A visualization of satellite data captured and processed January 1–20, 2003, by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows heavy pollution from China and Southeast Asia blowing out over the Pacific Ocean. The near-real time capability represented by the image is a breakthrough for NCAR team members working with the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument aboard NASA’s Terra satellite.

The image shows levels of carbon monoxide (CO) in a

Although sweet, bitter and umami (monosodium glutamate) tastes are different, researchers are finding that information about each of these tastes is transmitted from the various taste receptors via a common intracellular signaling pathway.

The identification of a common pathway runs counter to widespread belief among some researchers in the taste field who have long held the view that the different tastes require distinct machinery within the cell to transduce their signals to the brain, wh

Scientists study the affects of nitrogen fertilizer applied to corn hybrids

Scientists at the USDA-ARS, Jamie Whitten, Delta States Research Center in Stoneville, MS, have found that Bt concentrations in young corn plants are directly influenced by the amount of nitrogen fertilizer applied at planting. The research is published in the January-February 2003 issue of Agronomy Journal.

Hybrid corn cultivars genetically modified to have the Bt-producing gene synthesize special p

US fertility experts today (Thursday 6 February) published the first conclusive evidence that lead is linked to male infertility.

A report in Europe’s leading reproductive medicine journal Human Reproduction[1] concludes that exposure to lead damages sperm function and may be a contributory cause of unexplained male infertility.[2]

The findings have led principal investigator Dr Susan Benoff to urge doctors to measure lead in seminal plasma when evaluating men from couples with unex

The unique capabilities of a NASA earth-observing satellite have allowed researchers to view the effects of a major earthquake that occurred in 2001 in Northern India near the border of Pakistan.

Lead author Bernard Pinty of the Institute for Environment and Sustainability in the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy, and colleagues from the U.S., France and Germany, used the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite to o

Dr. Tyler Jacks of MIT and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Karen Cichowski of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues have discovered how neurofibromin, a key regulator of the ras oncogene, is, itself, regulated. This discovery has promising therapeutic implications for the treatment of neurofibromatosis type I (NF1), a common hereditary disease that results from mutations in the neurofibromin gene, as well as the ~30% of human tumors that have altered Ras a