“Flocking” Volvox in the Regeneron Science Talent Search

Balasubramanian Fig 3 A&B

Figure 3 A&B from Balasubramanian 2018. (a) V. barberi flock where 56 colonies gathered over several minutes and rotated coherently and rapidly in the culture well. (b) Schematic of flock in panel a.

In 2017, Ravi Balasubramanian, a student from Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, presented a talk and a poster on “flocking” behavior in Volvox barberi at the Fourth International Volvox Meeting in St. Louis. In 2018, Balasubramanian posted a preprint of his work to bioRxiv. Now his work has earned him a place among the top 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2020, “the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.”

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PhD position: evolution of multicellularity

Lund University logo

This is straight from the ALGAE-L listserv, but I thought it might be of interest:

PhD studentship: The ecology and evolution of multicellularity

A fully funded PhD position is available to work on evolutionary transitions to multicellularity. The student will work within the molecular ecology and evolution lab as well as the aquatic ecology group at the Department of Biology, Lund University.

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Jackson Wheat on misunderstanding multicellularity

Jackson Wheat has a new video answering Creation Ministries International’s claims that multicellularity is a problem for evolution. CMI’s strategy seems to be

  1. Bring up a topic in evolutionary biology
  2. Pretend that there haven’t been thousands of scientific papers published on that topic
  3. Make an argument from incredulity as if the question they’re asking hasn’t already been answered

Jackson does a great job tearing down CMI’s assertions one by one.