Monthly Archives: September 2011

BEACON’s Elena Litchman and Ben Kerr honored by President Obama

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

BEACON faculty members Elena Litchman (Zoology, MSU) and Benjamin Kerr (Biology, UW) are on the list of recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, announced today by the White House. President Obama today named 94 researchers … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON in the News | Comments Off

BEACON Researchers at Work: Spatial patterning in microbial communities

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s blog post is by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center postdoc Babak Momeni. Synthetic communities may help us understand the biology of natural microbial communities. Microbial communities in nature are abundant, with amazing diversity and huge impact on life … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , | Comments Off

BEACON research featured on Scientific American blog

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

NESCent‘s Robin Smith was a guest speaker at BEACON’s annual Congress in August. While she was here, Robin learned about all the great interdisciplinary BEACON projects involving Xiaobo Tan’s robotic fish. In landlocked East Lansing, Michigan, you’re unlikely to swim … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON in the News | Tagged , | Comments Off

BEACON Researchers at Work: Effects of rising temperatures on marine phytoplankton

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Mridul Thomas. Every day, a staggering quantity of carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere into the oceans as a result of the silent actions of massive numbers … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work, BEACONites | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Origins of Life: Experiment art installation at Ars Electronica 2011

Posted on September 15, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

The art installation “Origins of Life: Experiment #1.6″ by Adam Brown, BEACON’s  artist-in-residence, and Robert Root-Bernstein was featured this month at Ars Electronica 2011 in Austria. This series of experiments is a re-enactment of the famous Urey-Miller experiment which simulated … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON in the News, BEACONites | Tagged | Comments Off

BEACON Researchers at Work: Lessons in bacterial evolvability from eventual winners

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by University of Texas at Austin faculty member Jeffrey Barrick. For a long time, I thought that I’d become a synthetic organic chemist. Synthesizing intricate molecules would be a natural next … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Evolution keeps sex determination flexible

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

There are many old wives’ tales about what determines a baby’s sex, yet it is the tight controls at the gene level which determine an organism’s sex in most species. Researchers at Michigan State University have found that even when … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON in the News | Tagged , | Comments Off

BEACON Researchers at Work: Portrait of a Damsel

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Danielle Whittaker

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU postdoc Idelle Cooper. If damselflies were painters, they would surely be watercolorists, and probably impressionists, too. As soon as the morning sun strikes the vegetation along the riverbank, the damselflies … Continue reading →

Posted in BEACON Researchers at Work | Tagged , , | Comments Off