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...

Methane is a strong greenhouse gas that plays a key role in Earth’s climate. Anytime we use natural gas, whether we light up our kitchen stove or barbeque, we are using methane.

Only three sources on Earth produce methane naturally: volcanoes, subsurface water-rock interactions, and microbes. Between these three sources, most is generated by microbes, which have deposited hundreds of gigatons of methane into the deep seafloor. At seafloor methane seeps, it percolates upwards toward the open ocean, and microbial communities consume the majority of this...

Fin-to-limb transition is an icon of key evolutionary transformations. Many studies focus on understanding the evolution of the simple fin into a complicated limb skeleton by examining the fossil record. In a paper published February 4 in Cell, researchers at Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital examined what's occurring at the genetic level to drive different patterns in the fin skeleton versus the limb skeleton.

Researchers, led by M. Brent Hawkins, a recent doctoral...

In nature, the timing of recurring annual lifecycle events affects many aspects of the ecosystem and ecology. In trees the timing of a leaf’s developing bud dictates the length of the growing season and carbon cycling, it mediates competition among plants and controls interactions with pests and pathogens.

The timing of spring buds developing in woody plants – trees, shrubs – is mainly controlled by environmental cues...