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...

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...

Ctenophores, also known as comb jellies, are a group of over 200 living species of invertebrate animals with a transparent gelatinous body superficially resembling that of a jellyfish. There is much interest in ctenophore evolution in recent years as their controversial phylogenetic position in the animal tree of life has prompted conflicting hypotheses. While some studies suggest they might represent the earliest branching animals, others suggest a more traditional position as close relatives of jellyfish.

These hypotheses carry different and important implications for...

In a paper published in Geology, Javier Ortega-Hernandez and colleagues from the University of New England, The Natural History Museum, and Pomona College report a unique case of an exceptionally preserved nervous system in a 310 million year old fossil horseshoe crab from the world...