August 9, 2011

Baby sea urchins aren’t all the same

Guest post by Viviane Callier, Duke biology

July 25, 2011

Drawing a Line on Preservation

Conservation programs that perform captive breeding for endangered animals  – like the Duke Lemur Center – face a difficult choice when choosing pairs to breed.

DNA analysis suggests that some populations of rare animals which have been isolated from one another by fragmented habitat may in fact be distinct sub-species. If they've been separated long enough without mating opportunities, their genomes have evolved subtle differences.

July 21, 2011

Flying high on stolen wings

Guest post by Viviane Callier, Duke biology

The wing color patterns on some butterfly species have evolved to copy wings on other butterfly species. In Heliconius butterflies, which are toxic to birds, the convergence of several species on the same wing color pattern gives them all mutual benefit – birds recognize one pattern saying “I’m poisonous; don’t eat me!"

June 16, 2011

Cancer Genomics Points to New Approach

The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation Institute at Duke kicked off its new annual lecture June 15 in the biggest way imaginable: Bert Vogelstein,  a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Johns Hopkins University, is simply the most-cited scientist in the world. (That's a measure of how much other scientists refer to his work in their own papers.)