Murder Mystery: When the Witness is a Tree

Posted on by
Could this wounded tree provide clues to what happened to Bonnie Woodward?

In late June of 2010 Bonnie Woodward went missing. An acquaintance, Roger Carroll, was an early suspect for her assumed murder but police found no evidence of any crime, and never found her body.  For nearly eight years she remained missing and the case went cold.  It was only after Roger Carroll admitted to his wife that he had killed Woodward that critical new information came to light.

 A witness claimed Carroll shot Woodward at his rural Jersey County, Illinois, home, burned her remains in a huge brush pile that he stoked for several days, then used a tractor to push all the evidence – or so he thought – into a creek. Carroll was taken into custody in April of 2018 and charged with first-degree murder.

Continue reading →

A New Approach to Bridge Inspection and Safety

Posted on by
Unmanned aerial vehicle – Digital image correlation (UAV-DIC) System

Forest Products Laboratory’s (FPL) researcher James Wacker with collaborators from the Department of Civil Environmental Engineering, South Dakota State University are working on a new approach to inspecting bridges that will allow inspections to one day be more cost-efficient, easier to conduct, more accessible, and safer for motorists and inspectors alike. The journal article, “New Bridge Inspection Approach with Joint UAV and DIC System,” was published in Structures Congress 2020.

Our nation’s bridges have been under an every-two-year mandated inspection for nearly 50 years. The current method of inspecting bridges is accomplished largely by visual assessment often using costly snooper trucks. Wacker describes this approach as “a passive approach that has provided subjective and unreliable data.”

Continue reading →

FPL Celebrates 110 Years of Innovation

Posted on by

Today, June 4, 2020, marks 110 years since the doors opened at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) and a world of possibility opened with them.

  • Original FPL building, 1910-1931
  • FPL headquarters, 1931
  • FPL’s Cenennial Research Facility, 2010

We could never summarize in one blog post all the incredible advances in the world of wood that have occurred since then. In fact, FPL has produced more than 20,000 publications over the years, all of which are available to anyone who finds them useful, be they fellow researchers, industry partners, or homeowners with a project to tackle. (Many are digitized here.)

Continue reading →

110 Years of FPL: Remembering the Statisticians

Posted on by

In celebration of 110 years of research at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), we are revisiting blog posts that detail some of our most interesting historic people, places, and projects. Enjoy!

Statistics is commonly viewed as the collection, collation, and presentation of numerical data. FPL has long recognized that the field of statistics is critical for testing research hypotheses and making inferences to untested populations. Statistics has provided extensive and powerful tools for designing studies, analyzing data, summarizing or modeling data, and interpreting results for many research studies at FPL.

Continue reading →

Searching for Natural Resistance through Infrared Spectroscopy

Posted on by

Closeup view of Western Junipier – By Syntheticmessiah – stock.adobe.com

Durability is one of the most important building qualities needed for timber products. It is measured by how well wood species can resist fungal decay or insect damage.

Some trees are just naturally better at resisting rot.

And as market and public demand increases for more naturally resistant wood that hasn’t been treated with potentially harmful preservatives, researchers are looking to the trees for answers.

That’s what PhD student Shahlinney Lipeh from Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM) in collaboration with Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) researcher Mark Mankowski and a group of international researchers are looking for through infrared spectroscopy.   

Continue reading →