• DOI:10.1038/nature.2017.22521
• Corpus ID: 4446815

Skeleton plundered from Mexican cave was one of the Americas’ oldest

@article{Callaway2017SkeletonPF,
  title={Skeleton plundered from Mexican cave was one of the Americas’ oldest},
  author={Ewen Callaway},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2017},
  volume={549},
  pages={14-15}
}

• E. Callaway
• Published 7 September 2017
• Physics
• Nature

to hold back storm waters after Allison. Those precautions saved equipment and animals, says Anirban Maitra, a pathologist at MD Anderson. “I think they prevented a mega-catastrophe,” he adds. Baylor College of Medicine in Houston lost 60,000 breast-cancer specimens in the 2001 storm. But the lessons learnt from that event have paid off, says spokesperson Lori Williams. “We built a wall around the entire campus,” she says. “We’ve had no animals lost, no research lost.” The University of Houston (UH), by contrast, has no special flood infrastructure. So the institution has been dealing with flooded basement labs, and has struggled to keep animals dry and fed. Forty baby rhesus monkeys had their formula milk rationed, says Amr Elnashai, vice-president for research and technology transfer at UH. A few had to be weaned a week early. Supplies of liquid nitrogen and helium are also running low, and frozen samples will be in danger if they cannot be restocked soon. “If the worst is over, then we are fine,” says Elnashai. “If there is another hit, then we are in deep trouble.” Meanwhile, staff at the Johnson Space Center in Houston are camping out at mission control to keep the International Space Station and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) programmes going. Flight director Courtenay McMillan arrived for a shift on 25 August and stayed for days. Staff have been sleeping on makeshift beds and air mattresses, and subsisting on provisions supplied by co-workers and friends. “We have not run out of coffee, which is the most important thing,” McMillan says. The JWST was in the middle of a 100-day test in a thermal vacuum chamber when Harvey struck, but is unharmed. And a Soyuz capsule landing in Kazakhstan — which the space centre helped to coordinate — went ahead at the weekend with only minor modifications to the plan, says McMillan. Although many institutions have fared relatively well despite the storm’s ferocity, researchers and staff are still dealing with personal losses. The storm destroyed thousands of homes across the region and has been responsible for at least 60 deaths. Maitra says that one administrator on his team has been evacuated to a hotel. “She had to leave in a hurry with her kids in the middle of the night. They were stuck on the third floor of her complex for three days. It is just heartbreaking.” Louise Prockter, director of the Lunar Planetary Institute in Houston, was travelling when Harvey swept into town. She has been trying to support her staff remotely from Washington DC. “Some of our staff have lost all their property,” she says. “It is a mess. For some people, normal is a long, long way off.” ■