On the slopes of Mt. Kenya and the terraced hills of Nepal local farmers are using their cattle in much the same way as scientists use test tubes.

They may be illiterate and continents apart. And there isn’t a laboratory for hundreds of miles. But when it comes to animal nutrition they can teach western scientists a thing or two about the feeding value of the diverse range of tree species found in the hills around them.

While western laboratories break down and then analyse the sep

How fat contributes to high blood pressure is the focus of a new study at the Medical College of Georgia that is part of a National Institutes of Health initiative to understand the relationship between obesity and cardiovascular disease.

“You have obesity and you have hypertension. Where is the link?” says Dr. Gregory A. Harshfield, principal investigator on the $1.4 million grant from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute that will study 160 adolescents, half lean and ha

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves, for the first time, from a super-massive black hole. The “note” is the deepest ever detected from an object in the universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.

The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster, located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health, has reached a milestone in its efforts to support accelerated development of malaria vaccines. Working with an international group of public and private partners, NIAID has launched its first trial of a candidate malaria vaccine in a country where malaria is endemic. The Phase I trial, taking place in Mali, seeks to confirm the safety and immunogenicity in adults of a candidate vaccine called

Scientists looking for ways to clean up a common, persistent type of organic pollutant have developed an approach that not only restores the power of a naturally occurring pollution buster but also boosts it to levels of effectiveness that they can’t currently explain.

“It’s safe to say that we don’t fully understand why this approach works so well, but we’ll take it and develop it and figure out the details as we go,” Gerald Meyer, professor of chemistry in the Krieger

When Benjamin in “The Graduate” was told to go into plastics, computers were in their infancy and silicon technology ruled. Now, conducting organic polymers are infiltrating the electronics sphere and the watchword is once again plastics, according to Penn State researchers.

“For plastic circuits we cannot use the old processing,” says Dr. Qing Wang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. “Photolithography and silicon technologies require harsh environments and plastics ca