Portable inspection devices that detect food safety and quality problems are being developed by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists. Recent food safety outbreaks highlight the need for "space-age" ways to prevent such problems at every step in the food production process -- from farm field to grocery store or restaurant.

Scientists led by Yud-Ren Chen at the ARS Instrumentation and Sensing Laboratory, Beltsville, Md., are designing such portable inspection devices by adapting optical technology used for remote sensing of Earth.

Prototypes include binoculars with lenses that detect fecal matter on meat, produce or processing equipment--as well as diseases or quality defects.

A giant cloud half the size of the United States has been imaged on Saturn’s moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft. The cloud may be responsible for the material that fills the lakes discovered last year by Cassini's radar instrument.

Cloaked by winter's shadow, this cloud has now come into view as winter turns to spring. The cloud extends down to 60 degrees north latitude, is roughly 2400 kilometers in diameter and engulfs almost the entire north pole of Titan.

The new image was acquired on 29 December 2006, by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS).

A little-known lipid plays a big role in helping us grow from a hollow sphere of stem cells into human beings, researchers have found.

They found that in the first few days of life, ceramide helps stem cells line up to form the primitive ectoderm from which embryonic tissues develop, says Dr. Erhard Bieberich, biochemist at the Medical College of Georgia.

Probably 90 percent of ceramide gathers at the top or apical end of these early stem cells, literally helping cells have direction. “We have cell polarity, an up and down, a head and foot of the cell, and that is what ceramide most likely regulates,” says Dr. Bieberich.

Fluctuations in sex hormone levels during women's menstrual cycles affect the responsiveness of their brains' reward circuitry, an imaging study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has revealed. While women were winning rewards, their circuitry was more active if they were in a menstrual phase preceding ovulation and dominated by estrogen, compared to a phase when estrogen and progesterone are present.

Investigators from the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have made a breakthrough in identifying functional elements in the human genome, according to a report published online today in Nature Genetics.

While the DNA sequence can identify genes (the ‘what’) within the genome, it cannot answer the more fundamental questions of ‘how,’ ‘when’ and ‘where’ gene products are expressed. However, the LICR team and collaborators have developed a novel method to identify and predict the ‘promoter’ and ‘enhancer’ regions that switch on transcription, the first step in gene expression.