Animals have developed a wide variety of defensive strategies to avoid being eaten by predators. Some of these techniques, such as camouflage, decrease the organism’s chance of being spotted by a predator. Others, such as aggregation, deter predators from attacking. The most dramatic of defenses is predator satiation, in which...
On April 17th, J. Michael Hasse, a PEMM Graduate Student in the Department of Physiology and Neurobiology at the Geisel School of Medicine, gave a presentation at DHMC on his current research project. His research group in Dr. Farran Briggs lab collaborates with Thayer Professor Solomon Diamond and several undergraduates....
Dr. Mardi Crane-Godrea, as assistant professor in the department ofMicrobiology and Immunology at Dartmouth College and Peter Payne, a Qigong teacher, spoke at DHMC on April 26th. Both have personal interests in the concept of conscious self-regulation and the positive health effects it has. A number of activities are associated...
On April 19, Rebecca Safran, a professor and researcher at University of Colorado at Boulder, presented in the Life Sciences Center at Dartmouth College on her research involving sexual selection and speciation. As a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist, Safran works to better understand how individual behavior and population patterns might...
Takeo Watanabe Ph.D, a renowned professor from Brown University, gave a talk on Friday entitled “Roles of Reward in Perceptual Learning and Plasticity”. He shared his work over the years on unlocking the secrets of our brain and its incredible ability to constantly change and adapt. Throughout our lives, our...
The United States has developed infrastructure that supports the use of hydrocarbon fuels. Billions of dollars have been spent creating pipelines, storage, and end products that function specifically with these fuels. With the green movement, there has been a push to create more ‘environmentally friendly’ biofuels. Scientists have successfully designed...
On April 1, Johnathan Higgins, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard, gave a presentation at the Geisel School of Medicine on his work investigating regulation of mitosis by histone modification. In cellular replication, DNA condenses into chromosomes so that genetic information can more easily segregate. The goal in mitosis is...
RNA and DNA have long been established as the storage containers of genetic information in biology. However, researchers are now wondering whether RNA and DNA are inherently superior molecules for genetic storage and whether we can synthesize a new molecule to do the same job. Both questions are being answered...
Recent advances in DNA preparation and sequencing have enabled high-quality analysis of archaic human genomes. Previously sequenced genomes of archaic humans, including the Neanderthal genome in 2010, were relatively low in quality due to the degraded state of the DNA samples. Information that could be inferred from these low-quality genomes...
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and its more advanced counterpart, acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), affect approximately 34 million people worldwide, with the number of infected patients growing by over two million every year (1). Since first being detected in 1981, AIDS has claimed the lives of almost 30 million...
