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A woman sells her crop at a market in Haiti's Central Plateau. A Virginia Tech-managed program in central Haiti will introduce sustainable agricultural practices that can contribute to greater food security in Haiti. Credit: Keith Moore

Two Virginia Tech professors are leading research teams that will work with scientists and small-scale farmers in South America and [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 14, 2010) — Researchers at the University of Calgary have discovered the unique genes that allow the opium poppy to make codeine and morphine, thus opening doors to alternate methods of producing these effective painkillers either by manufacturing them in a lab or controlling the production of these compounds in the plant.

University of [...]

Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids' freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.

Brain drain (Image: Brandon Harman/Getty)
Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders – which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex.
To investigate [...]

Television crews stand outside the Global Seed Vault before the opening ceremony in Longyearbyen February 26, 2008. Credit: Reuters/Bob Strong

(Reuters) – A "doomsday" vault storing crop seeds in an Arctic deep freeze is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history, managers said on Thursday.

Set up on the Norwegian [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 9, 2010) — The King Cobra continues to weave its charm with researchers identifying a protein in its venom with the potential for new drug discovery and to advance understanding of disease mechanisms.

(Credit: Wikimedia commons)
The novel protein named haditoxin has been described in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (March 12, 2010).
Haditoxin was discovered [...]

(Reuters) – Vitamin D is vital in activating human defences and low levels suffered by around half the world's population may mean their immune systems' killer T cells are poor at fighting infection, scientists said on Sunday.

 
The findings by Danish researchers could help the fight against infectious diseases and global epidemics, they said, and could [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2010) — In the tropics, carnivorous plants trap unsuspecting prey in a cavity filled with liquid known as a "pitcher."

Tropical exotic carnivorous pitcher flower, Nepenthes sp., waits for any small insect to close and eat it. (Credit: iStockphoto/Eugene Bochkarev)
The moment insects like flies, ants and beetles fall into a pitcher, the plant's [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 6, 2010) — Many adolescents think about getting tattoos, but less than half know what's involved in having them removed, according to an Italian study appearing online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

When surveyed, forty percent of 4,277 secondary school students, ages 14 to 22, in the Veneto region of Italy were aware [...]

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010) — A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. The procedure, which uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, and has been made [...]

Not the stuff that we wipe off the coffee table on a regular basis, but the tiny particles floating around in the earth's atmosphere, which originate primarily from deserts in North Africa and the Middle East.

It can affect the oceans, impact the carbon cycle and even have an effect on global temperature.
Dust, and its impact [...]