Noah’s new Norwegian ark
Should floods and droughts induced by global warming destroy the world’s food supply, we now have a back-up plan. In collaboration with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a fund partly founded by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Norwegian government has designed a seed vault that will house samples of every important food crop around the world. Called the Svalbard International Seed Vault, the storage facility will hold three million seed samples and will be carved into the rock of Svalbard, an Arctic island not far from the North Pole, with an artful entrance visible to the public. Not only is Svalbard’s permafrost cold enough to preserve the seeds if refrigeration fails, but at 130 metres above sea level, it will stay dry if Antarctica and Greenland’s ice sheets melt-an event that would cause oceans to rise 61 metres. Officials designed the vault in plain view of the public in hopes that people will take an active interest in the vault’s safety. All the same, the vault will be guarded by several sets of reinforced doors and a video security system. The vault could provide hope of recovery from climatic ruin, but its presence will also be a towering reminder of the urgent need for conservation and sustainability in our everyday lives.
Source: Global Crop Diversity Trust news service
-Sandy Huen
Blame the hormones
Researchers have identified a “reward system” in the human brain that predicts different types of rewards for tasks-such as money and food-and plays a role in normal cognitive processes such as learning and motivation.
Located primarily in the area of the brain called the mesencephalon, the dopamine-dependent system is also distributed in various other brain sites. Malfunctions with it have been linked with pathologies such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia.
Previous research had shown that female rats will self-administer cocaine, a drug that interacts with the dopamine system, in higher doses after receiving estrogen injections. It was also known that the human female response to cocaine is greater in the follicular phase of the menstrual cycle and that schizophrenia tends to appear later in women than in men. So the team set out to discover how sex hormones are linked to dopamine-related brain diseases and drug sensitivity.
The researchers measured the brain activity of female human subjects twice during their menstrual cycles. Before being scanned, the women played virtual slot machines that advertised different probabilities of winning.
When the slots gave poor odds-that is, when a reward was especially uncertain-researchers found that women in the follicular phase of their menstrual cycle (when estrogen levels increase) showed more activity in emotional processing areas of their brains than women in the luteal phase (when estrogen levels drop). Conducting the same experiment on men, researchers found that a brain area involved in motivation for obtaining rewards was more highly activated than in either group of women.
Investigators say understanding the role hormones play in the reward system is particularly important to the study of psychiatric diseases, aging, and drug and gambling addictions.
Source: CNRS news service
-Abigail Slinger
