Posts filed under 'In the news'
News from TheScientist.com Posted by Bob Grant
Historically short-shrifted by federal funding bodies, academic agricultural research was recently promised redemption: a federal funding agency of its very own that will award competitive grants in a fashion similar to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). But will the new agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), be able to put public-sector agricultural science on an equal footing with biomedical research? Read more
October 27th, 2009
This is National Pollinator Week, a time to appreciate the essential contribution that pollinators make to our abundant food supply.
There are some events planned in Ohio and other states as part of this week-long celebration. Visit the Pollinator Partnership to see what’s happening here and elsewhere.
The Beekeeper, a blog by Kim Flottum, has some interesting information on bee-related issues.
June 22nd, 2009
World Environment Day (WED) was established by the UN General Assembly in 1972 to mark the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
Commemorated yearly on 5 June, WED is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action. The day’s agenda is to:
Give a human face to environmental issues;
Empower people to become active agents of sustainable and equitable development;
Promote an understanding that communities are pivotal to changing attitudes towards environmental issues;
Advocate partnership which will ensure all nations and peoples enjoy a safer and more prosperous future.
The theme for WED 2009 is ‘Your Planet Needs You-UNite to Combat Climate Change’. It reflects the urgency for nations to agree on a new deal at the crucial climate convention meeting in Copenhagen some 180 days later in the year, and the links with overcoming poverty and improved management of forests.
This year’s host is Mexico which reflects the growing role of the Latin American country in the fight against climate change, including its growing participation in the carbon markets.
Mexico is also a leading partner in UNEP’s Billion Tree Campaign. The country, with the support of its President and people, has spearheaded the pledging and planting of some 25 per cent of the trees under the campaign. Accounting for around 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the country is demonstrating its commitment to climate change on several fronts.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon states that the WED celebration will “further underline Mexico’s determination to manage natural resources and deal with the most demanding challenge of the 21st century – climate change.”
June 5th, 2009
From The Morung Express:
The 22nd day of the month of May is celebrated every year as the International day for biological diversity. It is a United Nations–sanctioned international holiday for the promotion of biodiversity issues. Biological diversity includes all life on earth and comprises of not only the plants and animals that we see but also the microscopic organisms that live in the soil, the bacteria in our digestive tracts, and the myriad biological processes that sustain life on earth.
Read more here!
May 21st, 2009
CABI today has announced free access to its specialist Global Health database – the definitive database for public health information – www.cabdirect.org/globalhealth
Simultaneously CABI has developed a Swine flu ‘dashboard’ that brings together up-to-the-minute information on the virus (http://www.netvibes.com/cabialerts).The ‘dashboard’ includes resources from CABI and critical advice from key health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
The Global Health database brings together global knowledge on every aspect of influenza since 1910. The knowledge it contains could provide a key weapon in health researchers’ response in understanding and controlling the virus.
Much of the data in Global Health is derived from publications that have long since vanished. They tell us a great deal about past pandemics, from rates and patterns of transmission, duration, timing of epidemiological peaks, geographical distribution of the disease, government preparedness and quarantine provisions through to effects on different age and social groups, severity in developing versus developed countries, symptoms, causes of mortality (secondary problems, especially pneumonia, were devastating in the Spanish flu) and mortality rates.
By opening the door to a wealth of historical information on past pandemics, the Global Health database has the potential to reveal vital clues in the international fight against swine flu (influenza A – H1N1).
May 5th, 2009
The Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, based in Sacramento, California, “seeks to compile and publish primary source accounts from the volunteers who worked with Cesar Chavez to build his farmworker movement during the period, 1962-1993.”
The site features essays written by farmworker strikers and volunteers from the 1960s through the 1980s — “first hand accounts by those who helped to build the farmworker movement.” Also included are poetry, manuscripts, photos, music, oral history, discussion and archives — all of which document Cesar Chavez and his farmworker movement 1962-1993.
Go to http://farmworkermovement.org for more information.
February 26th, 2009
“Public health and agriculture are large and diverse fields, but both involve fundamental issues that affect everyone. Our health, our food system and our environment are all intricately - and intimately - connected. Yet, for those who want to understand these connections it can be difficult to simultaneously access information about agriculture and public health.
The Agriculture & Public Health Gateway is a project of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. The Gateway provides a central place to access information about public health, agriculture, and the links between these two fields. It can be a useful resource for public health and agricultural professionals, advocacy and community organizations, policy makers, journalists, and educators.”
November 5th, 2008
The current issue of Wired Magazine presents a unique graphical perspective on the world food situation in an article “The Future of Food: How Science Will Solve the Next Global Crises.”
October 31st, 2008
7 October 2008, Rome - Biofuel policies and subsidies should be urgently reviewed in order to preserve the goal of world food security, protect poor farmers, promote broad-based rural development and ensure environmental sustainability, FAO said today in a new edition of its annual flagship publication The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) 2008.
Read more from the FAO press release.
October 9th, 2008
OSU’s Dept. of Food, Agricultural, and Biological Engineering has been ranked in the top 10 as one of the best undergraduate agricultural engineering programs in the nation, according to U.S. News and World Report. Read entire news release.
August 27th, 2008
The USDA Economics Research Service has issued a side-by-side comparison of the new farm bill with the previous legislation. “Summarized but substantive, it offers a time-saving reference to farm bill provisions. In addition to key provisions and details by Title, the side-by-side includes links to related ERS publications and to analyses of previous farm acts.”
August 25th, 2008
An excerpt from examiner.com (Cleveland Edition):
Jun 3, 2008 6:22 PM By STEPHEN MAJORS, AP
COLUMBUS, Ohio (Map, News) - A potential casualty of the skyrocketing price of oil is something that doesn’t first come to mind: polymers, the materials that go into making everyday items like grocery bags, yogurt containers and baby bottles.
Ohio, the leading polymer producer in the country, is trying to maintain its dominance in the field by thinking ahead to an economy less dependent on oil - the predominant source of the polymers that make up countless products.
Read the rest of the story.
June 5th, 2008
A recent article in the Washington Post highlights the budget constraints affecting the National Agricultural Library. Essential services and collections are threatened by proposed cuts to the NAL budget; these cuts would also affect agricultural libraries at the state level which depend on this national library.
May 5th, 2008
The Internal Revenue Service today warned taxpayers to beware of several current e-mail and telephone scams that use the IRS name as a lure. The IRS expects such scams to continue through the end of tax return filing season and beyond.
The IRS cautioned taxpayers to be on the lookout for scams involving proposed advance payment checks. Although the government has not yet enacted an economic stimulus package in which the IRS would provide advance payments, known informally as rebates to many Americans, a scam which uses the proposed rebates as bait has already cropped up. read more…
January 31st, 2008
From The Columbus Dispatch (Saturday, Dec. 15, 2007):
Bird flu resurfaces in parts of Asia
Saturday, December 15, 2007 2:55 AM
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Bird flu has resurfaced in parts of Asia, with human deaths reported in Indonesia and China and fresh outbreaks plaguing other countries during the winter when the virus typically flares.
Indonesia, the nation hardest hit by the H5N1 virus, announced its 93rd death yesterday. A 47-year-old man died a day earlier in a Jakarta hospital, said Health Ministry spokesman Joko Suyono. The man fell ill on Dec. 2 and was admitted with flu-like symptoms, becoming Indonesia’s 115th person infected with the disease.
In China, the military in eastern Nanjing banned the sale of poultry this week after a father and son came down with the disease earlier this month. Health officials confirmed the 24-year-old man died from the virus a day before his father, 52, became sick. It was the country’s 17th bird-flu death.
Most human cases have been linked to contact with sick birds.
December 20th, 2007
The science gateway that makes science information more accessible and useful to researchers, teachers, and learners wherever they are located commemorated its 5th Anniversary today.
Founded December 5, 2002, in response to the profound effect of the World Wide Web on science communications, Science.gov (www.science.gov) connected citizens to science as never before. Today, Science.gov Version 4.0 is available and searches more than 50 million pages of science information from thousands of Web sites as well as from deep Web databases inaccessible by Google and other popular search engines.
December 5th, 2007
“If you’re concerned with how far food travels before it gets to your plate, you just may be a ‘locavore,’ the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 Word of the Year… The ‘locavore’ movement encourages consumers to buy from farmers’ markets or even to grow or pick their own food, arguing that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Locavores also shun supermarket offerings as an environmentally friendly measure, since shipping food over long distances often requires more fuel for transportation.” Read the rest of the press release.
The New Oxford American Dictionary is available as a part of the OhioLINK Electronic Book Center.
November 14th, 2007
From InfoFarm: the NAL Blog: I’ve been watching a lot of baseball lately (Go Tribe!), and in between pitches last night, I found myself thinking again about how the grounds crew cuts those designs into the stadium grass. Cleveland’s Jacobs Field showed only a simple checkerboard pattern, but earlier in the week, Fenway Park was sporting two perfect “sox,” looking as if they’d been hand-stitched into the infield. –more–
October 19th, 2007
Peter Young, Director of the National Agricultural Library (NAL) announces InfoFarm: The NAL Blog a new blog and invites partners and customers worldwide to join in a conversation with NAL staff on a wide range of topics. “We want to have a conversation, one that’s more like a chat on the front porch and less like a meeting in the boardroom. From the library side, we’ll share a bit about what we do, how our day went (professionally speaking, of course), some nifty thing we learned, or a compelling story in the news. In return, we hope to hear from you. Share your experiences with us as an institution, with your efforts to find information, or with your life and work in the world of agriculture, food, nutrition, animal care, the environment, whatever. The result, we believe, will be a mutually beneficial dialogue, a compelling exchange of ideas and maybe even an entertaining break in your day.”
October 19th, 2007
From Wisconsin State Journal:
It was back in 1995 that a group of Minnesota middle schoolers shocked the scientific community when they returned from a field trip to report that more than half the frogs they’d captured had major deformities.
Some had five or more hind legs or even no legs at all.
But in the investigations that followed, it quickly became clear that cases of deformed amphibians went far beyond that Minnesota pond and were actually fairly widespread across the U.S.
The big question was, why?
To learn more read the rest of the Wisconsin State Journal news article and the research study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).
ALSO:
Similar articles in PNAS
Similar articles in PubMed
September 28th, 2007
FROM NPR.ORG:
All Things Considered, September 4, 2007 - As the Senate reconvenes this week, one agenda item will be the regular five-year update of federal farm programs. The House passed its version - all 742 pages of it - just before the August recess. One contentious issue is always sugar, and this year is no different.
So far, the sugar producers are winning. Their lobbyists have not only fended off attacks on sugar-price supports, but they’ve also persuaded the House to give sugar a new break - its own piece of federal ethanol policy.
LISTEN TO THE REST OF THE STORY!
September 5th, 2007
NASA’s Johnson Space Center invited The Kitchen Sisters to visit its “hidden kitchen.” On the eve of NASA’s scheduled launch of space shuttle Atlantis, The Kitchen Sisters present a brief history of space food.
Read or listen to the rest of the story from NPR.
June 7th, 2007
The power to transform research communication may be at each scientist’s fingertips, says Alma Swan in a recent article published in American Scientist Online . The author suggests that “open access can advance science and will do so more and more effectively as more scientists make their work freely available.”
May 14th, 2007
Ohio State Universitys Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) has received a $2.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help boost science education in Ohio schools and prepare the future generation of U.S. scientists.
Part of NSFs Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) Program, the grant will team up OARDC researchers, OSU Extension specialists and graduate students in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) with elementary and secondary school teachers and students in northeast Ohio.
–more–
March 7th, 2007
TOKYO, March 2 (Reuters Life!) - A Japanese dolphin is squealing with delight after receiving a prosthetic tail to replace one amputated due to a skin disease.
Fuji’s handlers at the Churaumi Aquarium in Japan’s southern most island of Okinawa say the fake tail may have saved her life as she had put on dangerous amounts of weight from being inactive after she lost her tail.
[Read the rest of the article @ Scientific American.com]
A keeper holds an artificial tail fluke attached to female bottlenose dolphin “Fuji”, estimated to be 37-years-old, at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Motobu town on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa February 14, 2007. Fuji’s handlers say the fake tail may have saved her life as she had put on dangerous amounts of weight from being inactive after she lost her tail. REUTERS/Issei Kato
March 2nd, 2007
Rachel Carson is considered by many to be the mother of modern-day ecology. This year, to mark the 100th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s birth, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working with the Friends of the National Conservation Training Center, will celebrate the achievements of its most notable employee by launching the Rachel Carson Online Book Club.
Beginning in March and continuing through November 2007, the online book club will focus on the life and work of Rachel Carson including her role as a female leader in science and government. Through the study of her writing, the Book Club will provide an opportunity for dialogue and discussion of current environmental issues in light of Carson’s legacy.
For more information on how to participate, view the book club Web site at: http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com
For more information on how the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rachel Carson, please visit our website at http://www.fws.gov/rachelcarson/
February 27th, 2007
From Morning Edition (NPR), February 16, 2007 — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked peanut butter to a salmonella outbreak that’s sickened almost 300 people since August. No one has died but dozens of people have been hospitalized.
Read the rest of the story here.
The affected jars of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter have a product code number on the lid of the jar that begins with 2111.
February 16th, 2007
On January 3, 2007, Governor Bob Taft and Ohio Agriculture Director Fred L. Dailey, along with other state and local officials, broke ground for a new state plant pathology, entomology, and seed lab. The Taft Plant Health Diagnostic Laboratory will be a state-of-the-art facility will feature a plant pathology lab, which will provide the resources to quickly identify and take action against dangerous plant pathogens and plant diseases, such as sudden oak death and soybean rust.
Construction of the project is scheduled to begin in August 2007.
Read more here.
January 5th, 2007
Susan ends her long career with the OSU Libraries on December 22. She came to The Ohio State University as an undergraduate, completing a B.S. in Home Economics in 1962. After completing an MLS at the University of Western Ontario (1970), Susan joined University Libraries as General Librarian and Supervisor of the Shelf List Conversion Unit, Cataloguing Information Systems Librarian and Instructor, Research and Development (1970-71). Her career here included: Information Specialist and Instructor, Mechanized Information Center (1973-78); Coordinator of Automated Library Systems (1978-99); and Head of the Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Library (1999-present). Susan was promoted to Assistant Professor (1984) and Associate Professor (1999).
Susan coordinated the work required to take the Library Control System (LCS) from an online circulation system to a full blown catalog containing serial holdings, full bibliographic records, and authority control. Because LCS was a homegrown system, written by several programmers at OIT, Susan had the ongoing responsibility of working with the programmers and others in the library to design new system functions, write specifications, and test and implement system changes. LCS was one of the earliest online catalogs, so the pioneer efforts led by Susan were of much interest to the profession. Susan’s success in enhancing LCS step by step, to the point where it could serve as OSU’s public access catalog, allowed OSU to close the card catalog before other libraries were ready to take that step. Similarly, Susan was responsible for coordinating OSU’s OhioLINK implementation, again a pioneer effort. The idea of the OhioLINK consortium and a central catalog that supported patron-initiated online borrowing was completely new, and Susan participated in writing the RFP specifications and in selecting a vendor (III) to fulfill them. She also coordinated several major initiatives that had to be completed at OSU to get us ready to join OhioLINK. Many people carried out the projects but Susan had the responsibility of coordinating everything and making sure that it got done in time.
The online catalog was the primary technology focus for much of Susan’s career, but she was responsible for other “firsts” as well — the development of the grant funded Gateway to Information, for which Susan was a project manager; the pre-Web online delivery of locally mounted reference databases; the transition from public terminals to networked public computers; the implementation of BuckID printing; support for creation of OSUL’s initial Web presence; and the expansion of the Automation Office to include staff other than Susan herself.
Those of us who were here working with her can appreciate the significance of her accomplishments and the dedication and hard work it took for her to achieve them. Susan’s persistent intellectual curiosity has served OSU well, enabling her to envision new directions and to build relationships with colleagues, such as those at OIT, to help us move in those directions. (Reprinted from OSU Libraries’ News Notes, December 19, 2006)
December 21st, 2006
FROM NPR’s MORNING EDITION: A start-up company called Philadelphia Fry-O-Diesel is focused on making biodiesel fuel from restaurant trap grease. That’s the slimy, sticky gunk that collects at the bottom of restaurant drains. Most restaurants pay to have the stuff hauled away.
Listen to the full story (you must have either RealPlayer or Windows Media Player installed on your computer. If not, you may download one here).
Also check out the Philadelphia Fry-O-Diesel web site.
December 6th, 2006
From the Columbus Dispatch — November 5, 2006 (p. 15E):
Dead fish floating on Lake Erie in the spring generally do not set off alarms, but the fish kill last spring did. The size of the kill thousands of yellow perch and tens of thousands of freshwater drum in the western and central basins made it different from anything seen in recent years.
Ominously, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, known widely as VHS, was found to be the cause. Ominous because VHS, a disease long known in Europe and Asia as a bane to trout and salmon, showed up in North America fairly recently in an apparently mutated form that attacks numerous species.
The rest of the article can be read here.
November 21st, 2006
