Meanwhile, in botany news...

"Cary Fowler is a modern day Noah, but he isn't building an Ark. He's the mastermind behind a 'doomsday vault' being built beneath the Arctic permafrost to safely store the world's crops for thousands of years.

"Construction began on the vault on Monday, to be carved deep in permafrost in the side of a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago, 1,000 kilometers (625 miles) from the North Pole.

"Built with top security, the $3 million depository will preserve around three million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops, at sub-zero temperatures... Convincing the world of the problem has not been easy, however.

"'Part of the problem is you can go into a meeting and mention gene banks, and people's eyes glaze over. Maybe they recall a high school biology class they did poorly in,' he says.

"'But people get a perception of the magnitude of the loss when I tell them that at the end of the 1800s, 7,000 named apple varieties were grown in the United States. Now, 6,800 of those are as extinct as the dinosaurs."

Meanwhile, in China:


"For one type of orchid in China, procreating is a lonely affair. Rather than depending on insects or even the wind for pollination, scientists have discovered that the orchid Holcoglossum amesianum actually fertilizes itself, according to a report in this week's Nature.

"The orchid defies gravity to twist the male part of its flower into the necessary shape to fertilize the female one, a team led by LaiQuang Huang of Tsinghua University found.

"The plant does so without the help of sticky fluids or other methods used by self-pollinating plants to ensure that the pollen reaches the egg, LaiQuang reported. This makes it a new method of pollination, he said."