USDA Blog

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA's rich science and research profile. When it comes to microorganisms that contaminate our foods, you may think it’s a veritable jungle out there—but in fact, in...

Science can do more than improve people’s lives; sometimes it can save them. Consider the contributions of the late Allene Rosalind Jeanes, an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) chemist at what is now the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois. Her efforts are...

By Vincent M. Russo, Research Leader, ARS South Central Agricultural Research Laboratory and Tasha Askew, Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellow, USDA Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Just in time for the 2010 Feds, Farmers, and Friends Feed Families Food Drive, is two-thousand one...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. With droughts becoming more severe, water tables getting lower and an increasing demand for water from growing suburbs and...

Written by: John A. Goolsby, Ph.D., Research Entomologist, Biological Control of Pests and Weeds United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service

Today is World Food Safety Day, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has launched a sweeping new initiative known as the Salmonella Grand Challenge. The project brings together an elite group of ARS, university and food industry scientists from different...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. If you want to stir consumers’ passions about produce, just mention tomatoes. There’s no shortage of outrage about those...

She leans over her dead subject and deftly pushes a pin through its body, securing it to the foam below. To be clear, this is not about a morgue or a serial killer. This is about taxonomy, or the science of identifying, classifying, and naming organisms. The woman in question is a scientist, and her...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. During the month of April we have taken a closer look at USDA’s Groundbreaking Research for a Revitalized Rural America...

We all love nuts, but we’re careful not to eat too many because of the high fat calories. Now, there may be less to worry about. In a series of studies, USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) physiologists David Baer and Janet Novotny looked at how many calories of almonds, walnuts, and...