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Gayatri Chaturvedi, a junior at Falmouth High School, won a $5,000 Marjot Foundation grant to conduct scientific research over the course of the 2023-24 school year. Gayatri is the daughter of Drs. Neena and Rahul Chaturvedi. Gayatri will be collaborating with two scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL): Dr. Loretta Roberson, associate scientist in the Bell Lab; and Dr. Mirta Teichberg, associate scientist and director of MBL’s Semester in Environmental Science. Gayatri’s project, “Investigating the Impact of Ocean Acidification on Seaweed Growth and Physiology,” will have ..read more

WOODS HOLE — To take a walk in Woods Hole is to take a walk on the edge — not only the edge of land and sea, but also on the boundary where threats associated with climate change come up against a community determined to adapt.   That community − scientists, town officials, environmental engineers, business owners and residents − is sharing its vision for meeting predicted climate change-driven sea-level rise with an eye toward being a model for others. It's doing this through a newly created, self-guided walking tour, with stops at the village's most vulnerable spots.   Developed by ..read more

Forget "Jaws": The remarkable wound-healing power of shark skin could end up helping humans, new research claims. Shark skin is coated with a special film of mucus that more closely resembles mucus generated by people than that generated by other types of fish, noted researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm. They conducted their investigation at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Wood's Hole, Mass., and reported their findings recently in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. It's long been known that sharks have an unusual ability to quickly heal and ..read more

The American Academy of Microbiology, the leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), released a new climate change report this week highlighting strategies to mitigate methane emissions by leveraging microbes. MBL Senior Scientist Zoe Cardon participated in the colloquium on which the report, The Role of Microbes in Mediating Methane Emissions, is based. "Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas but it has a short lifetime (10 years) in the atmosphere," Cardon says. "So anything we can do right now to reduce our methane emissions can have an important and quick ef ..read more

MBL Senior Scientist Joshua Rosenthal and the biotech company he co-founded, Korro Bio, are mentioned in this article. Although DNA editing has been celebrated for its potential to create new drugs, a relatively unsung alternative, RNA editing, may end up stealing the show RNA could be considered DNA’s younger sibling. From the very beginning, RNA’s milestones came later and attracted less attention than DNA’s milestones. For example, the discovery of DNA’s structure was first published in 1953; the corresponding discovery for RNA’s structure was published in 1956. The polymerase discoveries f ..read more

A person might wear their heart on their sleeve, but cuttlefish seem to wear their thoughts right on their skin. Horst Obenhaus, a neuroscientist working with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is studying how these unusual creatures communicate with color. In particular, he and his team now think the unique patterns cuttlefish show on their skin while they sleep might be a colorful reflection of their inner thoughts—and, maybe, even of their dreams. Cuttlefish are cephalopods—cousins of octopuses and squid. They’re clever animals with complex brains. Previous resea ..read more

In this blog post for The Node, three MBL researchers explain why they love the sea star as a research organism and the questions it is helping them to ask. What comes to mind when I say, “sea star”? For me, I think of easily accessible eggs that we can fertilized in vitro to make completely clear larvae that grow in a 6-well dish. Ah yes, I guess you were also thinking about snorkeling in a transparent ocean! My name is Margherita Perillo and I am a Research Scientist at the MBL in beautiful Woods Hole right in Cape Cod. My research focuses mostly on understanding tissue and organ m ..read more

The American Academy of Microbiology, the leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), released a new climate change report this week highlighting strategies to mitigate methane emissions by leveraging microbes. MBL Senior Scientist Zoe Cardon, an ASM Academy Fellow, participated in the colloquium on which the report, The Role of Microbes in Mediating Methane Emissions, is based. "Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas but it has a short lifetime (10 years) in the atmosphere," Cardon says. "So anything we can do right now to reduce our methane emissions can have a ..read more

Seven international researchers, including MBL Senior Scientist Joshua Rosenthal, are recipients of Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems Kavli Exploration Awards, receiving $3.7M for three different projects. The Kavli Foundation announced the awards at the Society for Neuroscience conference this week. The projects will pursue novel investigations into how nervous systems may enable organisms (cephalopods, in Rosenthal's project) to adapt to environmental challenges, including warming oceans, extreme weather events such as heatwaves, and other environmental perturbations that may have influen ..read more