Congratulations to PhD candidate Sam Church (Extavour Lab), Ben Goulet-Scott (Hopkins Lab), Dakota McCoy (Haig Lab) and Jacob Suissa (Friedman Lab) awarded funding from the Office for Sustainability to plant native plants on the Harvard campus for their proposal, "Native plants at Harvard: Ecosystem, eduction, community."

Image: ...

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PhD candidate Anju Manandhar (Holbrook Lab) is recipient of the Harvard Center for Biological Imaging Simmons Award for her project, "Structural mechanism of stomatal movement (How do leaves have pores that open and close?)."

 

Congratulations to PhD candidate Inbar Maayan (Haig Lab) recipient of the Society of Systematic Biologists Graduate Student Research Award for her project titled, “Testing species hypotheses in sympatric, wide-ranging Caribbean lizards.”

The non-trilobite arthropod (the largest phylum in the animal kingdom, which includes such familiar forms as lobsters, crabs and spiders) Sinoburius lunaris has been known for approximately three decades, but few details of its anatomy are well understood due to its rarity within the early Cambrian Chengjiang biota in Southern China, and the technical limitations for studying these fossils. In a new paper by Javier Ortega-Hernández in collaboration with Prof. Yu Liu, Yunnan University, China, researchers use microCT to show in great detail...

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Congratulations to Stephanie Pierce, awarded the 2019 Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching!  The Harvard Gazette Read more about Stephanie Pierce Awarded Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching

With profound sadness, we note the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Jim McCarthy, on December 11th after a protracted illness. Jim was a towering figure, whose impact as a scholar, policy advisor, and human being was extraordinary. The OEB community is greatly diminished by his loss, and we will all feel Jim’s absence deeply.

Notable remebrances by the Harvard Center for the Environment and ...

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Congratulations to Andrew Biewener, named fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Read more about Andrew Biewener Named AAAS Fellow

Artificial muscles will power the soft robots and wearable devices of the future, but the underlying mechanics is not well known. Professor L. Mahadevan's study in Physical Review Letters uncovers some of the fundamental physical properties of artificial muscle fibers. The thin soft filaments can stretch, bend and twist into extreme deformations. Mahadevan's study explains the theoretical...

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Roopkund Lake is a small body of water nestled deep in the Himalayan mountains. The Lake is known colloquially as Skeleton Lake due to the remains of several hundred ancient human bones scattered around its shores. The skeletons have never been studied so little was known of the origins. 

Graduate student, Éadaoin Harney (Wakeley Lab) and an international team of researchers analyzed the remains using bioarcheological analysis (including ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, stable...

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New research by Postdoc, Ashesh Dhawale and Bence Ölvecsky suggests errors resulting from variability in motor function are a feature, not a bug, of our nervous system and play a critical role in learning. The study published in Current Biology addresses the issue of how the brain regulates variability which is necessary for learning, but not useful...

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Postdoctoral Researcher Katrina Jones and Stephanie Pierce tackle the question of biological complexity using the complex mammalian spine as an evolutionary example. Using phylogenetic modeling. Jones and Pierce were able to discover why the mammalian vertebral column became more complex over time. The data published in Nature Communications shows major shifts in spine complexity are associated with increases in aerobic capacity, thus...

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PhD candidates Nate Edelman (Mallet Lab) and Michael Miyagi (Desai & Wakeley Labs)  and researchers including Profs. James Mallet and John Wakeley have found evidence for widespread hybridization and gene flow between different species of Heliconius butterflies. The team looked at a group of neotropical butterflies and found that different species have been hybridizing with each other throughout their millions-of-years-old history. They developed a new method to identify parts of the genome that were particularly impacted by hybridization and showed the process of recombination...

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Tuna are highly efficient swimmers, migrating thousands of miles across the Pacific from California to Japan. They are also among the fastest fish in the water reaching speeds of nearly 50 miles per hour. George Lauder has been trying to understand how they are capable of both by developing robots to model tuna's flexible underwater gait.

Working with a team of researchers from the University of Virginia, Lauder developed Tunabot, the first robotic tuna that accurately mimics both their highly efficient swimming style and high speed. Tunabot is described in a paper published...

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Pardis Sabeti and researchers at the Broad Institute have turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells. Many of the world's most common or deadly pathogens are RNA-based viruses. The study in Molecular Cell is the first to harness CAS 13 enzyme, or any CRISPR system, as an antiviral in cultured human cells....

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Prof. L Mahadevan and researchers with the Harvard Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering have created the most complex shape-shifting structures to date -- lattices composed of multiple materials that grow or shrink in response to changes in temperature. The team printed flat lattices that shape morph into a frequency-shifting antenna or the face of pioneering mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in response to a change in temperature. The study is published in the...

Read more about Shape-shifting Structures Take The Form of A face, Antenna