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Author Archives: Danielle Whittaker
BEACON's Elena Litchman and Ben Kerr honored by President Obama
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
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BEACON Researchers at Work: Spatial patterning in microbial communities
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
BEACON research featured on Scientific American blog
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
BEACON Researchers at Work: Effects of rising temperatures on marine phytoplankton
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
Origins of Life: Experiment art installation at Ars Electronica 2011
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
BEACON Researchers at Work: Lessons in bacterial evolvability from eventual winners
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
Evolution keeps sex determination flexible
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
BEACON Researchers at Work: Portrait of a Damsel
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
BEACON Researchers at Work: Survival of the weakest – when doing poorly does best
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Washington graduate student Joshua Nahum. “Survival of the fittest” is a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer upon his reading of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to describe the … Continue reading
BEACON Researchers at Work: Measuring fitness in the Long Term Evolution Experiment
This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by Michigan State University graduate student Mike Wiser. If there’s one thing you can really depend on about life, it’s that it’s constantly changing. Many of us learned in our biology classes … Continue reading