all Andrew Biewener stories

Gonzalo Giribet

404132862 — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:42:07 -0500

They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty hands to show for it.

Gonzalo Giribet, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, managed to remain upbeat, but with each passing day the sick feeling in doctoral student Sarah Boyer’s stomach grew. The two had traveled halfway around the world looking for the daddy longlegs as part of Boyer’s dissertation.

No daddy longlegs, no dissertation.

Research highlights the muscle’s many motions

404132862 — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:46:03 -0500

New research from Harvard’s Concord Field Station has shown that the common perception of a muscle as a single functional unit is incorrect and that different sections within an individual muscle actually do different work.

Spring in your step helps avert disastrous stumbles

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:48:17 -0400

From graceful ballerinas to clumsy-looking birds, everyone occasionally loses their footing. New Harvard University research suggests that it could literally be the spring, or damper, in your step that helps you bounce back from a stumble.

Understanding how fish swim

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:08:28 -0400

The pattern is hard to see at first because the movement seems to happen in the blink of an eye. The only thing that makes it visible at all is the fact that the bluegill sunfish in George Lauder's experiment is swimming through water that is awash with tiny silvery glass beads that catch the light and reveal the fluid's movement. "That's the fish's pectoral fin," Lauder says, pointing to the grainy, black-and-white-picture. "It's slowed down because the camera was taking 250 images per second. But do you see the way the water is moving in a sort of loop behind it?" Lauder is in the midst of conducting what may be the most thorough and technologically sophisticated study to date of how fish swim.