Americans love their meat. Whether it's rib eyes, pork chops or chicken breasts, the demand for protein is so great in this country that more than 85 billion pounds of meat and poultry are processed here each year. And we're not alone. About a quarter of U.S. beef and pork is exported to feed hungry mouths around the world. While China is now the world's largest consumer of meat, in Mexico, meat consumption has increased by 50 percent since 1990.

In an effort to curb the illegal use of steroids in the European beef industry, scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting the development of a new test that can identify steroids with higher accuracy, more convenience, and less cost than conventional doping tests. Their report is in the current issue of Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal.

In a new, year-long University of Pennsylvania survey of dog owners who use confrontational or aversive methods to train aggressive pets, veterinary researchers have found that most of these animals will continue to be aggressive unless training techniques are modified.

Using equipment not all that different from what a runner might take on a jog, veterinary researchers at Kansas State University are working to make life more comfortable for cattle. A jogger's heart rate monitor and an instrument similar to a pedometer are a few of the tools K-State researchers are using to measure discomfort in cattle undergoing two routine procedures, castration and dehorning.

Even when faced with distractions, monkeys are able to consistently choose the path of greatest reward, according to a study conducted by researchers from Princeton and Stanford Universities. The study, published February 13th in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, adds to the growing evidence that animal foraging behavior can approach optimality, and could provide a basis for understanding the computations involved in this and related tasks.

A long-running and crucial food safety program that began shutting down due to lack of government funding has been granted a last-minute financial stay of execution, receiving emergency temporary funding from a consortium of nonprofit organizations and individual taxpayers who believe the program is too important to public health to allow to fail.