Understanding how corals use this amorphous phase to construct their skeletons presents a challenge: scientists only have a short window to observe what’s happening at the cellular level before the coral skeleton crystalizes and assumes its final, solid form.This is why Mass teamed up with physicist Pupa Gilbert, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, to look at fresh samples of hood coral polyps, Stylophora pistillata, using powerful X-ray imaging from the Advanced Light Source at Berkley. Their findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in August.
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