Science News Archives

A western Nebraska meat business has settled a 2-month-old lawsuit after agreeing to following federal inspection laws governing businesses that sell to commercial customers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has designated the Big Island a primary natural disaster area because of losses farmers suffered from volcanic emissions this year.

In this July 29, 2008 file photo, rhesus macaque monkeys groom one another on Cayo Santiago, known as Monkey Island, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico .

The world's largest atom smasher on Monday broke the record for proton acceleration previously held by a U.S. lab, sending beams of the particles at 1.18 trillion electron volts around the massive machine.

A Texas researcher has found a way to reduce toxin in cottonseed that until now could only be eaten by cattle.

Sir Paul McCartney has appealed for "people power" to make the difference in the fight against global warming.

Sugar beet farmers in northern Colorado say they're celebrating the sweetest harvest in memory.

A soon-to-be-implemented policy for scientists who are permitted to conduct research in national parks will give the National Park Service a share of any profits from their work.

A Georgia woman has been arrested for having four children in a filthy home. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that an arrest warrant says 37-year-old Casey Abigail Robinson of Acworth faces charges of contributing to the deprivation of a minor because of the condition of the home.

AUSTRALIAN scientists are working to breed a sheep that belches less, as they look for ways to reduce harmful methane emissions from the country's woolly flocks, a researcher said on Sunday.

Agriculture Minister Brendan Smith today witnessed first hand the devastating impact of the recent floods on farmers in Co Galway.

Monday is the last day for Wisconsin residents to sign up for the list that bans telemarketing calls that goes into effect Jan.

Naked mole rats don't get cancer. They shrug off brushes with acid and age so well, some are older than the college-aged researchers handling them.

Singapore - A strong earthquake measuring 6.1 was measured near an uninhabited island north of New Zealand on Saturday, the United States Geological Survey said.

Older Americans who were raised on stories of the Great Depression and acquired lifelong habits of thrift now find themselves crowding soup kitchens and food pantries in greater numbers for the first time after seeing retirement funds, second jobs and nest eggs wiped out by recession.

A new dinosaur park located near Laurel, Maryland hasn't been open very long, but already one of its visitor's finds is headed to the Smithsonian.

Virginia Tech's Seismological Observatory says a small earthquake that struck central Virginia prompted numerous reports of weak to light shaking but it didn't cause any damage.

MADISON - The state has issued a consumer alert about Blue Marble Family Farm dairy products because it may not be properly pasteurized.

How could it be true in the land of plenty, in the midst of an obesity epidemic, skeptics wondered.

With the best of the crop off to market, growers say this year it's cheaper to leave leftovers on the trees than to pick and sell them for juice.

The bluish haze that has hung over the Third Street Diner's bar and booths for decades finally lifts next month as a new anti-smoking law takes hold in Virginia, a huge shift for a state whose tobacco habit dates to the Jamestown settlement some 400 years ago.

Authorities in Cleveland have asked a leading anthropologist and a forensic artist to help identify the remains of an 11th woman found inside the home of a suspected serial killer.

Gov. Jim Doyle has issued an executive order giving farmers another month to transport heavy harvest loads.

A strong earthquake struck off El Salvador's Pacific coast Thursday, sending people running from buildings in this Central American nation and in neighboring Guatemala.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Bill Golden survived more than 20 years in the U.S. Army and another 30 in law enforcement.

Stuttgart-based Riceland Foods Inc. says its sales for the fiscal year are up by 8 percent from the year before.

"The history of the Milky Way is encoded in its oldest fragments, globular clusters and other systems of stars that have witnessed the entire evolution of our galaxy," says Francesco Ferraro from the University of Bologna, lead author of a paper appearing in the November 26 issue of the journal Nature.

Nov. 25 - The drought in the Amazon has killed thousands of cattle and destroyed acres upon acres of crops and officials fear that the drought may worsen over the next few weeks.

Deere and Co. lost $223 million in the fourth quarter, reflecting big charges and a 28 percent slump in sales as demand for tractors, combines and construction equipment sagged amid the global economic downturn.

CALEXICO, Calif. a " Earthquakes continue to rattle the California-Mexico border but there are no reports of damage or injuries.The U.S. Geological Survey says a quake with a preliminary magnitude of 3.2 struck at 5:01 a.m. Wednesday in Mexico.

Savor that holiday sweet potato pie and those marshmallow yams while you can. Agricultural experts and industry officials expect enough sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving and Christmas, traditionally a high-demand period.

A flotilla of hundreds of icebergs that split off Antarctic ice shelves is drifting toward New Zealand and could pose a risk to ships in the south Pacific Ocean, officials said Tuesday.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says it aims to stop agricultural runoff in 41 watersheds in 12 states from ending up in the Mississippi River.

With more Americans going hungry than ever before, the Agriculture Department is concerned that dozens of states aren't adequately administering food stamp programs designed to provide food to low-income Americans.

Earthquakes struck both ends of California Tuesday morning but no damage or injuries are reported.

A powerful earthquake of magnitude 6.8 struck northeast of the South Pacific island nation of Tonga on Tuesday, the United States Geological Survey said, but a destructive tsunami was not expected.

Arkansas farmers say that a record amount of rainfall and flooding this year has put a strain on their crops and their infrastructure.

A nice November speeds up construction of a new technical center for high school and college students.

The readings at this 2-mile-high station show an upward curve as the world counts down to climate talks: Global warming gases have built up to record levels in the atmosphere, from emissions that match scientists' worst-case scenarios.

In this Sept. 10, 2008 file photo, European Center for Nuclear Research scientists control computer screens showing traces on Atlas experiment of the first protons injected in the Large Hadron Collider during its switch on operation in CERN's control room, near Geneva, Switzerland.

The featured speaker at the 2009 Nebraska Soybean Day and Machinery Expo is an agriculture business management specialist from Iowa.

An oil boom is under way in California's agricultural heartland, as evolving tastes and a trend toward healthy fare have transformed a profession as old as civilization: olive production for the extra virgin market.

Greenhouse gas emissions from European livestock and fertilisers exceed the carbon absorption of all the region's trees and soils, underlining the need to cap farms' contribution to climate change, a study shows.

It will soon be the season for holiday decorations, but state officials are urging homeowners to avoid hanging any wreaths or garland that may include invasive plant species.

Thousands of marine species eke out an existence in the ocean's pitch-black depths by feeding on the snowlike decaying matter that cascades down, and even sunken whale bones, according to a report released Sunday.

A magnitude 3.7 earthquake has rattled Southern California's Big Bear Lake area, followed by a sharp aftershock.The U.S. Geological Survey says the first quake struck at 7:55 a.m. Sunday, about seven miles north of Big Bear City.The same area was rocked by a 2.4 magnitude aftershock two-and-a-half minutes later.A San Bernardino County Sheriff's ...

An Ohio university is celebrating the International Year of Astronomy by displaying never-before-seen photos from NASA space telescopes.

Thiruvananthapuram, Nov 21 : The National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development has sanctioned Rs.49.53 crore for the development of the Kollam Technopark, an IT park coming up in Kollam, Kerala.

About 53mm of rain has fallen on the city between Saturday evening and Sunday morning, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Peter Blake said.

A thousand people were evacuated and traffic was stopped after the Galeras volcano erupted in southern Colombia without causing casualties, officials said Saturday.

Thousands of Spanish farmers took to the streets of Madrid to protest at the low prices they receive for their products and saying commercial middle men take too high a cut.

Five Vermont dairy farmers are being asked to provide records proving their workers are legal, federal immigration officials said Friday.

Business appears to be slowly improving in rural areas of 11 Midwest and Plains states, but the economy there remains weak, according to a new survey of bankers.

Federal immigration officials are cracking down on Vermont dairy farmers as part of a national effort, asking them to provide records to prove their workers are legal.

The Chinese government has held an American oil geologist on suspicion of stealing state secrets for nearly two years, prompting President Obama to raise the issue during his visit to Beijing this week, the American Embassy in Beijing said Friday.

This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A. Centaurus A is the nearest giant, elliptical galaxy, at a distance of about 11 million light-years. One of the most studied objects in the southern sky, by 1847 the unique appearance of this galaxy had already caught the attention of ...

They arrive at the meeting by U.S. military helicopter, politely accept a cup of tea and haggle over a U.S.-funded water project gone awry.

Maize, or corn, as it is commonly called by North American consumers, is one of the world's most important plants and the most valuable agricultural crop grown in the United States, representing $47 billion in annual value.

A former B-2 stealth bomber engineer accused of spying for China suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, expert witnesses for the prosecution and the defense testified in federal court Thursday.

Chrome OS: "Turning On a PC Should Be Like Turning On Your TV" Direct from Google headquarters, and liveblogged by John Paczkowski, Google's Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management and Matthew Papakipos, engineering director for Google Chrome OS, explain some of the advantages of the operating system.

Poor weather affects harvest; likely to be less pumpkin available this holiday Nestle Baking today announced that it expects a shortage of LIBBY'S Pumpkin on store shelves as the country enters the holiday season.

Sometime into his long detention by China's feared state security agents, American geologist Xue Feng had something to show U.S. consular officials on their monthly visit.

Are cramped chickens crazy chickens? Researchers are trying to answer that question through several studies that intend to take emotions out of an angry debate between animal welfare groups and producers.

A A A' National forests can be used as a carbon "sink" with vast numbers of trees absorbing carbon dioxide to help slow global warming, the Forest Service chief said Wednesday, but that goal must be balanced.

We're here at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual cloud computing event in San Francisco.

I recently discussed here the Tevatron results of searches for new Z bosons in electron-positron or dimuon samples collected by CDF and DZERO, pointing out that there seem to be a couple of intriguing upward fluctuations in the data. One of the dielectron fluctuations sits at a mass of 240 GeV, the other, also in the dielectron spectrum, is at about 720 GeV.

Neither is compelling.

A new image of the bulge at the center of a distant spiral galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is giving astronomers insight into how these galactic paunches form.

The head of a U.N. food agency expressed regret Wednesday that an anti-hunger summit failed to result in precise promises of funding, and critics said the meeting had only thrown crumbs to the world's 1 billion people without enough to eat.

Researchers recently found an insect in north Georgia that has never before been reported in the Western Hemisphere - and its arrival could be both a blessing and a curse.

More than $98 billion in taxpayer dollars spent by government agencies was wasted, much of it on questionable claims for tax credits and Medicare benefits, representing an increase of $26 billion from the previous year.

Nine days after the launch a single electrical splice overheated because it had been badly soldered, and disaster struck Photo: PA The 'Big Bang' machine was launched with great fanfare last year before its spectacular failure from a bad electrical connection.

Gross domestic product - that traditional way of measuring economic growth - has won out over a new happiness index in France.

A 6.6 magnitude earthquake has struck the Queen Charlotte basin, off British Columbia's north coast.

Tristesse Jones will probably never drive a tractor or guide a combine through rows of soybeans at harvest time.

Northern Mexico's Yaqui Indians buried their lost warriors after a two-year effort to rescue the remains from New York's American Museum of Natural History, where the victims of one of North America's last Indian massacres lay in storage for more than a century.

The U.S. Geological Survey says a magnitude 4.6 earthquake has shaken a remote area of the Mojave Desert in Southern California.

Today, November 16, is the 35th anniversary of a coded radar beam that was directed out into the galaxy by Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, who used the enormous radio telescope dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, to send a message from the Earth. Those signals are now 35 light years away. They have already passed the nearest stars, and may even have been intercepted, with a reply heading our way.

More than one in seven American households struggled to put enough food on the table in 2008, the highest number since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began tracking food security levels in 1995.

A UN summit on the plight of the planet's one billion hungry opens in Rome on Monday.

Sunflower crops could set records in the nation's top two producing states this year, helping to blunt a drop in nationwide production and ensure a healthy supply for processors in the United States and Canada.

Two earthquakes have struck under the ocean near the Channel Islands, resulting in rumbles felt as far away as the greater Los Angeles area.

Two seniors in South Florida spent the past three years dealing with more than 60,000 bees that made the roof of their house their home.

A U.N. agency says a deal has been reached with the Islamic Development Bank for $1 billion in funding to help develop agriculture in poor countries.

Plans to raise the water level behind China's massive Three Gorges dam to full capacity this month - which would mark the symbolic culmination of the decades-old project - have stalled amid a worsening drought and reports of increased landslide risks.

A strong 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck far northern Argentina Saturday near its border with Chile and Bolivia, the US Geological Survey said.

Cool, wet fall weather that's caused mold to appear in some of Indiana's corn crop is now creating problems for livestock and ethanol producers.

Jacques Diouf began the 24-hour strike at 8 p.m. Friday in the lobby of the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Abiero remembers it was not too long ago that his neighbors went to bed hungry. Now they and thousands of others in the lowlands of western Kenya are able to get year-round work as farm laborers or earn money from their once-neglected rice paddies.

Jenn Boneza remembers when the white sandy beach near the boat ramp in her hometown was wide enough for people to build sand castles.

Foreign investment is trickling into Mozambique's agricultural sector. But instead of growing crops for food, companies are planting jatropha for biof ...

LOS ANGELES a ' The lunar dud for space enthusiasts has become a watershed event for NASA.

The software will help safeguard virtual server environments and allows businesses a more secure path for transitioning critical assets to virtual enterprise data centers.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is planning to join a 24-hour fast to spotlight the plight of the more than one billion people around the world who go to bed hungry every night.

Michigan hunters could see fewer deer when firearm season starts Sunday because of a relatively late corn harvest.

The state Agriculture Department says wet conditions have delayed what looks like a near-record harvest for many South Dakota farmers and raised concerns about a Dec.

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was promoting a complex legislative package to rebuild California's water system, he often appeared alongside farmers who were unable to cultivate their land amid a third year of drought and federal pumping restrictions.

The deputy head of the U.N. children's agency said Thursday that a famine is looming in southern Sudan because of scarce rainfall and inadequate foreign funds for the region.

A strong earthquake struck northern Chile early Friday, briefly knocking out power to a city but otherwise causing no major damages, authorities said.

A Cargill executive testified Thursday that he did not check to see if company farmers were following an environmental handbook he helped compile in 2002 that warned them not to spread excess chicken manure on their land because the runoff could pollute area water.

A draft declaration for next week's U.N. food summit would commit world leaders to a new hunger-fighting strategy by pledging to increase agricultural development aid to help the world's 1 billion hungry people feed themselves.

Ohio wants the federal government to allow an industrial insecticide to be used in homes to fight bedbugs, tiny bloodsucking insects that continue to be a problem here and in other states.

Tropical Storm Ida may not have done much damage when it hit the Gulf Coast this week, but its wind and rain compounded the misery for Southern farmers already coping with a wet, difficult harvest season.

Hewlett-Packard said Wednesday it plans to acquire 3Com, maker of network switching and routing products.

A fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex that failed to sell at auction in Las Vegas last month has been bought by a private buyer who intends to see it displayed in a museum, an auctioneer told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Why can't chimps speak? Connie Casey checks in for a flight to Denver holding Mikayla, her 15-month-old chimpanzee, at Lambert St.

Ohio wants federal permission to use a strong weapon against a growing problem of bedbugs.

Scientists say they've discovered a new dinosaur species in South Africa that may help explain how the creatures evolved into the largest animals on land.

Newly released estimates for U.S. wheat, corn and soybean crops may put to rest fears that a wet harvest season in many parts of the country could cut into production.

Pope Benedict XVI has made strengthening the relationship between faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.

President Barack Obama has chosen Rajiv Shah, a medical doctor and currently a senior official at the Department of Agriculture dealing with food security, to run the U.S. Agency for International Development, the officials said.

A good part of basic research in fundamental physics focuses on the definition, the prediction, and the measurement of quantities which put the current theory -the standard model- to the test in the most stringent way possible.

Georgia State University is joining with 16 other colleges across the country to form a network of virtual computer labs that make educational and research resources available online 24 hours a day.

Egypt and the Getty Conservation Institute announced Tuesday a five year project to restore the Tomb of Tutankhamun, the boy king whose golden mask and artifacts have long awed the world.

The United Nations World Food Program on Monday hailed the declaration of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, adding that China has set an example to the world that hunger can be beaten in a generation.

An artist's conception shows the LightSail-1 craft, consisting of three CubeSats at the center of four lightweight triangular sails.

Google Inc. is buying mobile advertising network AdMob for $750 million, underscoring the Internet search leader's determination to ensure its marketing machine reaches the growing number of people surfing the Web on phones.

A strong earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 hit off the Pacific island nation of Fiji late on Monday but it was too deep to generate a destructive tsunami, US geologists said.

VITALY Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin's purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness.

A broken pelvis and injured knee nearly put an end to North Dakota farmer Dustin Lien's harvest, but a group that helps injured farmers and the families of those who have died came to his aid.

COKER CREEK, Tenn. - The U.S. Forest Service has begun to uncover the remains of a fort used to temporarily house migrating Cherokee along the Trail of Tears more than 170 years ago.

A strong earthquake was reported in the ocean off Indonesia on Sunday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

Massachusetts authorities plan to survey trees in Boston and Springfield for signs of the invasive Asian longhorned beetles.

The Indian government is pushing ahead with economic reforms aimed at achieving a growth rate of more than 7 percent next year but will make sure the benefits reach the poor, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Sunday.

Many of the patients who fill the day are bereft, angry, broken. Their stories are gruesome, their distress lasting, and the process of recovery exhausting.

There are few songs as mournful and haunting as Taps played for a fallen warrior, and on an isolated combat outpost in southern Afghanistan it has been sounded for David Baker, a 22-year-old Marine lance corporal who was just six weeks short of going home when he was killed in an explosion.

Gov. Chet Culver is easing road rules for truck drivers who are carrying propane into Iowa.

Geologists plan to drill a pair of mile-deep holes in southern Idaho in a hunt for geothermal fields that could be tapped to produce energy.

The Obama administration intends to seek resolution to a lawsuit filed by American Indian farmers who alleged discrimination in the granting of federal agricultural loans over three decades.

North Carolina's highest court says three cigarette companies can stop making payments to tobacco farmers in Maryland and Pennsylvania through a decade-old settlement.

Dinosaur footprints have been discovered by scientists in Nelson. The 70 million-year-old fossils are the first dinosaur footprints recognised in New Zealand and the first evidence of dinosaurs in the South Island.

An animal rights group on Friday asked a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency to look into an owner's treatment of a circus elephant that escaped and was hit by a sport utility vehicle on a northwestern Oklahoma highway.

FILE - In this file photo taken Aug. 4, 2009, dying crops and weeds stand in a flooded field near... FILE - In this file photo taken Aug.

The smells and sounds of country life are greeting Prince Charles and his wife Camilla today at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto.

Airborne nitrogen pollution from vehicle exhaust and farm fertilizer is turning algae in the alpine lakes of Rocky Mountain National Park into junk food for fish, a study says.

CAMDEN, N.J. - A New Jersey food store owner and two employees have admitted defrauding the federal food stamp program of more than $280,000. Mehal Mothon, who owned a Citgo Food Mart in Westville, pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy to embezzle from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program.

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources has issued an Emergency Order to Suspend Surface Mining for a mine located where the Nile landslide happened .

When the news broke on Wednesday that a domestic cat had come down with H1N1 swine flu, probably transmitted to the feline by sick owners, many people no doubt wondered how vulnerable their own pets were to the illness.

No evidence of De Soto's path between Tallahassee and North Carolina has been found until now, and few sites have been located anywhere.

Hartwell Huddleston returned the extra combine he bought to help harvest what looked to be one of his best soybean crops ever.

A Jurassic Park is coming to the St. Louis Science Center this weekend. 20 life-sized animatronics dinosaurs will be on display.

This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, resolves a ten-year mystery surrounding this object.

Cisco Systems Inc. is forecasting revenue growth for the first time in a year, offering further evidence that orders are rising again after passing what CEO John Chambers called a "tipping point" in the downturn this summer.

The swine flu virus has been confirmed in a cat treated at the Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine.

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A federal Agriculture Department official in southeastern Minnesota is announcing $17 million in grants to address the needs of beginning farmers and ranchers.

Cisco and EMC Tuesday kicked off a cloud-chasing joint venture called Acadia that includes VMware and Intel as minority investors.

Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. on Tuesday agreed to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died.

The first thing to realize is that any good scientist got that way with generous and continuous doses of skepticism.

Schools are doing a better job of identifying students who are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches, but some states are much better than others, the Agriculture Department says in a report to Congress.

ONTPELIER, Vt. - A Vermont slaughterhouse ordered closed Friday after video showed calves kicked, shocked and cut while conscious had its operating license suspended three times earlier this year for similar conduct.

Bug spray that produces a fog to kill insects is likely to blame for the death of a 10-month-old South Carolina boy, and his 2-year-old brother was critically injured by the fumes, authorities said Monday.

I was under the impression that the general subject of love, in all its oblique insanity, was the subject of study and much woeful writing by poets, mostly. That is, until I came across neuroscientist Larry Young's absolutely bizarre work on the neurochemistry of love, attachment, cuddles and hugs.

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90 percent of black youngsters will be on food stamps at some point during childhood, and fallout from the current recession could push those numbers even higher, researchers say.

Two federal agencies that put Americans at risk for identity-theft-like problems have fixed a glitch that linked U.S. Social Security numbers to those issued by three foreign countries, officials said.

White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers will lead a high-level meeting on Monday to discuss the state of the economy, job creation and ways to achieve sustainable growth.

WIMER, Ore. _ Vern and Gianaclis Caldwell do a lot of the typical things that make a small farm self-sufficient. Besides the 40-some dwarf Nigerian goats they milk to make artisanal cheeses, they also raise chickens for meat and eggs, a steer for beef, horses to ride and vegetables for the table.

THE mysterious people who etched the "Nazca lines" across deserts in Peru hastened their own demise by clearing forests 1500 years ago, according to a study.

Britain's Prince Charles, left, and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, right, are shown in this file photo.

A mild earthquake has rattled parts of central California. TheA U.S. Geological Survey says a 3.7-magnitude temblor struck Sunday morning near the Pinnacles National Monument.

Bernice and Jerry Angely like to show visitors the singed T-shirt a friend was wearing when their water well exploded and shot flames 30 feet high.

A new farm subsidy program created to spur the development of next-generation biofuels could turn out to be a cash cow for a decidedly old business - paper mills and their suppliers.

Co-chairs have been named to the 18-member search advisory committee for the position of vice president and vice chancellor for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.