Author Archives: Danielle Whittaker

BEACON Evolved Art Competition Results

For the past three months, participants in BEACON’s evolved art competition have been using evolution to create art pieces that resemble the BEACON lighthouse. “How is that possible?” you ask? Each entry started as a random image that looked something … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at work: Changing environments / changing organisms

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by University of Washington graduate student Peter Conlin. Natural selection produces an organism whose phenotype is well matched to its environment. Under a constant environment there should be a single optimum, … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Evolving division of labor

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by MSU graduate student Anya Johnson. Have you ever looked around you and thought about the amazing feats that organisms accomplish together? The most obvious examples are of course everything that humans … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: To What Place Workflowmics?

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by NC A&T faculty member Scott Harrison. A practical challenge in genomic studies has been for students to conceive of different outcomes concerning variation, and to test these outcomes against data … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: The Structure of Coevolution

This BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Luis Zaman.  In my first BEACON blog post, I wrote about how we study the diversity producing effects of host-parasite coevolution in Avida. I used a traffic jam … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: When Cooperating Means Just Saying No

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Washington postdoc Brian Connelly. Evolutionary biologists often talk like economists, particularly when the topic is cooperation. Instead of dollars, euros, or pounds, the universal currency in evolution is fitness. A species that … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Addressing the Next Generation Science Standards

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate students Melissa Kjelvik and Liz Schultheis. The current landscape of K-12 science education is shifting – moving away from memorization of science facts to an approach based on the … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Multi-objective Evolutionary Optimization to Allow Greenhouse Production/Energy Use Tradeoffs

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student José R. Llera. My name is José R. Llera, and I received my B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. I learned about … Continue reading

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How and why do animals evolve grouping behavior?

This blog post is reposted from MSU graduate student Randal Olson’s blog. In the concluding remarks of their book Living in Groups, Jens Krause and Graeme Ruxton highlighted “understanding how and why animals evolve grouping behavior” as one of the … Continue reading

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Bacterial warfare using antibiotics and communication

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Washington research assistant professor Josephine Chandler. Bacteria can compete with one another by making antibiotics Competition occurs all around us, between people and institutions, and in plants and animals. … Continue reading

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