The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. (Credit: Mari Tefre/Svalbard Globale frøhvelv)
Just nine years after its official opening, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway is undergoing renovations to protect it from climate change.
The work was prompted by accidental flooding that took place last week, as melting permafrost seeped into the vault’s access corridor. While the seeds were in no danger, the flooding is nevertheless a worrying sign at a facility meant to en ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock/Daniel Prudek)
A trek to base camp at Mount Everest will leave you short of breath in a hurry.
A push to the summit begins in thin air, 17,000 feet above sea level — higher than any peak in the Rocky Mountains. Once you reach the “Death Zone,” above 26,000 feet, oxygen levels drop to a third of what they are at sea level. Few climbers reach the summit, which rises 29,029 feet above sea level, without bottled oxygen.
To acclimate their ...read more
Brain responses to emotion stimuli are highly variable even within the same individual, and this could be a problem for researchers who seek to use these responses as biomarkers to help diagnose and treat disorders such as depression.
That’s according to a new paper in Neuroimage, from University College London neuroscientists Camilla Nord and colleagues.
Nord et al. had 29 volunteers perform three tasks during fMRI scanning. All of the tasks involved pictures of emotional faces, which ar ...read more
Lionfish on a mesophotic reef off Florida. Photo credit: Mike Echevarria, Florida Aquarium via NOAA
In the last few decades, scientists have come to appreciate the incredible creatures living on the reefs that lie just below conventional diving limits in what is called the mesophotic zone. These incredible biodiversity hotspots are home to more endemic species than shallower reefs, and conservationists are hopeful they may serve as refuges—pockets of relatively pristine habitat out of ...read more
A young flamingo demonstrates it’s passive, one-legged stance. (Credit: Rob Felt/Georgia Tech)
Flamingos are striking not only for their brilliant pink plumes, but for how they often stand on a single slender leg, even when asleep.
Now scientists find that standing on one leg may counter-intuitively require less effort for flamingos than standing on two. It’s a finding that could help lead to more stable legged robots and better prosthetic legs.
The One-Legged Problem
One prior exp ...read more
By Dr. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher
Caren Cooper. (2016). Citizen Science: How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery. Overlook Press: New York, NY. $28.95.
While publications proliferate on the subject of citizen science, an introduction to inform and delight all readers has been conspicuously absent until Caren Cooper’s new book, Citizen Science: How Ordinary People Are Changing the Face of Discovery hit the shelves this spring. In the pages of Citizen Science we find compelling ...read more
Finding Pneumo, by Linh Ngo of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (2nd place)
No matter how flamboyant your shower curtain mold is, it couldn’t have competed with the fungus that won this year’s Agar Art contest.
This is the third year the American Society for Microbiology has run the contest, asking for “works that are at their core an organism(s) growing on agar.” The artwork can be any kind of microbe colonizing any size or shape of petri dish. This year&rsq ...read more
The “space pups” made from freeze-dried sperm flown aboard the ISS. (Credit: Teruhiko Wakayama et al.)
Before they were born, these mice were astronauts. Or, rather, the sperm that would go on to deliver half of their genetic material were.
For nine months, mouse sperm was kept aboard the International Space Station, freeze-dried to preserve it. Brought back to Earth, the sperm was rehydrated, introduced to an egg and allowed to divide for about 20 days. The resulting mouse pups ca ...read more
What kinds of secrets does the average person keep? In a new paper, Columbia University researchers Michael L. Slepian and colleagues carried out a survey of secrets.
Slepian et al. developed a ‘Common Secrets Questionnaire’ (CSQ) and gave it to 600 participants recruited anonymously online. Participants were asked whether they’d ever had various secrets, at any point in their lives. The results are a monument to all our sins:
It turns out that extra-relational thoughts & ...read more
