By Nora Lowe You’re wiping rainwater from your brow. The damp darkness is only interrupted by the occasional dull, red light, moving to and fro. No, this spooky scene isn’t an alien abduction, but it is still a big night. In fact, it is the Big Night, when spotted salamanders migrate to reproduce, and Amherst…
Cover image: Berghia stephanieae. Point of Fort Jeudy, Grenada. 14 feet deep, 24 August 1986. Photo by Hans Bertsch. Reprinted with permission from The Slug Site. Article by Nora Lowe This year’s finals had me feeling especially sluggish, so when I heard that there would be a Biology Seminar on sea slug brains, I thought,…
This article is a summary of this video: “Nuclear receptor NR4A is required for patterning at the ends of the planarian anterior-posterior axis”. https://jrnlclub.org/research-films/planarian-regeneration-patterning Regeneration is a fundamental process in biology that allows animals to “bounce back” from injury by synthesizing new tissue. While regeneration is an essential process for the maintenance of homeostasis in…
The following article is based on a video posted to JRNLclub.com by Sahin Naqvi. A great part of psychology is how many connections it makes to other fields. One of the most common connections is to neuroscience. Although the following study is not related to my research in social psychology, it still offers some fascinating…
This article is published in collaboration with The Amherst Student. Professors Sally Kim and Marc Edwards of the Biology Department received a Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grant recently from the National Science Foundation for the acquisition of an integrated Zeiss 980 microscope with Airyscan 2 and Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) in order to create an…
This article is published in collaboration with The Amherst Student. Assistant Professor of Biology Jeeyon Jeong was recently awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). The CAREER award provides faculty early in their career with five years of funding for research and educational resources. It is considered…
Ethan Clotfelter has been a professor of biology at Amherst College for eighteen years. Some of his courses Form and Function, Animal Behavior, Adaptation, and the Organism, and Tropical Biology. What is your degree in and what was your educational path to achieving it? I graduated from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill…
Like most fortuitous encounters in my Amherst College career, I met Dr. Victoria Fang ‘11 through Professor Sheila Jaswal. I noticed the LinkedIn message while switching between tabs, taking breaks from the Google slides page on which I prepared slides for my first journal club. Not only was this the first journal club I was…
There is a palpable difference between the macroscopic animals we interact with daily and the microscopic unicellular organisms we can only appreciate under a microscope. The transition from unicellularity to multicellularity is perhaps one of the most significant evolutionary transitions that we know of today, even among other large-scale evolutionary transitions, such as tetrapods moving…
In addition to being one of the common forms of cancer for men, ,prostate cancer is responsible for the second highest number of cancer-related deaths for men across the United States. ,In a recent study, researchers from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed a biologically informed deep learning…