Blog topic: Science

Dr. Steve Schneider talks about how he became interested in earth systems and in atmospheric research in this excerpt from an interview done by Gray Thompson in 1992

“I was actually born in New York City. I didn’t live in it until I went back to Columbia University 17 years later. And I grew up in [Woodmere,] Long Island. And what I remember enjoying a lot about Long Island before the developers hacked down all the woods was getting dropped off in a square mile of woods which I used to call “the deep, dark forest…” and run around and just enjoy streams and nature.

You might not think of worms when someone mentions neuroscience, but it turns out the tiny, transparent worm C. elegans is a great organism for studying the senses. That's in part because researchers have previously mapped the locations and synaptic connections of each of the 302 neurons of these 1mm long creatures. 

More recently, researchers Juan Cueva and Miriam Goodman have performed studies using C. elegans to examine how certain touch receptor neurons are activated. They generated nearly 3300 electron micrographs of worm cross sections that have been preserved in the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) and are now available for download and reuse by other researchers around the world (see below for links to the images).

"[T]he oceans have always belonged to the clams."

At least from a metabolic perspective, according to Earth Sciences Professor Jonathan Payne and his co-authors. The researchers have just published an article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences about the struggle for dominance between brachiopods and bivalves.