Staying Chill, Even When Disaster Strikes

When most people prepare for a hurricane, they buy food and water. But when scientist Amanda Moors sees one of those big, red, pinwheel-shaped storms appear on the weather map, she buys liquid nitrogen.

Moors spends a lot of time thinking about failure. Not career failure or experiment failure, but equipment failure. And that’s where the liquid nitrogen comes in. Because if a hurricane hits her lab and there’s a power outage, a lot of the biological and environmental specimens archived there could be lost if she and her colleagues don’t adequately fill up the liquid nitrogen freezers and make sure the backup generators are ready.