Sea cucumbers, scavengers of the seafloor that resemble the cylindrical vegetable, have been consumed as a delicacy in Asia for centuries. But in recent decades, they’ve been severely overharvested to a point that they are now quite rare. New research that Mark E. Hay, Regents Chair and the Harry and Anna Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology, helped conduct suggests their repopulation could play an important role in protecting and revitalizing another type of endangered marine organism: corals.

As they seep and calve into the sea, melting glaciers and ice sheets are raising global water levels at unprecedented rates. To predict and prepare for future sea-level rise, scientists need a better understanding of how fast glaciers melt and what influences their flow.  Now, a study by MIT scientists offers a new picture of glacier flow, based on microscopic deformation in the ice. The results show that a glacier’s flow depends strongly on how microscopic defects move through the ice.

“This study really shows the effect of microscale processes on macroscale behavior,” says Meghana Ranganathan who led the study as a MIT graduate student and is now a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “These mechanisms happen at the scale of water molecules and ultimately can affect the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.” (This also appeared at Mirage News and Phys.org.)

A new paper published in the journal Science argues that traits that are highly variable and evolve quickly, over short time scales, are often the same ones that shape the direction of long-term evolution of new species. School of Biological Sciences Assistant Professor James Stroud, who was not involved in the research, says the study provides a fascinating insight: “As selection changes through time to chase new optima, the genetic variation of traits under selection may increase from this evolutionary back and forth,” he says. “This additive genetic variance, termed evolvability, is a window into evolution’s past.”