Japan wants to preserve seeds of endangered species

The Environment Ministry in Japan is set to dry, freeze and preserve the seeds of 1,690 species of plants that it fears are on the verge of extinction, ministry officials said. The ministry has designated 1,690 of about 7,000 types of plants, including nonflowering plants such as fiddlehead ferns, as endangered species, and intends to preserve the seeds of most of them. “The method of drying and freezing seeds allows us to preserve a large number of seeds. It’s effective in preventing their extinction,” a ministry official said. In the project to be launched in October, the ministry will cooperate with botanical gardens and research institutes across the country to collect seeds of the endangered plants from their habitats. It will then dry them while maintaining their ability to put forth buds and preserve them in a freezer at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Gyoen park that is 20 degrees Celsius below freezing point. Experts say seeds can be preserved for tens of years if frozen. The protection of plants on the verge of extinction is important for conserving biodiversity. A total of 26 botanical gardens across the country are cooperating in growing endangered plants, but there has been no example of systematically preserving seeds of such plants until now. (Source: The Mainichi Daily News)

Snow on Mars?

A Canadian university’s laser aboard a NASA Mars lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds about four kilometres above the landing site, and vaporizing before reaching the ground. “Nothing like this has ever been seen on Mars,” said Jim Whiteway, of York University in Toronto, the lead scientist for the Canadian weather station on the Mars Phoenix lander. “We’ll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground.” Mars Phoenix landed in May at the edge of the Martian Arctic to investigate the soil, and especially to dig for water, in the form of ice. Ice appears and disappears near the Martian North Pole as the seasons change. But how the moisture moves around is unclear, especially as Mars has very little atmosphere — less than one per cent of what Earth has. Canada’s share of Phoenix includes lidar, a cousin of radar that uses lasers to scan the sky. Until now, it had found clouds, fog and blowing sand. Now, as Martian winter approaches, “it’s condensing in the atmosphere … and we’ve started to see frost, ground fog and clouds.” Photos from the little robot show fluffy clouds drifting across the horizon each morning. And lidar’s beam shows that inside those clouds, cascades of the heaviest ice crystals are falling inside the cloud. “So that is snow, falling from the clouds, and we’re going to be watching very closely over the next month for evidence that the snow is actually landing on the surface.” The next month may be all the team gets. Phoenix runs on solar power, and the sun will soon set for about three months, leaving the robot to freeze in the dark. It probably won’t survive. Nevertheless, the chief scientist for Mars Phoenix, Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, is happy. “The atmosphere is a transport mechanism for water-ice and vapour,” he said Monday.