Number 24 (Story #3), 7 March 1991 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein PRODUCING ORIENTED POLYMERS is like cooking spaghetti in reverse: scientists must take tangled polymer molecules and straighten them out by a variety of stretching and squeezing techniques. The resultant material can be stronger than steel (the lined-up covalent bonds reinforce each other) and a better conductor than copper (electricity flows better if the polymer's backbone is straight). Dupont's Kevlar, for example, is five times stronger than steel, although only along its principal axis (it is used to reinforce other materials). Oriented plastics are used in sporting goods and aerospace products, but so far their high costs and complicated processing have kept them from even wider applicability. New research may change this. Plastic batteries, pollution monitors, and "smart windows" which produce solar-photovoltaic electricity are a few of the anticipated products. (Science, 22 Feb.; contact Alan Heeger, UC Santa Barbara, 805-961-3184.)