Researchers, led by senior author Professor L. Mahadevan, drew inspiration from ants to design simple robots that work collectively to perform complex tasks with simple parameters. The study, published in eLife, sought to understand how individual social insects such as ants, termites and bees, work collectively to perform really complex tasks including construction, foraging, and defence.
The researchers examined how black carpenter ants work together to...
Stem cells are a biological wonder. They can repair, restore, replace, and regenerate cells. In most animals and humans these cells are limited to regenerating only the cell type they are assigned to. So, hair stem cells will only make hair. Intestine stem cells will only make intestines. But, many distantly-related invertebrates have stem cell populations that are pluripotent in adult animals, which means they can regenerate virtually any missing cell type, a process called whole-body regeneration.
Even though these adult pluripotent stem cells (aPSCs) are found in many...
Ecosystem ecology studies often focus on what’s happening to plants above ground, for instance exploring photosynthesis or water loss in leaves. But what is happening below the ground in plant roots is equally important when evaluating ecosystem processes.
In a new study in Nature Geoscience researchers in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University examined root exudates and their impact on soil carbon storage revealing surprising and counterintuitive results...
The rise of tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) is one of the iconic evolutionary transitions preserved in the fossil record. These animals, which lived about 385 to 320 million years ago during the Devonian and Carboniferous periods of Earth’s history, set the stage for the evolution and diversification of all other terrestrial vertebrates as we know them today, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals like humans.
It was long thought that these early animals grew very slowly throughout their lifetime, gradually getting bigger and bigger, similar to a modern...
The most famous fossils from the Cambrian explosion of animal life over half a billion years ago are very unlike their modern counterparts. These “weird wonders,” such as the five-eyed Opabinia with its distinctive frontal proboscis, and the fearsome apex predator Anomalocaris with its radial mouthparts and spiny feeding appendages, have become icons in popular culture. However, they were only quite recently recognised as extinct stages of evolution that are crucial for understanding the origins of one of the largest and most important animal phyla,...
The major histocompatibility complex (MHC), an important genomic region for adaptive immunity, has been extensively studied in mammals and birds, but very little in squamate reptiles.
In a study in Frontiers in Genetics researchers provide the first detailed characterization of the squamate MHC using the genomes of two anole species, the green anole (Anolis carolinensis) and the brown anole (Anolis sagrei), revealing the complexity of the...
A new study in eLife finds excessive clustering of tree species and over introduction of nonnative species may make urban forests more vulnerable to pests and disease.
Co-lead authors Dakota E. McCoy (‘21) and Benjamin Goulet-Scott (‘22) assembled a dataset of more than five million street trees living in 63 of the largest cities in the United States. They then analyzed the data through an ecological lens. They found that there is a wide range in the diversity of street tree communities across cities and that these...
Professor and Department Chair, Scott Edwards, and Professor Cassandra Extavour featured in a display at the University of Bristol, UK, honoring African and African American scientists. October is Black History Month in the United Kingdom.
