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Doctoral students in archaeology, Alex Marko, Dan Plekhov and Miriam Rothenberg worked with the Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission in Newport, Rhode Island, to create an interactive map of God’s Little Acre, one of the oldest African and African American burial grounds in the country. It is the final resting place of untold numbers of individuals. Some were born across the Atlantic, others mere blocks away. Some died centuries ago, others just decades ago. Some were slaves, others business owners. The students are working with Newport’s Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission, whose mission is to preserve and revive their stories. Read more.

What genes help organisms survive in changing environments? As climate change impacts species across the planet, it’s a big question in basic biology. New research by a Brown research time, including doctoral student Joaquin Nunez, on barnacles may provide some answers. Barnacles are crustaceans, related to shrimps and crabs. After a brief period when they float freely around the ocean, barnacle larvae attach to a hard surface — a rock, a boat, a whale — and develop into adults. They build hard plates surrounding their bodies, which they can open to feed and to reproduce, and close protectively during low tide and other harsh conditions. Read more.

The iconic stripes of zebrafish are a classic example of natural self-organization. As zebrafish embryos develop, three types of pigment cells move around the skin, eventually jostling into positions that form body-length yellow and blue stripes. Scientists want to understand the genetic rules that direct this delicate dance, and a new algorithm developed by Brown University mathematicians, including doctoral student Melissa McGuirl, could help them accomplish that. The algorithm, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is able to quantify various attributes of shapes and patterns, enabling scientists to more objectively test ideas about how zebrafish stripes — and potentially other developmental patterns — are formed. Read more.