Category Archives: BEACON Researchers at Work

BEACON Researchers at Work: The Origin of a Species?

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU postdoc Zachary Blount. I love big questions. I tend to walk around, my head in the clouds, questions flitting through my head. I admit that I have walked into … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Testing Phylogenetic Inference with Experimental Evolution

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work blog post is by MSU graduate student Cory Kohn. Skepticism. This is generally an important characteristic of scientists. Why would an attitude that is to be avoided in polite conversation act as a useful, … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Digital Macroevolution

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Idaho faculty member Luke Harmon. I am a researcher who typically studies evolution over very long time scales – tens to hundreds of millions of years. For example, we’ve … Continue reading

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BEACON Researchers at Work: Evolving Genome Libraries

This week’s BEACON Researchers at Work post is by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Peter Enyeart.  I love bacteria. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but I really do. When most people think of bacteria, … Continue reading

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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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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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