SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
DNA Gleaned from Ancient Coral Unlocks Clues about Warming
from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
The skeletons in the Earth's closet reveal not only a dark past. They also cast a light on its future.
That is what Tim Shank discovered when he sent an underwater robot to sweep up a basket full of broccoli-like fossils from volcanoes under the sea. Shank, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found skeletons of 35,000- to 40,000-year-old corals littered on the New England Seamounts in the North Atlantic. He took them back to his laboratory, extracted what he could of their remaining DNA fragments, and started to piece together their past.
Their story—and similar ones gleaned from the DNA of ancient spiders entombed in ice cores, and the bones of dodos and woolly mammoths—tells us how ancient creatures survived or disappeared as a result of dramatic climate changes. That, in turn, provides a preview of how today's flora and fauna might react to global warming.
Read more...
Science in the Media
Newspapers:
Magazines and Web Sites:
The Science-Media Intersection:
Subscribe to Our Content!
Visit our RSS Feeds page to choose among 13 customized feeds, or create a free My AmSci account to request an email notice whenever a specified author, department or discipline appears online.