WASHINGTON, Jan. 19, 2010—Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has allocated $45 million, provided by Section 10201 of the 2008 Farm Bill, for projects to build and preserve critical plant health safeguarding initiatives across America. Funding will be provided to more than 50 cooperators including state departments of agriculture, universities, nonprofit organizations and USDA agencies in support of over 200 projects. These state, regional, and national projects will support the Farm Bill goals of building strong systems to safeguard the health of our agricultural industries using early plant pest detection and surveillance, threat identification and mitigation.

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After trying some 50 arrangements of household objects, researchers have come up with a new low-cost, homemade bed-bug detector.

To lure the bugs out of hiding, Wan-Tien Tsai of Rutgers University in New Brunswick put dry ice into an insulated, one-third-gallon jug, the kind available at sports or camping stores. Adding 2.5 pounds of dry ice pellets and not quite closing the pour hole allowed carbon dioxide to leak out at a bug-teasing rate for some 11 hours at room temperature, she said.

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