An Iowa State University agronomy professor is using erosion control methods to restore the Sahel and Niger River in West Africa.

Andrew Manu, associate professor of soil science, has been working with the people of Niger to restore degraded lands in the Sahel, the region of West Africa that separates the Sahara Desert from the savannah. Land degradation is threatening the economic stability of the region. “There is hope in the Sahel,” Manu said. “We can restore the Sahel and make

Reduced adaptability, hyperactivity, and disturbances in memory and learning functions. These are deficiencies mice and rats evince when exposed to bromide flame retardants, such as those found in computers, textiles, and other materials in our surroundings, during the period when the brain develops most rapidly.

Our environment contains a multitude of pollutants, including bromide flame retardants (polybromide diphenylethers, PBDEs) used in plastics, electronic circuit boards, c

Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD) In Humans

The Institute of Food Science & Technology, through its Public Affairs and Technical & Legislative Committees, has authorised the following Information Statement, dated October 2004, replacing the Statement of October 2001 and any previous version.

Special Note

This updated Information Statement takes account of available data and published research up to

Rich pecan pie is a long-time favorite dessert of the holiday season. But this year, the amount of pecans harvested will be dramatically down due to substantial damage from the 2004 hurricanes, say plant health specialists with The American Phytopathological Society (APS).

Pecan growers in Georgia and Alabama, two of the primary pecan growing areas were already expecting a light production year due to reduced nut set on many cultivars, said Tim Brenneman, APS member and plant p

Scientists have produced a potential solution to a problem fishing activity which costs the industry millions of pounds and has a major impact on the marine environment worldwide.

A team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, writing in the academic journal Marine Policy, say fishermen should be given incentives not to return unwanted fish and other marine animals – known as ’discards’ – back into the sea after they are caught in their trawlers’ nets.

The study fo

Yesterday, an important milestone was reached in the development of ESA’s GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) mission, when a contract, worth €7.8 million, was signed between ESA and the Institute for Astronomical and Physical Geodesy (IAPG) from the Technical University of Munich.

The contract means that the scientific data resulting from the GOCE mission will be analysed by a consortium of 10 European universities and research institutes led by

Some of the first written evidence of food taboos can be found in Leviticus in the Bible, forbidding the consumption of fish and underwater creatures without fins or scales, among other dietary restrictions. Throughout the world in different cultures and religions, a variety of dietary restrictions exist. The origin of these rules is often debated. For Alpina Begossi, Natalia Hanazaki and Rossano Ramos (Universidade de Campinas, Brazil), the question of food taboos led to an investigation of t

Region once slated for logging supports tool-making chimps

Scientists have discovered that a remote rainforest in Central Africa, saved from logging by a collaboration among the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, a timber company and the Republic of Congo, is home to a population of innovative, tool-making chimpanzees that “fish” for termite dinners. According to a study in the November issue of the journal The American Naturalist, chimps living in the 100-square-mile

Microbial processes ultimately determine whether arsenic builds to dangerous levels in groundwater, say researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Remediation may be as simple as stimulating certain microbes to grow.

Arsenic contamination is a serious threat to human health. In the Ganges Delta of Bangladesh, for example, chronic exposure to arsenic has been linked to serious medical conditions, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease and a variety

A new Michael Jordan of toxins isn’t required to increase crop protection against bugs as long as the right genes are strategically placed to take their shots at destructive insects, researchers report.

Plants modified with protectant genes designed to kill resistant insects can extend the usefulness of currently used pest-control methods and delay the development of pesticide-resistant bugs, according to Purdue University scientists and their collaborators from the University

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA scientists studying Mount St. Helens are using high-tech Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology to analyze changes in the surface elevation of the crater, which began deforming in late September 2004.

With data derived from airborne LIDAR, scientists can accurately map, often in exquisite detail, the dimensions of the uplift and create better models to forecast volcanic hazards. LIDAR shows, in the two weeks before Oct. 4, the new upl

Scientists in the department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University have devised a method to precisely date the timing and temperature of a meteorite impact on Mars that led to ejection of a piece of the planet into space and its eventual impact on Earth.

Meteorites are the main source of mass exchange between planets and carry with them characteristic clues about the nature and history of the planets or planetesimals where they originated, the impacts that dislodged them, a

Retiring croplands and switching to no-till agriculture can contribute in a modest way to reducing the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but doubling fuel efficiencies of cars and light trucks would achieve much greater results, according to two Duke University ecologists.

In an analysis to be published the week of Oct. 25, 2004, in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Robert Jackson and William Schlesinger of Duke’s Nichola

The program developed by Russian specialists of the North-Caucasian Scientific Research Institute of Gardening and Viticulture (Russian Agricultural Academy, Krasnodar) allows to select cultures, horticultural crops and other agricultural specimen the most profitable for a given locality. The development was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Fund for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises (FASIE). If the program’s advice is used competently, there will be no n

Insects and other invertebrates are the arena for the evolution of new infectious diseases in humans, new research shows.

Scientists now believe that not only are insects the carriers of some existing diseases but they are also the vehicle where recently emerging highly infectious diseases, such as the plague that killed millions in the 14th and 17th Centuries, evolve. Writing in the October edition of Nature Reviews: Microbiology, the researchers point to the large reservoir of d

Remains of a dinosaur new to Russia have been found in the town of Blagoveshchensk and described by a Russian paleontologist. Previously, remains of the nearest relations of this pangolin – Kerberosaur – were found only in North America.

An unusual scull of a large dinosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous (approximately 70 million years ago) was found in the territory of Blagoveshchensk by paleontologist Yuri Bolotsky, specialist of the Amir Comprehensive Scientific Research Ins