Leache Lab

New Burke Herpetology Webpage

Adam — Sat, 18 May 2013 00:30:53 +0000

The Burke Herpetology website is new and improved thanks to the help of Cathy Britt (Digital Communications Specialist at the Burke). One of the many cool new additions is an Amphibian Q&A section, which includes answers to important questions like “what happens if you kiss a frog?” Thanks to Heidi Rockney for writing all of the Q&A’s.

xkcd posts horned lizard art

Adam — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:26:53 +0000

Physics comedy blog xkcd has posted a simple and elegant figure depicting a horned lizard squirting blood (in color). Excerpt from the post: ”Horned lizards shoot jets of blood from their eyes for distances of up to five feet. I don’t know why they do this because whenever I reach the phrase “shoot jets of blood from their eyes” in an article I just stop there and stare at it until I need to lie down.”

Computational Molecular Evolution Workshop 5

Adam — Mon, 13 May 2013 15:26:15 +0000

Photo from the the 5th annual workshop on Computational Molecular Evolution.
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK.

Participants of CoME5

New postdoc riding gigantic tortoise to UW – won’t arrive until end of Summer

Adam — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 23:37:16 +0000

Jamie Oaks

Congratulations to Jamie Oaks on his recent NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Jamie is joining our lab later this Summer after he finishes up his doctoral work at the University of Kansas. Jamie plans to continue his work on comparative phylogeography. One of the main products of his postdoctoral work will be a new computer program for testing whether multiple species share similar divergence times. He’s also planning to make some exciting new contributions to existing computer programs, like incorporating SNP data. We’re all looking forward to his arrival.

1000 Word Challenge

Adam — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:11:18 +0000

Try to describe your research using only the 1000 most common words using the “UP-GOER FIVE TEXT EDITOR”

We study animals and how they came to be from the same animals and then changed over time into different ones. Some of them disappear through time, but others break into two or more over many, many years. When we figure out the order of the past situation we call it a tree of life. The tree helps us place the animals of the past into the places that they came from. It also tells us what they might have looked like and how they acted. We think that it’s very cool to know how and why animals are the way that they are! There is no doubt that living things are part of the tree of life, but understanding how the parts fit together takes a lot of hard work, and that’s what we do. We use the stuff inside animal cells as building blocks for putting the tree together, and that takes a lot of training and computer time.