Molly Brown of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and her colleagues have created a model using data from satellite remote sensing of crop growth and food prices.

Brown conceived the idea while working with organizations in Niger, West Africa, that provide information regarding failed crops and help address local farmers' worries about feeding their families. Brown's new approach could improve the ability for government and humanitarian aid officials to plan and respond to drought-induced food price increases in Niger and elsewhere.

On July 3, a NASA aircraft equipped with a state-of-the-art sensor provided emergency response officials with critical soil moisture data for several regions across Texas that were threatened by flooding. NASA responded to the heavy rains and flooding in Texas by redirecting a NASA research aircraft, the P-3B, to Texas after it completed an interagency project in Oklahoma.

The aircraft had been flying a sensor developed by the University of Colorado at Boulder, NOAA and U.S. Department of Agriculture that could provide detailed maps of ground surface water.

LSI (low-swirl injector) technology, developed by Robert Cheng of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, recently won a 2007 R&D 100 award from R&D magazine as one of the top 100 new technologies of the year for successfully using pure hydrogen as a fuel – a milestone that indicates a potential to help eliminate millions of tons of carbon dioxide and thousands of tons of NOx from power plants each year.

The LSI holds great promise for its near-zero emissions of nitrogen oxides, gases that are emitted during the combustion of fuels such as natural gas during the production of electricity.

If you take a strip of paper, twist one end by 180° and then stick the two ends together to form a ring, the result is called a Möbius strip, a geometric shape with only one surface and one edge. You can prove this by making a line along the strip with a pencil: Without lifting the pencil you get back to your starting point in the end—with the whole strip marked: at each point, both sides of the strip are marked by the line.

Ring-shaped aromatic molecules can also have a topology like that of the Möbius strip, with only one side. Polish researchers have now made a porphyrin-like ring that can do something its paper analogue can’t.

In 2004, Korean investigators announced the creation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, entailing transfer of genetic material from a cell in the body into an egg.

Research led by Kitai Kim, PhD, and George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, of the Children's Hospital Boston Stem Cell Program demonstrates that the Koreans created something entirely different – the world's first human embryonic stem cell to be derived by parthenogenesis, a process that creates an embryo containing genetic material only from the donor egg.

The report sheds new light on a now-discredited Korean embryonic stem cell line, setting the historical record straight and also establishing a much-needed set of standards for characterizing human embryonic stem cells.

Low-intensity electric fields can disrupt the division of cancer cells and slow the growth of brain tumors, suggest laboratory experiments and a small human trial, raising hopes that electric fields will become a new weapon for stalling the progression of cancer.

In the studies, the research team uses alternating electric fields that jiggle electrically charged particles in cells back and forth hundreds of thousands of times per second. The electric fields have an intensity of only one or two volts per centimeter. Such low-intensity alternating electric fields were once believed to do nothing significant other than heat cells.

An increasing body of evidence indicates that we should reduce the amount of salt in our diet. The American Medical Association (AMA), the American Heart Association (AHA), the American Dietetic Association (ADA), and the National Institutes of Health have begun a campaign to cut the salt intake of Americans by one-half. The AMA is even pushing the Food and Drug Administration to withdraw salt’s designation as “safe,” according to UCLA's Healthy Years.

“The consequences of too much salt are hypertension, or high blood pressure, which increases the risk of a stroke or heart attack,” says Amy Schnabel, MS, RD, Clinical Nutrition Manager at the UCLA Medical Center. Ninety percent of Americans will develop hypertension unless they take steps to prevent it.

Monkeys seem to learn the same way humans do, a new research study indicates.

“Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented to them passively,” said Nate Kornell, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in psychology and lead author of the study. “The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.”

In Kornell’s study, conducted when he was a psychology graduate student at Columbia University, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to place five photographs in a particular order. The photographs were displayed on a touch-screen computer monitor similar to those found on ATMs. When the monkeys pressed a correct photograph, a border appeared around it.

Why do we like some music and not others? Why does music feel right and why does it evoke certain moods? The brain's ability to segment the continual stream of sensory information into perceptual chunks and extract meaning, “event segmentation” functions, have long fascinated researchers.

In a series of experiments, a team led by Vinod Menon of Stanford University School of Medicine asked subjects to listen to symphonies of the English composer William Boyce. The symphonies were chosen because they are relatively short and comprise well-defined movements - changes in tempo, tonality, rhythm, and pitch, and brief silences.