Congratulations to the Hoekstra Lab, winner of the 2017 North American Laboratory Freezer Challenge. More than 200 labs representing 34 organizations participated in the Challenge, including three labs from Harvard’s Cambridge campus. Led by Lab Manager Kyle Turner, the Hoekstra Lab earned the most points by tackling some of the largest energy conservation...
Most animals with multiple gaits change at predictable speeds. However, the Jerboas, bipedal desert rodents that use three gaits, transition between these gaits at unpredictable speeds. Talia Moore (former graduate student in Biewener and Losos labs) and Andy Biewener looked at the unpredictability of the jerboas and the benefits for survival over their quadrupedal neighbors in a new study published in...
L. Mahadevan recreated complex birdsongs using air blown through a stretched rubber tube. The study published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, found the complexity of birdsongs may be due to a simple controllable instability in the structure of the syrinx, a specialized organ used to create songs. News coverage in the...
Graduate student, Brianna McHorse (Biewener and S. Pierce Lab), used beam bending to study fossil horses (Equidae) to shed light on the evolutionary forces that led to digit reduction. The study, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supports two historical hypotheses: increased body mass and limb elongation, and elucidates the mystery of the modern horse. One of...
Shane Campbell-Stanton (PhD '15, Losos and Edwards Labs), offers a rare view of natural selection in the anole lizard due to extreme weather events in a study in Science. As a graduate student, Campbell-Stanton collected DNA in 2013 from lizards in Texas and Oklahoma. Following an unusually harsh winter in 2014, he returned to the field sites to collect new DNA samples. With the before and after samples, Campbell-Staton and...
