Museum graduate student Edward Stanley recently used high-resolution x-ray images of tiny “armor” bones to help an international team of scientists discover a new species of lizard from remote, war-torn mountains in Central Africa. The lizard, Cordylus marunguensis, was found on the Marungu Plateau in the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is described in the African Journal of Herpetology.
The new lizard was discovered on an expedition led by Eli Greenbaum, assistant professor of evolutionary genetics at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Chifundera Kusamba, a research scientist from the Centre de Recherche en Sciences Naturelles in the Congo. Suspecting that the lizard represented a new species, Greenbaum sent DNA samples and a specimen to Stanley, a third-year student in the Museum’s Richard Gilder Graduate School—the first museum program in the Western Hemisphere with the authority to grant the Ph.D. degree. Read more »
When an epidemic hits, early detection of the disease’s spread is crucial for halting disaster. The Museum’s Science Bulletins recently created a video about how the social networking site Twitter is being used to track the spread of cholera in Haiti.
Science Bulletins is a production of the National Center for Science Literacy, Education, and Technology (NCSLET), part of the Department of Education at the Museum. Click here to learn more.
In rural coal mining communities in China, miners face daily perils for slim rewards in a profession that claims an estimated 5,000 lives annually. Winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award Yuanchen Liu delved into this riveting story with his documentary To the Light, and as part of the Margaret Mead Traveling Film Festival, the film and Liu will return to the Museum on Thursday, May 17, at 6:30 pm for a special encore screening and discussion.
To the Light has traveled to St. Thomas and Vietnam since the 2011 Margaret Mead Film Festival. The 2012 Margaret Mead Film Festival will take place at the Museum from November 29 through December 2.
Thumbnail: The 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award jury was led by Darren Aronofsky, the Academy Award-nominated director of Black Swan and The Wrestler, who poses for a photo with Yuanchen Liu.
Museum Research Associate David Gruber, assistant professor at The City University of New York (CUNY), describes a diving trip in 2011.
We wanted to include a panoramic image of a magnificent coralscape in Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, and Bloody Bay Wall [off Little Cayman Island] was the perfect place.
But capturing Ansel Adams-like vistas are impossible under water, where sections of the light spectrum—especially reds—are absorbed within a meter. We need to get in very close to our subject and use flash photography to capture the reef ’s true color. We have to repeat this process hundreds of times over the wall face. Then, the small consecutive images are painstakingly stitched together to create a life-sized, true-color view.
Underwater photographer Jim Hellemn developed this process to create a 20-foot by 70-foot true-color image of the Bloody Bay Wall in 1999. Returning to the wall 12 years later (with the support of a National Science Foundation Connecting Research to Public Audiences grant) allowed us to overlay the images and really see the way a coral wall ages. Some of the corals are disappearing, some of the sponges have gotten huge, and some new things have taken up residence on the wall. It’s amazing.
We also wanted to apply Jim’s methods to photograph the coralscape at night to capture a phenomenon few people encounter in person or in photographs: marine biofluorescence. Read more »
Museum scientist Eleanor Sterling has been chosen as a recipient of this year’s Faculty Mentoring Award at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Sterling, who is the director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, serves as the director of graduate studies and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia.
The award honors excellence in mentoring Ph.D. students, and recipients are chosen by representatives from the graduate student body. In the words of one graduate student who nominated Sterling, “Eleanor is consistently available to students, whether that means answering questions about an assignment or reading last-minute drafts of a proposal. Truly not a student in the department has remained untouched by her tremendous generosity of time, advice, and career and thesis support.”
“It is a tremendous honor to receive this award,” says Sterling, “particularly given that it comes from the students. Teachers and mentors were instrumental to many important turning points in my life, and I am thrilled to serve in that role myself.” Read more »
