ecology
Deep Sequencing the English Channel, Or How You Can Find Any Microbe If You Look Hard Enough
Microbiologists scan a sample of seawater from the English Channel and find that if you look hard enough, you can find almost every microbe species on the planet.
Complex Food Webs Meet Big Time Computing
When ecologists study how species interact in their natural environments, one of the most important things to understand is the structure of food webs, the relationships between predator and prey, or who eats what. As you can imagine, these webs can get pretty complex in the real world as the number of species in a […]
The List of Explanations for Ocean Acidification Keeps Getting Smaller
Over the past 20 years, Cathy Pfister and her husband Tim Wootton, both biologists in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, have been traveling to Tatoosh Island off the northwestern tip of Washington state to study the rich variety of plant and animal life in and around its coastal waters. And while they have turned […]
LabBook July 6, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
LabBook June 22, 2012
Welcome to LabBook, our weekly roundup of University of Chicago Medicine & Biological Sciences research news from around campus and the world wide web. Each Friday, LabBook will recap the week on the blog, link to news stories about our faculty and studies, and briefly summarize a handful of recent publications by our researchers. THIS […]
Like Father Like Son, Even In Song
Kids learn a lot of things from their dads: how to play catch, how to shave, how to drive. In many cases, it’s obvious that sons have even learned how to talk from their father. Though their voices may be different, the words they use or their pronunciation or mannerisms can be very similar from […]
Recalculating a 40-Year-Old Ecology Riddle
By Rob Mitchum In 1972, a physicist named Robert May tried his hand at a different scientific discipline, publishing a simple formula that inflamed the field of ecology. Scientists studying the structure of natural ecosystems had long assumed that diversity was an inherently good thing — those ecosystems stocked with thousands of species were likely […]
Vertebrate Evolution: Heads or Tails?
In the aftermath of a mass extinction, nature tends to get creative. Those lucky species that survive often explode with Seussian abandon into a diverse array of shapes, sizes, and behaviors, capitalizing upon the ecological opportunities left available by their less fortunate peers. Usually, the oddities produced by these “adaptive radiations” are whittled down by […]
Year in Review: UChicago Research 2011
As another year comes to a close we’d like to look back at the fascinating research breakthroughs and inspiring patient stories from 2011. ScienceLife ran 168 posts this year, and while we wish we could highlight all of them, here are a handful of our favorites from each month. January Patrick Wilson found out that […]
The Helpful Pacifism of Bacterial Cheaters
Have you ever cheated on a test by glancing over at someone else’s work? Or relied on a fellow student to carry the load on a group project while you coast along with minimal effort? While few will admit to these forms of cheating, they have long been fixtures of the classroom. However, a lazy […]
