Genevieve Smith
Conflict Avoidance:
How NOT Competing Can Be The Ticket to Success.
With over 8 million species and counting on the planet, fighting for survival can be a challenge. But often, being able to avoid competition is as important as facing up to it. Finding new ways to make a living, new places to colonize, and new things to eat allows species to coexist in our crowded world and results in the astonishing variety of life that surrounds us.
Genevieve studies avoidance of competition in amphipods – tiny crustaceans that live in lakes and ponds.
Darwin Day
Join us as the Science Under The Stars team helps celebrate Darwin Day at the Texas Memorial Museum. Our very own past speaker Emily Jane McTavish will be giving her excellent talk about the evolution of Texas Longhorns at 3:00pm!
Sunday, February 11, 2012 1-4:45pm
Texas Memorial Museum
2400 Trinity St.
Austin, Texas 78705
© John A. Maisano
Here’s more information from the Texas Memorial Museum’s website:
Join TNSC on Sunday, February 12, 2012 from 1 p.m. to 4:45 p.m. for Darwin Day—a free, family-friendly event celebrating the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.
Travel on your own voyage of discovery as you explore specimens from the TNSC collections similar to those that Darwin saw during his journey while aboard the HMS Beagle, investigate how Darwin’s observations led him to develop fundamental theories of evolution, and learn more about Darwin’s influence on modern day science.
FREE activities for the whole-family include:
Ongoing: Arts and crafts, exploration of TNSC specimens at booths hosted by University of Texas at Austin scientists, and digging in the Fossil Dig Pit
Talks by University of Texas at Austin Scientists:
1:30 p.m.—Sassy taste or sexy traits: Stories about co-evolution of female preference and male traits: presented by Silu Wang, Graduate Student, School of Integrative Biology
3:00 p.m.—Longhorn evolution: presented by Emily Jane McTavish, Graduate Student, School of Integrative Biology
In 1831 Charles Darwin set off on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on the HMS Beagle. His scientific observations of the amazing diversity of animals he saw in South America were the foundation of his theory of evolution by natural selection. I use the principles of evolution to study Texas Longhorn cattle, another organism that made that long voyage across the Atlantic Ocean—over 300 years before Darwin.
Jacob Soule
Partners in Pollination
Jacob Soule, Graduate Student in Ecology, Evolution & Behavior at the University of Texas at Austin, will explain the many strange relationships that pollination produces.
UT Austin Graduate Student Jacob Soule
Animal pollinators help over 80% of the world’s flowering plants reproduce. The relationship between plants and their animal pollinators has produced an amazing diversity of pollination mechanisms. From minute wasps that specialize in pollinating figs to orchids that mimic female bees to deceive male bees, pollination strategies are astounding in variety.
Speaker Jacob Soule on the Radio!
Our Science Under the Stars speaker for this week – Jacob Soule – will be appearing on They Blinded Me With Science radio show tonight (Feb 6th, 2012) from 8:30PM-9PM on www.kvrx.org or 91.7FM. Jacob will be talking about some of the bizarre ways that animals and plants have coevolved for pollination.
Since 2008, “They Blinded Me With Science” has been home to the best of science news and current events. Hosted by DJ’s Ganglion, Perihelion, Anticodon, Chrysalis & Cyclohexane MONDAYS on KVRX 91.7, they bring you the best of science news, taboos, don’t and do’s, along with special guests, interviews and journal reviews. They cover everything from physics to hardcore genetics, amyloid plaques, supercomputers, mutants, androids, genetic experiments gone wrong, ecological nuances, science history and even modern takes on the science of kissing!
SUTS Receives NSF BEACON Funding
Science Under The Stars is honored to be a recipient of generous grant funding from the BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action to support our scientific outreach lecture series. BEACON is an NSF Science and Technology Center, headquartered at Michigan State University with partners at North Carolina A&T State University, University of Idaho, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Washington. Many thanks to Risto Miikkulainen and the National Science Foundation! Look forward to some exciting upgrades in our equipment at this Spring’s events!
Science Under The Stars 