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How Can Slumbering Squirrels Inform Astronauts on Long-term Missions?
Researchers show the animals have uniquely adapted to their extreme habitat by converting bodily waste products into nutrients
Researchers peered into the deepest of slumbers – the barely-breathing sleep of arctic ground squirrels – to better understand how the small mammals can emerge from an eight-month hibernation with a minimal loss of muscle mass.
Using metabolite profiles in the squirrels’ blood, a recently developed technology, the researchers showed that the animals have uniquely adapted to their extreme habitats by converting bodily waste products into essential nutrients. Despite spending the long winter curled into a ball and breathing only once per minute, the hardy rodents awaken in spring unscathed.
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North Pacific fishing crews on edge about what they’ll find this month, after a tough 2020 of small fish and COVID-19 By Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times
Published: January 10, 2021, 6:00am
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Skipper Kevin Ganley spent most of the summer and fall pulling a massive trawl net through the Bering Sea in a long slow search for pollock, a staple of McDonald’s fish sandwiches. The fish proved very hard to find.
“We just scratched and scratched and scratched,” Ganley recalls. “It was survival mode.”
Ganley’s boat is part of a fleet of largely Washington-based trawlers that have had a difficult year as they joined in North America’s largest single-species seafood harvest. Their catch rates in 2020 during the five-month “B” season that ended Nov. 1 were well below long-term averages. They also encountered more skinny, small fish fit for mince but not prime fillets than in a typical year, according to a federal review of the season.
Friday, January 8, 2021 at 10:43
Royal Norwegian Navy Skjold-class Corvettes HNOMS Storm and HNMOS Skudd ride alongside the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman during flight operations supporting Exercise Trident Juncture 2018 off the coast of Vestfjordern, Norway October 24, 2018. (Specialist 2nd Class Thomas Gooley/U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS)
Rapidly melting sea ice and increasingly navigable Arctic waters – a so-called Blue Arctic – will create new challenges and opportunities for the United States, requiring “sustained American naval presence and partnerships in the Arctic region,” according to the new U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Arctic strategy.
The strategy released on Tuesday by outgoing Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite cites an expected rise in commercial shipping, natural resource exploration and increased military competition with Russia and China in the Arctic, calling on the Navy and the Marine Corps to focus on “day-to-day” competition with
Exploring the gardening potential of the Last Frontier January 7th |
More than 100 years ago, a man traveled north on a mission most people thought was ridiculous to see if crops would grow in the frozen wasteland known as the Territory of Alaska.
That man, Charles C. Georgeson, was a special agent in charge of the United States Agricultural Experiment Stations. The secretary of agriculture charged Georgeson with the task of finding out if crops and farm animals could survive in the mysterious land acquired just 21 years earlier from the Russians.
When he landed at Sitka 100 years ago, Georgeson set in motion agricultural studies that are still carried on today at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
Giant Storms, Big Waves and Chilly Winds Giant Storms, Big Waves and Chilly Winds
Alaska went big on New Year’s.
First, on New Year’s Eve 2020, a superstorm spun its way through the North Pacific Ocean and into the Aleutian Islands.
The twirling mass of gases surrounding Earth was more than 5,000 miles wide, its boundaries stretching from northern Japan to middle Alaska. That’s about 10 times the width of a typical hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Alaska storm that covered a good portion of the globe induced a Dec. 31 low-pressure reading on the Aleutian island of Shemya of 924.8 millibars, a record low for Alaska. Winds on the island registered more than 80 miles per hour. A buoy in the ocean south of Amchitka Island farther east than Shemya in the middle of the Aleutian chain rode up and over a 58-foot wave.