting the process is important — respecting what everybody’s role is — then figuring out how to make everybody work together.

One thing that emerged from the training, and what I do day to day, is to understand who’s responsible for what and to make sure I don’t then ask someone else to do that person’s job. It’s very easy to slip and do that. You can involve others, of course. They may have a suggestion that’s easy enough to incorporate, and then everybody owns a little piece of it. But you have to be clear about who’s responsible. Otherwise, people will cross wires, and that will create a ripple effect that’s totally unnecessary.

Q. Other ways that you draw on your training in psychology?

A. I am convinced that I have a third ear. I listen, and I really pay attention and try very hard to understand the nuances. I tell people that I will listen to what they say, and will try to incorporate what I can from their suggestions if I think they fit the objective we’re trying to achieve. If we’re not going to do what they’re suggesting, I’ll tell them why. I think people deserve that. I will tell you why, and then we will proceed. I think it works, because people feel that they were listened to, and were given the respect of an answer about why I might disagree. You gain a lot by being respectful of people’s ideas.

Q. Talk about some other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the years.

A. It’s important not to choose alliances too early. There are always issues and camps that develop in any organization. You may think you understand them, but you don’t.

I don’t really think there are people who wake up every morning wanting to tear things down in an organization. But there are people with strongly held beliefs who are driven by various things — maybe their own need to be in the limelight, or maybe some deep philosophical belief.

Q. What have you learned from other leaders you’ve observed?

A. I had people who were very helpful to me, who saw something they thought was worth developing, and they created opportunities for me. Their ability to analyze and to be thorough and to think about the impact of one decision versus another was interesting and helpful to watch.

I also saw a lot of things I knew I didn’t want to do. Some people were emotional, histrionic, intolerant and wanted to humiliate people. I also saw people who didn’t pay attention to detail, which I think will sink you every time. My staff calls me Dr. Detail — lovingly, I’m sure. That doesn’t mean I micromanage, but I need to know the details. Things can come around and bite when you don’t pay attention to the real substance.

I’ve also seen people who didn’t respect process. They reached down into the ranks and had other people doing things that marginalized the people they needed to rely on to really get the job done and move the organization forward.

Q. How do you hire? What qualities do you look for? What questions do you ask?

A. I’m really interested in who you are and if you fit in with the culture, with the team — how committed you are to the objectives and goals we’ve set, the vision we have. I like to know how they got here, so I always ask what they thought they were going to do when they were younger, when they went to college.

Why did you choose your major? What did you think you were going to do? What was your vision for your career? How did you get where you are? What were the various things that happened along the way, because invariably it wasn’t a straight line. Then I like to know a little bit about where people grew up. Are they living in the same place they grew up, or did they leave their hometown to come to New York? Are they adventurous? Are they a risk-taker? What’s their passion about? What’s driving them?

Q. What are you listening for?

A. I’m listening for passion. I’m listening for a commitment to being the best, to being successful, and a commitment to something larger than themselves, not just their personal success. That kind of drive really does blossom into one’s work ethic and attitude and approach.

Q. Anything you have a particularly low tolerance for?

A. It’s kind of subtle, but I don’t like when people tear other people down because they’re not owning what might have been their mistake. If you don’t take any risks, you certainly won’t make any mistakes, but you’re not going to get that far, either. So it’s O.K. to make a mistake. You just need to own your mistake. That’s a bad sign for me if somebody doesn’t.

The other thing I don’t like is people who waste other people’s time. They’ll have meetings with no point — everybody has to come together just because you can call them all together. Then, at the end of the day, everybody’s just wasted an hour and a half, and there’s no point to the agenda. Maybe they’re just trying to show they’re in charge of something that they really don’t fully understand. So they might ask 25 questions, or even 10, when they didn’t need to ask any. Ultimately when people can’t answer all their questions, it does sort of make them seem much more smart and more important.

But it doesn’t really work when what you’re trying to do is build a well-oiled machine. All they had to say was: “How can I help you? Let’s figure this out.” They need to be committed to something beyond themselves.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Economic Damages and Using Experts: Recap from TLI Litigation Summit, Part I

At The Legal Intelligencer's first Litigation Summit in Philadelphia, a panel on working with economic damages experts included advice on what attorneys should look for in selecting the right expert witness and tips on how attorneys and experts can work together more effectively through discovery, preparation of expert reports and trial.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Apple’s Rivals See an Edge in Using Wireless Accessories

Hotels outfitted guest rooms with alarm clocks containing a telltale wedge of 30 tiny pins that could play music from Apple’s devices and charge their batteries. Retail stores were thick with sound docks and other speaker systems meant to work with Apple gadgets.

But Apple’s iron grip on the digital accessories in hotel rooms, store shelves and living rooms is starting to slip — potentially risking the royalties it earns from accessory makers and, more significant, giving Apple customers more freedom to switch to rival products. That could be an issue for a company whose stock has been shaken in recent months as investors worry that the iPhone business is slowing.

Jeremy Horwitz, editor in chief of iLounge, a Web site devoted to Apple accessories, said Apple’s aggressive control over accessories for its products drove many makers to more open means of connecting devices, which helped feed the success of mobile devices made by other companies.

“At some point Apple’s obsession with having control over everything that is associated with its products may wind up biting it,” Mr. Horwitz said.

The Bluetooth standard for wireless connections has allowed accessory makers to build products that can work with many kinds of devices because they no longer have to worry about a physical hook. Other phone makers like Samsung and tablet-computing device makers like Amazon have become strong alternatives in the eyes of gadget shoppers.

And Apple itself provided an opening for competitors when it changed the way its phones connect to other devices, aggravating both its business partners and consumers.

Now accessory makers are eager, even obliged, to think beyond Apple.

“We’ve had to adapt to new technology, support more devices and meet the growing demands of consumers looking for accessories that can accommodate multiple devices,” said Ezra S. Ashkenazi, chief executive of iHome, one of the biggest makers of iPhone clock radios and other Apple audio accessories. This year, iHome is releasing more products with Bluetooth than ever before, he said.

Apple says it is fine with the wireless direction in which accessories are headed. “Apple provides users with the best wired and wireless connectivity options to work with the broadest range of accessories,” said Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple. “As a result, iOS users have access to the world’s largest ecosystem of options and the most seamless integration with our products.”

Apple expected some grumbling from customers and partners last fall when it introduced in the iPhone 5 a new way for the mobile phone to connect to other devices. But its executives defended the connector, Lightning, because the new, smaller design allowed for slimmer phones and tablets.

While the 30-pin connector can be plugged into an old iPhone in only one way, a Lightning cable works even if it is flipped over.

Apple did not tell accessory makers about the change ahead of time, which is normal for a company known for its secrecy, but it was painful for many of its partners.

“You really don’t know where Apple is going to go next, if they’re going to change to something else down the road,” said Kyle Thompson, director of marketing for Cambridge SoundWorks. “They’ve made a lot of companies like us really nervous.”

That change frustrated partners whose customers had invested in products that used Apple’s old 30-pin connector. Those older devices are incompatible with the latest Apple products without an adapter that Apple sells for $29 to connect to the latest Apple products. Also, the new Lightning connectors are more expensive to license and manufacture than the old ones, electronics makers say.

“A lot of us were bitten pretty badly by the connector transition,” said Ian Geise, senior vice president for marketing and product development at Voxx Accessories Corporation, which makes audio products under RCA, Acoustic Research and other brand names.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Prototype: Using Aluminum to Lighten Manufacturers’ Load

But innovations in their design and manufacture may play an important role in creating a fleet of more environmentally sustainable cars and trucks.

Taylor Hopkins, 24, was part of a five-student research team at Ohio State University that recently created three novel designs for shipping pallets. Ordinary pallets are made of wood; the students’ prototypes are made of aluminum, which lasts longer.

The aluminum pallets are also much lighter than wood pallets, which saves fuel during shipping.

“We were presented with the problem of, try and come up with a new pallet that we thought could make an impact environmentally,” Mr. Hopkins said. “We ended up going with aluminum just because it’s very widely used and it’s lightweight.”

Aluminum is also significantly more expensive than wood, which means that the students’ designs are unlikely to become the industry norm soon. But the technology behind them could be useful to carmakers, which have started to embrace aluminum as a means of building lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“This project is such an interesting microcosm of the challenges that the transportation industry in total is facing, in moving from heavy steel to lightweight aluminum,” said Randall Scheps, automotive marketing director of Alcoa, and chairman of the aluminum transportation group at the Aluminum Association. Mr. Scheps said the student team looked at various methods of joining, or bonding, metals. It also looked at forming, or bending, metals, and at recycling. “These are all issues that the auto industry is facing,” he said.

Companies and foundations have been looking to young innovators for environmentally sustainable and cost-effective solutions to real-world problems. In the case of the shipping pallets, the project was funded with a grant from the Alcoa Foundation, which wants future engineers to think about use of lightweight materials. (Although the use of aluminum clearly benefits Alcoa, an aluminum company, it did not have to be used in the project.)

It’s an issue that has taken on urgency in Detroit in anticipation of Obama administration fuel-economy regulations that will require American vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Ford, for instance, that producer of macho, all-terrain trucks, is working on an aluminum version of its popular F-150 pickup.

Dr. Glenn Daehn, a professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State and the students’ research adviser, says the aluminum shipping pallets are an example of “using simple projects to inject ideas into how we might make lighter-weight door systems or seats” — research that Ohio State is working on with companies like Honda and General Motors.

Mr. Hopkins said welding is an issue in dealing with aluminum. “There’s just a certain property of aluminum that if you heat it up too much, or for too long, it loses a lot of its strength,” he said.

To get around that, the students relied on “conformal interference joining technology,” a method of joining metals through a process involving electromagnetism, as opposed to heat.

Then there was the question of how to make the pallets cost-effective. Aluminum pallets on the market can cost more than $200 each, in part because they are welded by hand. Aluminum pallets are used to ship materials that must be kept sterile, or that will be stored for long periods.

But the students’ models are all estimated to cost less than $75 each. That was achieved by making the designs simple enough so they could be mass-produced.

“They weren’t some crazy designs that would take 20 hours to produce, where you’d have to do it one at a time,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Our designs can be automated. They only have two, separate pieces in a couple of them.” That makes it possible to “knock them out in a short amount of time,” he said.

WHILE the project could eventually affect how cars are manufactured, it may not change the world’s shipping pallets. According to Edgar Deomano, technical director of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, wood pallets, which account for 90 percent of the domestic market, are not going away, mainly because of cost.

“A recycled, or repaired, wood pallet could go for as low as $3 each,” Mr. Deomano said.

As for the argument that wooden shipping pallets are responsible for deforestation, he said: “That’s a false impression. Our industry is able to recycle pallets again and again. You don’t have to cut down more trees, you just have to repair existing pallets.”

Dr. Daehn says he remains hopeful, however, that a company will “step forward and commercialize” the new aluminum shipping pallets.

“We need more than a student project to do that, but I think we’ve shown them the promise is there.”

In the meantime, the project has already served Mr. Hopkins well. After graduating from Ohio State in June, he was hired as a metallurgist at Valbruna Slater Stainless in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“It was definitely one of my résumé highlights,” he said.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.

Uranium Plant Using Laser Technology Wins U.S. Approval

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a license to General Electric-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment this week to build and operate a uranium enrichment plant near Wilmington, N.C., deploying the laser technology instead of costlier centrifuges.

The approval alarmed some advocates of nuclear weapons control, who say they fear that allowing companies to use the cheaper and easier technology could increase the risk of it falling into the wrong hands.

“We think the approval of the license was done without due consideration of proliferation,” said Edwin S. Lyman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re already grappling with how to cope with Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability” and the laser technology “could make the problem of global proliferation intractable and uncontrollable.”

G.E.-Hitachi said it had not yet decided whether the project would be profitable enough to begin construction of the $1 billion plant. Part of the evaluation will involve weighing whether markets for enriched uranium will hold for years into the future, said Christopher White, a spokesman for the partnership.

But the company made assurances that its hold on the classified technology was secure.

“The company has worked with the N.R.C., the U.S. Departments of State and Energy and independent nonproliferation experts for several years to ensure the security of this technology and has met — and in many cases exceeded — all regulations pertaining to safeguarding this technology,” G.E.-Hitachi Nuclear Energy said in a statement.

The license, awarded Tuesday, allows G.E.-Hitachi to enrich uranium to 8 percent by weight. Uranium is enriched to 90 percent purity to build atomic bombs.

The United States and five other world powers have imposed sanctions on Iran because it has enriched uranium to 20 percent, a level that could be turned into weapons-grade material much more quickly than power-plant fuel.

Using Mental Illness as a Criminal Defense

In the child sexual abuse criminal trial of Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant coach of the Penn State University football team, the defense made an argument that Sandusky had histrionic personality disorder.