Cold weather or not, spring is officially here and the planting season is not far behind. Experts and volunteer Master Gardeners from the Rutgers Cooperative Extension (RCE) of Union County are ready to help with questions about growing successful home…
Archives for March 2014
Rutgers Personnel by Day, Moth-ers by Night: Gearing up for Third Annual National Moth Week
As National Moth Week gains in popularity as it enters its third year, its Rutgers roots deepen further. The founders of National Moth Week are all tied to Rutgers: naturalist David Moskowitz is completing a Ph.D. in Entomology at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and Liti Haramaty is a marine sciences researcher at Rutgers […]
These Ocean-Current Maps Could Help Us Find the Malaysia Airlines Plane If…
Over the weekend, the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 widened to include thousands of miles of the southern Indian Ocean along with most of central Asia. The plane was last pinpointed by military radar 200 miles off the western coast of Malaysia on the traditional flight path toward Europe, but no country since has reported spotting MH370 in its airspace…Javier Zavala-Garay, a researcher at Rutgers’ Ocean Modeling Group, said in an email, “The new techniques implemented in ROMS allow us to evolve the model ‘backwards in time’ in the sense that if we know where the debris is located, say today, we could trace its position back in time to know where the debris was six days ago.” (Zavala-Garay’s group has a ROMS model that includes the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand.)
Middlesex County’s EARTH Center offers to help with garden & diet
The Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Middlesex County will hold free workshops on April 12 at the county’s EARTH Center in South Brunswick to help improve residents’ gardens and diets. The first workshop, “Herb Gardens for Your Yard or Patio,” is scheduled for 10 a.m. to noon and will discuss the basic of designing, planting and caring for an herb garden, as well as container gardening…The second event is from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m. and is entitled, “Eating Wish While On The Go: Quick, Health Meals and Snacks.” Susan Stephenson-Martin, a certified dietician and nutritionist, will discuss strategies for families on the go looking to improve their weekly menus, according to the press release from Middlesex County.
State Climatologist Dave Robinson Offers Winter Climate Review
Was it the snowiest winter? Was it the coldest winter on record? New Jersey State Climatologist Dave Robinson was interviewed by RU-tv on how the winter of 2014 stacks up.
IFNH Co-Hosts First Annual Rutgers Human Performance Conference on March 29
The first Annual Rutgers Human Performance Conference will be hosted by the Center for Health & Human Performance of the Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health and the International Society for Sports Nutrition on Saturday, March 29, from 9a.m. to 5p.m. in Beck Hall, on the Rutgers Livingston Campus. Sponsors include Rutgers’ Department of Exercise […]
A Growth Spurt at 1,500 Years Old
Signy Island, which lies 375 miles off Antarctica, has too harsh an environment to support a single tree. Its mountains are girdled instead by banks of moss. “It’s just like a big, green, spongy expanse,” said Peter Convey, an ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey who has worked on Signy Island for 25 years…Blankets of permafrost have grown on the island for thousands of years, since the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age…In 2007, Paul G. Falkowski of Rutgers University and his colleagues reported reviving bacteria trapped in Antarctic ice for eight million years. The idea that bacteria can survive for so long has inspired a lot of debate. “It gets controversial pretty quickly,” said Dr. Jay Lennon of Indiana University, who was not involved in Dr. Falkowski’s study.
A Fleet of Unpowered Submarines Is About to Plumb the Ocean’s Depths
Even though they cover two-third’s of the planet’s surface, we know precious little about how the oceans actually interact with the continents and atmosphere. What’s more, our oceanic models are woefully incomplete-only capable of showing large areas w…
Gut bacteria to battle vitamin A deficiency: Could probiotics be modified to produce beta-carotene?
Research backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation could offer a new solution to the problem of vitamin A deficiency by creating modified gut bacteria, researchers told NutraIngredients. The novel approach, spearheaded by researchers at Rutgers University in the US, aims to create gut friendly bacteria that are able to produce the Vitamin A precursor beta-carotene directly in the gut of deficient people. Led by Professor Loredana Quadro, the team have now modified a strain of E. coli bacteria to produce beta-carotene-something that is the first step on the path towards creating a human probiotic able to battle vitamin A deficiency. “What we did in the paper was establish a proof of principal,” explained Professor Paul Breslin, co-author of the study.
Starting from seed
Around the middle of March, Megan Meyer starts to get a case of itchy fingers. “At this time of the year, the snow is just too much,” the Penfield, N.Y., resident says. Her remedy: taking her garden plans for the year and beginning to grow some of the plants from seed. “This is the time of year to do it,” she says…According to the Rutgers Cooperative Extension guide to starting seeds, “The easiest way to start any vegetable garden is direct seeding – wait until the weather warms and plant the seeds directly in the garden. Unfortunately, direct seeding is not practical for some crops. For example, tomatoes and peppers cannot be planted until after the last frost and after the soil has warmed. If seeded directly in the garden at that time, tomatoes and peppers require more than 100 days to produce the first fruit.”