Grandma, what a big brain you have!

All the better to survive with, my dear

 

Used with permission from Nicola L. Robinson.

Editor’s Note: SciColl held our first community workshop on Emerging Infectious Diseases in October 2014. This October we're posting several pieces that highlight the important work where collections continue to play an integral role.

Editor’s Note: SciColl intern, Ebubechi Okpalugo from Pembroke College, contributed this article as part of her time in the SciColl office during Summer 2017.

Sit down with a prehistoric relative of ours from the genus Homo - their extinction making it a lot easier said than done - and you’ll notice something significantly different: their heads, and therefore brains, are a fraction of the size of a modern human’s. Why exactly did brain size increase? Quite simply, large and complex brains can process and store more information, which was hugely beneficial to humans as they developed skills and social interaction.

The Smithsonian NMNH Human Origins exhibit houses a collection of fossil skull remnants dating back as far as 3 million years ago, as well as silicon reconstructions of early humans. One can see a gradual change in facial features, body hair and most significantly, head shape and size. Over the course of human evolution, it’s found that brain size tripled, with the modern human brain being the largest and most complex of any living primate. But, size alone doesn't tell us much about thinking ability.

Here’s a bit of what we know. 

Networking a Cure for HIV

    

Fig.1. HIV illustration (left, credit: ©iStock.com/Rost-9D) and receiving treatment (right, credit: WHO).

Editor’s Note: SciColl held our first community workshop on Emerging Infectious Diseases in October 2014. This October, we're posting several pieces that highlight the important work where collections continue to play an integral role.

Editor’s Note: SciColl intern, Eden Absar from the University of Houston, contributed this article as part of her time in the SciColl office during Summer 2017. 

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is an enigma of an infection that has puzzled scientists, doctors, and researchers since the first presented case in the 1980s. Although the modern medical community continues to study it and gather information, a cure for the disease remains elusive. According to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, as of 2015, there are nearly 37 million people worldwide who have been infected by HIV. Of that number, 1.8 million are children under the age of 15. In 2015, approximately 150,000 children were newly infected with HIV - a rate of nearly 400 new pediatric HIV patients every day. These numbers present a huge problem that appears to grow threateningly larger in the face of the lack of a cure for the disease.

Scientific Collections vs. Pandemics: an unfair match?

Fig. 1. Ebola Signs and Symptoms.

Editor’s Note: SciColl held our first community workshop on Emerging Infectious Diseases in October 2014. This October we're posting several pieces that highlight the important work where collections continue to play an integral role.

Editor’s Note: SciColl intern, Ebubechi Okpalugo from Pembroke College, contributed this article as part of her time in the SciColl office during Summer 2017.

Sweeping across three countries and claiming over 11,000 lives, the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak is almost impossible to forget. First identified in 1976, in a remote village named Zaire in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, there have been multiple outbreaks of the virus since. But the 2014 pandemic, caused by the Zaire strain, has been the most deadly. Striking on the border of three of the poorest African nations, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the virus spread to an unprecedented scale. Liberia, the worst hit, was not officially declared Ebola-free until the 13^th of January 2016.

Could it have been stopped quicker? That’s where scientific collections come in.

Best of 2016: Our Annual Report

2016 was a great year for communication: we held a workshop on GRSciColl, we hosted three months of webinars on a wide range of topics, and we held a symposium on Food Security. The communities we developed around these main activities and our online outreach platforms engaged with us at every turn and we couldn’t have had such a successful year without you! 

Best Of 2016: A year of visual communication

via GIPHY

2016 rang in with a new medium for us at SciColl: a video series! This year we jumped feet-first into video profiles of folks working with collections every day. We inquired about how they use collections, who they collaborate with, and how collections-based research is unlike any other. The stories are as diverse as the collections, and we’re looking forward to bringing you more in 2017!

• Interested in plants and how to study the tallest trees in the forest if you can’t get to canopy? Check out The Ultimate Identifier.
• Flies are everywhere, but these kinds of flies are often easier to find in collections than the field. Learn more in The Assassin (Flies) of Entomology.
• What do archaeology, wildlife management and conservation genomics have in common? Check out The Archaeogenomics Equation and learn how this interdisciplinary field got started.
• We also collaborated with our friends at Biodiversity Heritage Library to revamp one of their 2014 blog posts into a video: Monsters Are Real. Is it just us, or do these monsters seemingly come to life when animated with an appropriate soundtrack?

Looking for more? We always are, and compile the best from around the web on our YouTube Channel. Come see what we have in our playlists:

• #ScientificCollections
• #FoodSecurity
• #EnvironmentalChange

We look forward to a blog-filled 2017 and hope you’ll continue to join us!

Best Of 2016: Peeking behind the curtain

In 2016, our most popular articles included a profile of David Inouye (left) leading up to our food security workshop; the engineering behind biorepositories; and a piece about the challenge in describing new or undescribed species.

Without further ado, the end of the year “most read” list is here! Looking at the posts that captivated the largest audiences, it seems this year people were particularly intrigued by stories that pulled the curtain back on collections, their operations, and how to apply the information inside.

In Describing the Undescribed, we learned how to describe a new species with the particular challenge of ensuring you’re not re-describing an already named species. When working in small geographic areas or on a group of closely related species, collections can help researchers verify their new species and highlight what makes them unique.

In The Engineering Behind Repositories, we discussed the challenges of operating a repository. In addition to housing specimens in the appropriate containers to planning out the current collection size and its growth potential, repository managers have to worry about maintaining the right environmental conditions. Errors in technology can have a profound impact on sensitive collections and it pays to have a backup system - even if it never gets used.

Lastly, in Climate Change and Phenology, one of the keynote speakers from our Food Security Symposium explained how his work on pollinators and their ecology can be useful when working to reduce their decline and subsequent loss of ecosystem services. The importance of this work - and the work of pollinators - cannot be overstated.

Many folks also stopped by the blog to check out our new video series! We’ll recap that series and some other videos we’re paying attention to next week!

Monday Morning Coffee Break: December 19

(Credit: Natural History Museum) 

#reindeer #anatomicalspecimen #eyecolor #summervision #wintervision #light