Monthly Archives: February 2013

Lamprey genome sequenced

This blog post is reposted with permission from BEACON faculty member C. Titus Brown’s blog, Living in an Ivory Basement. The lamprey is a jawless vertebrate that diverged from the jawed vertebrate lineage around 550 mya. Lampreys, together with hagfish, represent the … Continue reading

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Ex Una Plures! Happy 25th birthday to the Long Term Evolution Experiment

This blog post is by MSU postdoc Zachary Blount. Once upon a time, at a university far from MSU, Richard Lenski, my boss, founded twelve populations of E. coli from a single clone called REL606. And so began the E. … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: A Tiny Teal Tale

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Jessica Caton. Birds are everywhere! With 10,000 species living on every continent, you are bound to have come across a bird in your lifetime with possibly a … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: What do evolution, cancer, and optical character recognition have in common?

This week’s blog post is by MSU postdoc David Knoester. In 2012, cancer accounted for about 1 of every 4 deaths in the United States. That’s 1,500 people each day. By 2020, annual cancer deaths are expected to increase to … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Why do men and women exist?

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Rohan Maddamsetti.  In his treatise on love, Symposium, Plato tells a myth of a time when men and women were one. People used to have one head … Continue reading

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Evolve & Conquer: Teaching Evolution via an Engaging Multiplayer Video Game

Cross-posted from the Adami Lab website. Teaching with games has been one of the buzz topics in pedagogy lately. Although video games aren’t a formal teaching method by any means, many education scientists suggest games increase intrinsic (self-) motivation to … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Making and breaking species

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Alycia Lackey. The world’s biodiversity represents a balance between the formation and extinction of species. To understand what drives diversity, scientists study what generates, maintains, and degrades … Continue reading

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