Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are a diverse group of charismatic microscopic invertebrates that are best known for their ability to survive extreme conditions. A famous example was a 2007 trip to space where tardigrades were exposed to the space vacuum and harmful ionizing solar radiation, and still managed to survive and reproduce after returning to Earth. Tardigrades are found in all the continents of the world and in different environments including marine, freshwater, and terrestrial.

Tardigrades have survived all five Phanerozoic Great Mass Extinction events,...

L Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a team of mathematicians and physicists have used observations, lab experiments, theory and computation to understand the growth and form of the cusp of an apple. 

The team collected apples at various growth stages from an orchard at Peterhouse College at University of Cambridge in the U.K. They then mapped the growth of the dimple, or cusp...

OEB alumni Trevor Bedford (PhD '08) named a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and awarded a 'genius grant.' Bedford will use the funds to build tools for tracking and forecasting the spread of viral pathogens such as those that cause influenza, Ebola, and COVID.

Bedford was a graduate student in Professor Dan Hartl's lab...

Congratulations to Cassandra Extavour selected as one of 33 Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigators. Extavour is investigating the ancient origins of germ cells, which are the only cells in the body to pass on their genes, making germ cells central to the process of evolution. Extavour studies the evolutionary processes that led to the formation of the first egg cell. “While my research...

Charles Davis, OEB Professor and Curator of Vascular Plants at Harvard University Herbaria, has been awarded $4.7 million from the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections Grant for his team’s collaborative project "Bringing Asia to digital life: mobilizing underrepresented Asian herbarium collections in the US to propel biodiversity discovery.”

Asia is the largest continent on Earth, and includes the world’s tallest mountains, lowest...