Maryland's hidden treasure

Fig.1. Sara Rivers-Cofield displays a part of the
MAC Lab collection. (Credit: MAC Lab)

Sara Rivers-Cofield always planned on pursuing archaeology. Her background prepared her for it. She bagged a bachelor’s in history and anthropology at Murray State University and a master’s in applied anthropology at the University of Maryland. She landed a position working in collections after doing seven years of fieldwork.

After working on a conservation assessment at Historic St. Mary’s City, Rivers-Cofield found herself in the “right place, right time” when there was an opening at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab) at Jefferson Patterson Park & Museum in St. Leonard, Md.

Rivers-Cofield is curator of federal collections at the MAC Lab, a repository for archaeological finds recovered from land-based and underwater projects conducted in Maryland.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: August 8

(Credit: Joachim Burger/JGU Mainz) 

#DNA #agriculture #anthropology #humanorigins

Food security workshop registration now open

We are pleased to invite you to register for our symposium, Stressors and Drivers of Food Security: Evidence from Scientific Collections. The symposium will be hosted by the US Department of Agriculture at the National Agriculture Library in Beltsville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., Monday to Wednesday, 19-21 September 2016.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: August 1

(Credit: JoAnna Wendel) 

#geoscience #meteorite #KingTut #dagger #comicstrip

Describing the undescribed

Fig. 1. Chiloglanis kerioensis, one of the species Hank Bart and colleagues discovered in Kenya. (Credit: R.C. Schmidt).

Henry “Hank” Bart, director of Tulane University’s Biodiversity Research Institute, had never done research in Africa, much less visited the continent, before 2008. Now after intense suckermouth catfish research in Kenya over the past few years, Bart is looking to continue his work there.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: July 25

(Credit: The National Geographic Society) 

#NationalParkService #NPS #centennial #maps #collection

In the News: Biodiversity in Beer and Nut-cracking Monkeys

Fig.1. Some beer labels now display Genebank accession numbers. (Credit: Ove Fosså.)

A powerful DNA tool holds the answers to crop population genetic variations, and archaeologists discover tools that monkeys used to get their nut fix. That and more in our science news roundup.

• As we shared last week in our video, high-throughput sequencing is a powerful tool available to scientists. This team used it to identify small genetic differences in plant crop populations: Exploring Genetic Diversity in Plants Using High-Throughput Sequencing Techniques, Current Genomics (August 2016)
• We've talked about beer made with wild yeast - here's an assessment of how many barley varieties are actually utilized by the industry. You know the number is low when there is a brewery putting Genebank accession numbers on its labels: The biodiversity of beer, Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog (5 July 2016)
• Ocean ice and sediment cores reveal a new connection between ocean circulation and climate patterns during the last ice age: Ocean circulation implicated in past abrupt climate changes, Science Daily (30 June 2016) 
• Humans aren’t the only ones with a history of using tools. Primate archaeologists have found evidence of 700-year-old tools used by capuchin monkeys to crack open nuts: Monkeys used stone tools 700 years ago, BBC News (12 July 2016)
• If you study cancer, you probably were excited to hear about a new initiative to double the world’s number of cancer cell lines available to researchers (to 1,000!): Global Initiative Seeks 1,000 New Cancer Models, Scientific American (11 July 2016)