Despite receiving flack from Republicans earlier this year, volcano monitoring is among the first programs to get federal stimulus dough from the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), the Associated Press reports.

Of the $140 million that the DOI is shelling out to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), $15.2 million is headed to bolster volcano monitoring programs in the National Volcano Early Warning System, which helped to alert officials to the early rumblings of Mount Redoubt in Alaska before it erupted last month. Also getting a hefty chunk of the cash, earthquake monitoring is receiving $29.4 million to update seismic stations.

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The long-simmering standoff between Stephen Colbert and NASA comes to an end tonight, when the space agency unveils its name for a new International Space Station (ISS) module on the Colbert Report.

To recap: NASA is expanding the ISS later this year with the addition of its Node 3, a module that will house life-support systems and a robotic-arm command station with a panoramic observatory. But Node 3 isn't the snappiest moniker, so the space agency set up an online poll where people could vote for their fave name from a list or write in a candidate of their own.

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Scientists say they have developed a fast and supersensitive new test for ricin, a poison found in castor beans that scientists say is a prime candidate for use in bioterrorism attacks. The new method, described in research recently published in Analytical Chemistry, takes only three minutes to detect ricin and is 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive than tests currently available, according to study co-author Vern Schramm, a biochemist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in Bronx, N.Y.

Ricin comes from the castor bean plant Ricinus communis, which is easy and cheap to grow. Extracting the poison from the beans requires simple chromatography, a method of separating chemicals taught in college chemistry classes. If eaten, inhaled or injected into the bloodstream, ricin kills cells by interfering with their ability to manufacture proteins, which can lead to organ failure and death, Schramm explains. There is no treatment for ricin exposure, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

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John Maddox, who in two stints as Nature's editor helped transform the influential journal, died yesterday in Abergavenny, Wales, at the age of 83. The cause of death was cumulative heart and lung problems following a broken hip, according to his daughter, Bronwen Maddox, a columnist for the Times of London.

In a long and varied career, Maddox worked as a science journalist at the Manchester Guardian (now simply the Guardian) and as a lecturer in physics at the University of Manchester. But his editorship of Nature (1966–1973, 1980–1995) "was what feels like his life," Maddox says.

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

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When computer programmers find security flaws in the programs they use (particularly software running on the Web), they have a choice: report the glitch to the software maker (which may ignore the warning) or find some way of publicly (and often illegally) exploiting it to make clear to the company how vulnerable its software is. A 17-year-old hacker claiming to be from Brooklyn, N.Y., this past weekend chose the latter path, unleashing at least two worms after discovering a weak spot in the social network site Twitter; the worms wended their way into a reported 190 user accounts and infected about 10,000 tweets (messages sent via the Twitter network), the company said yesterday.

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With the recession grinding into its 17th official month, a lot of things are on sale right now – including male sex cells.

In a move unprecedented in its history, Xytex, one of the oldest sperm and tissue banks in the U.S., is offering a steep discount on sperm: up to $200 off, for a net price of between $250 and $350 per vial.

Unfortunately, the discount only applies to sperm from donors with large inventory, thanks to multiple donations and/or an unusually high sperm count and quality.

"We're all feeling the effects of the economy and, especially for families seeking reproductive options, every dollar counts, " Xytex spokesperson Danielle Moores told AFP, explaining why the company took the step.

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The company whose salmonella-tainted peanut products made 691 people sick and may have killed nine others has been fined $14.6 million.

The Texas Department of State Health Services yesterday fined Plainview Peanut Corp. — a plant owned by the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA), the company at the center of the salmonella outbreak — for what the agency described as unsanitary conditions and contamination of its goods, as well as illnesses and operating for nearly four years without a food manufacturer’s license from the state. State health inspectors in February discovered dead rodents, waste and bird feathers in a crawl space above the plant's production area. PCA filed for bankruptcy a day after the stomach-turning findings were announced.  

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Some analysts see strong evidence that North Korea's controversial rocket launch this past weekend was a missile test and not a peaceful space launch as the secretive country claims. The launch has been condemned by the U.S. as a violation of United Nations sanctions intended to quash the development of nuclear or ballistic-missile programs in North Korea. The state media claims that the launch was a successful stab at putting a communications satellite in orbit, but U.S. and South Korean observers say the rocket's upper stages and payload fell into the Pacific Ocean well before anything reached orbit.

South Korean scientists told the Christian Science Monitor this week that it is unlikely North Korea could or would launch a real satellite, meaning that a missile test was the likely motive for the launch. (And a successful one at that, as the rocket doubled the range of its predecessor.) "They cannot have been shooting a real satellite," Noh-Hoon Myung, head of the Satellite Technology Research Center at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), told the newspaper. He added that he thinks "it was a dummy, not a real one," since there is no indication that North Korea has the capacity to build a satellite.

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Cases of food-borne illnesses, including infections such as salmonella and Escherichia coli that have been at the center of recent outbreaks, have held steady for the past four years, federal health officials said today.

Salmonella was the most common bacteria transmitted by contaminated food last year, according to today's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Rates of the infection, which has sickened 691 people and possibly killed nine in a recent outbreak via tainted peanut butter, have decreased the least of the nine illnesses that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documents in the report.

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Twenty-five high-risk medical devices that hit the market more than 33 years ago – and are still in use today – were never subjected to scientific scrutiny by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But that's about to change, The New York Times reports.

For the first time, devices as diverse as pacemaker parts and female condoms will be assessed using the contemporary analysis standards, including reports on safety and effectiveness from any company that manufactures them.

Since 1976, when Congress passed the Medical Device Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, the FDA has been in charge of ensuring that all new medical devices get the job done and do so safely. The agency made plans to re-evaluate devices that were already on the market, but many have been de facto grandfathered in (so to speak) – even though they fall in the highest risk category ("those that support or sustain human life" per the FDA's Web site).

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