Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello had just moved to New York when Hurricane Sandy blew in from the Atlantic and buffeted the East Coast.

She heard that the labs at New York University, where she was working — and its freezer — were losing power. So she ran to the failing freezer, took the microbiota samples she’d gathered as a researcher in Puerto Rico over the past 14 years and stored them elsewhere.

Dominguez-Bello’s colleagues weren’t so lucky — many researchers lost samples that took years to gather.

Now she has an idea for how to protect those samples from disasters. Read more at NPR.

[photo: NIAID]