Lab Spotlight

USDA-ARS scientists and university collaborators developed a laser-guided intelligent sprayer for optimized pesticide application based on plant canopy structure. This sprayer is compatible with diverse crop architectures and reduces pesticide use by up to 70 percent, airborne spray drift up to 87...

Now throughearly 2016, each of the Agricultural Research Service 's four utilization centers will celebrate its 75th anniversary. These centers were established toconduct research into and to develop new scientific, chemical, and technical uses, as well as new and extended markets for farm...

ARS scientists are saving water in California's vineyards by using satellite data and computer models to manage water resources better. Bill Kustas and Martha Anderson are fine-tuning computer models at the ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, to help vineyard...

The U.S. Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa, Ariz., is a world leader in the development and deployment of high-throughput phenotyping technologies for crop improvement. This tractor-mounted platform quickly scans and assesses multiple phenotypic characteristics of thousands of...

In response to the public health emergency posed by the Zika virus infection, researchers at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) rapidly developed a vaccine candidate to prevent Zika virus infection. NIAID clinicians tested the vaccine candidate in a Phase I clinical...

Fermilab’s VIPIC (vertically integrated photon imaging chip) is a 3D integrated circuit that serves as a large area, small pixel (65µm), photon counting detector with zero-suppressed data readout, time resolution of less than 10 microseconds, and high raw data throughput of up to 3.5...

The following article is part of an occasional series of profiles on FLC Northeast Region member laboratories. The John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe Center) is a federal, fee-for-service Center of Excellence within the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Research and...

Free-space optical (FSO) communications, or wireless laser communications, provides dramatically higher bandwidths compared to all other wireless methods and addresses communications limitations in undersea environments. While the technology has been around for over 40 years, only recently have...

Scientists observed diamond rain in the laboratory for the first time as it formed at conditions found deep inside giant planets like Uranus and Neptune. Here, extremely high pressure (roughly 1.5 Mbar) squeezes hydrogen and carbon apart to form solid diamonds that sink slowly down into the planet...