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In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Rutgers Cooperative Extension announces its webinar series “Earth Day at Home”. This series will focus on steps everyone can take to protect the environment. Join us on Mondays at 6:30 p.m. to learn from experts at Rutgers Cooperative Extension. These live, interactive sessions will be 1 hour. To join you need either a computer, tablet, or smartphone with speakers. Every week we will cover small actions that together reduce negative impacts on the environment. Monday, May 11th join us for Home Vegetable Gardening for Food, Fun and Stress Management. We can all do our part to take actions that make our homes more sustainable, from environmentally friendly lawn care, to composting, to reducing plastic waste. These actions, more than ever, start at home.

Two new technologies being deployed in New Jersey as part of the fight against the coronavirus could boost those testing numbers enormously if they can perform. One comes out of a Rutgers University research center that uses a laboratory technique to make millions of copies of the COVID-19 nucleic acid. It can perform 10,000 tests a day using high-throughput, automated equipment. But instead of using nasal and throat swabs to obtain viral material, the analysis can be performed on saliva samples obtained by spitting into a tube — a far easier way to collect samples without relying on health care workers. Saliva testing would be a new development and would allow testing without the need of a medical provider to take the sample. RUCDR has also submitted an emergency use authorization request for a saliva collection method that will allow for broader population screening. Another is a test developed by Abbott Laboratories that its makers say can detect the COVID-19 virus in as little as five minutes.