Podcasts about clades

Ga mee op expeditie met de legendarische Clades, een familie van ontdekkingsreizigers, door een mysterieus land waar gevaar op de loer ligt en fantastische wezens huizen. Tijdens dit avontuur stuit... Uitgegeven door Saga Kids Spreker: Ilari Hoevenaars

Mpox Virus has evolved into two distinct clades I and II, each with differing transmission rates and virulence. These clades raises new concerns about transmissibility and what it means for the future of Mpox control and vaccine efficacy. This episode highlights evolutionary dynamics of Mpox Virus clades and their implications for public health! References:

In this episode of In Search of the Crystal Skull, Arun and Patricia discuss about the 2022 Disney animated film Strange World. A family called the Clades consisting of an explorer named Jaeger and his son Searcher are traveling around the mountains and unknown lands. One day, Searcher discovers a plant that releases energy. Jaeger wishes to continue exploring while Searcher wishes to settle down and take the plant to their hometown Avelonia to help their community. After a massive disagreement, they go their separate ways. 25 years later, Searcher is a farmer with a wife and son whose discovery has made Avelonia a much easier and advanced town. However, the plant source is dying and he has to explore the unknown lands to find out how to solve the problem before they die out completely. When the film came out in theaters, it received mixed to negative reviews making only $72 million dollars out of a $135 million dollar budget making it one of the biggest bombs Disney has released in years. Some people blamed the low box office numbers due to little to no advertisement while others blame it due to its LGBTQ representation in the form of Searcher's son Ethan. What did Patricia and Arun think of this film? Listen and find out. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/old-school-lane/support

In the first episode of Season 3, our hosts have decided to do things... a little differently this time. For this season, they are going to take movies, TV shows, music and books they are consuming and chat about them in depth! To kick things off, they are starting with the Disney movie called Strange World - "The legendary Clades are a family of explorers whose differences threaten to topple their latest and most crucial mission." The hosts go on an epic adventure of their own discussing becoming our parents, and what it truly means to be yourself. Have something you'd like them to review? Email it to wanderingunicornproductions@gmail.com Make sure to follow us on Instagram and Facebook @wanderingunicornproductions And, make sure you tap that BELL BUTTON so you never miss an episode of your favorite mum-pop culture-core-cast... that you've never heard of! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marytylermorepod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/marytylermorepod/support

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Famed detective Benoit Blanc travels to Greece to solve a murder amongst friends on a remote island. Lyle Lyle Crocodile - Entertainer Hector P. Valenti discovers a singing crocodile called Lyle. But when Hector leaves Lyle, the crocodile has to find a new home in New York. It just so happens the house he has picked is already lived in by the Primm family. Strange World - The legendary Clades are a family of explorers whose differences threaten to topple their latest and most crucial mission.

Jaeger Clade may be hard as nails, blazing trails, the manliest of guys, but that doesn't mean his son Searcher wants to follow in his footsteps as an explorer…but fate has other plans for this family. Adventure down to a new and Strange World with the Clades, the Dummies, and company (both two- and three-legged) in this fun family film (and stealth biology lesson). If there's one thing you take away from this story, let it be this: this world, this world we live in today, is a pretty strange world too. The post DD61 – Strange World (2022) appeared first on PodCavern.

Robert Winfree, Alexis Hejna and Zachery Strobel present their Strange World Disney 2022 Movie Review! Strange World is a 2022 American computer animated science-fiction adventure film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The 61st animated film produced by the studio, it was directed by Don Hall, written and co-directed by Qui Nguyen, and produced by Roy Conli. The film stars the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, and Lucy Liu. Set in Avalonia, the film follows the Clades, a legendary family of explorers who must set aside their differences as they embark on a journey to a mysterious land inhabited by surreal lifeforms in order to save a resource called the Pando from losing its energy power source. The film was noted for introducing Walt Disney Animation Studios' first openly LGBTQ teenaged character. The film received generally positive reviews from critics but was a box office bomb, with projections having it lose as much as $147 million for Disney. Mark Radulich and his wacky podcast on all the things: https://linktr.ee/markkind76 also snapchat: markkind76 FB Messenger: Mark Radulich LCSW Tiktok: @markradulich twitter: @MarkRadulich

Robert Winfree, Alexis Hejna and Zachery Strobel present their Strange World Disney 2022 Movie Review! Strange World is a 2022 American computer animated science-fiction adventure film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The 61st animated film produced by the studio, it was directed by Don Hall, written and co-directed by Qui Nguyen, and produced by Roy Conli. The film stars the voices of Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, Gabrielle Union, and Lucy Liu. Set in Avalonia, the film follows the Clades, a legendary family of explorers who must set aside their differences as they embark on a journey to a mysterious land inhabited by surreal lifeforms in order to save a resource called the Pando from losing its energy power source. The film was noted for introducing Walt Disney Animation Studios' first openly LGBTQ teenaged character. The film received generally positive reviews from critics but was a box office bomb, with projections having it lose as much as $147 million for Disney. Mark Radulich and his wacky podcast on all the things: https://linktr.ee/markkind76 also snapchat: markkind76 FB Messenger: Mark Radulich LCSW Tiktok: @markradulich twitter: @MarkRadulich

Happy Thanksgiving from The Movie Wire!In this special episode we welcome the return of our young critic Brooklyn to help review 2 brand new family films just in time for Thanksgiving!The sequel to 2007's Enchanted streaming exclusively on Disney+: Disenchanted The legendary Clades are a family of explorers whose differences threaten to topple their latest and most crucial mission in Strange WorldReady for the verdict? Let's go!**Please show your support by leaving a review on Apple Podcast & follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Letterboxd @MOVIEWIRESHOW**Make sure to check out my appearance on The Casting Views podcast coming this Sunday, where we discuss Urban Legends!   Make such you follow Dan and Lou at Casting Views! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casting-views/id1585420067And make sure you check The Movie Wire out as a featured podcast on the Newsly App and make sure you use promo code: THEM0V1EW1RE to receive a 1-month free premium subscription!

Today on Mushroom Hour we are joined by adventurer and mycologist Danny Haelewaters PhD. Danny Haelewaters holds a Bachelor's in Veterinary Sciences, a Master of Science in biology, and a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. During his Masters program he developed a new technology to analyze forensic relevant fungi in casework at the Netherlands Forensic Institute. Between 2012 and 2018, he worked at the Farlow Herbarium of the Harvard University Herbaria (Cambridge, MA) as a PhD student. In 2018, he did a short postdoc at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic, and from November 2018 until late 2020 he was a USDA-funded postdoctoral research assistant at Purdue University, where he worked on characterizing the fungal microbiota of Romaine lettuce. Currently he works at Ghent University as a junior postdoctoral fellow on a project dealing with Laboulbeniales associated with bat flies. In addition, he  writes popular science articles for different sources. Since the very beginning of his student career at Ghent University (Belgium), he has has loved the interdisciplinary research in biology. It probably contributed to his choice to study the ecto-parasitic Laboulbeniales fungus. I'm excited to learn more about these unique organisms as well as the secrets of other little-known parasitic fungi. TOPICS COVERED:From Vet to MycologistFungal Inspiration at the University of GhentDiscovering LaboulbenialesUncovering Phylogeny of Rare, Microscopic FungiBat Fly Research in PanamaTripartite System of Bats, Bat Flies and FungiFuture of Laboulbeniales Research on Bat FliesOther Entomopathogens Including HerpomycesPhysiology of LaboubienialesInvasive Species & "Enemy Release” HypothesisImportance of Conserving Fungal PathogensExploring Laboubeniales as a BioControl AgentDiscovering new Clades of Cryptic Fungal OrganismsUnderstudied Habitats (Romaine Lettuce & Dead Bodies?!)EPISODE RESOURCES:Danny Haelewaters Website: http://www.dannyhaelewaters.com/Danny Haelewaters Twitter: https://twitter.com/dhaelewa/Laboulbeniales (Fungal Order): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaboulbenialesHerpomyces (Fungal Genus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HerpomycesBeauveria bassiana (Fungal Species): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauveria_bassianaMetarhizium brunneum (Fungal Species Complex):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metarhizium_brunneumOphiocordyceps (Fungal Genus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps

Ein Germane der seine Heimat verteidigt ist zu vielem fähig. Die V. Legion Roms bedroht den Rhein und die Tenkterer doch die stolzen Reiter geben nicht so leicht auf. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today on Mushroom Hour we have the pleasure of speaking with the distinguished Todd Osmundson PhD, Associate Professor of Biology at The University of Wisconsin Lacrosse. Todd is a faculty member in the Department of Biology and his research specialties include studying the ecology, genetic relationships, geographic distributions, and conservation biology of bacteria and especially fungi, using fieldwork, microscopy, and molecular genetic (DNA-based) tools. His professional mycology career really began during a fateful encounter with a local mushroom club in Montana. Todd has conducted mycological fieldwork in the U.S., French Polynesia, China, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Svalbard, Thailand, and Australia. His varied research projects have seen him span alpine, arctic, tropical, and temperate habitats in search of fungi. There are few people more familiar with the process of finding, observing, extracting DNA, and genetically sequencing fungi. Let's learn more about where “we” are in cataloging fungal populations, what that means for mycology and how citizen scientists can be a part of this process. Topics Covered:Seizing Opportunity to Begin a Mycology CareerMorea & French PolynesiaModel Ecosystem Modeling with GeneticsPCR Analysis and SequencingInterpreting Genetic DataChallenges of Identifying Fungal SpeciesWhat are Clades and How Do We Use Them?165 Million Species of Fungi?!MicrosporidiansMysteries of Burn MorelsDifferentiating Individuals with GeneticsFungal Herbarium Collections as Genetic Vaults?Biogeography & Evolutionary HistoryDiversity Surveys & Fungi ConservationEpisode Resources:Todd Osmundson Website: https://www.uwlax.edu/profile/tosmundson/Larry Evans (Inspiration): http://www.montanamushrooms.com/tag/larry-evans/Dr Cathy Cripps (Inspiration): https://plantsciences.montana.edu/alpinemushrooms/investigators/principal.htmlMicrosporidians (fungi): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicrosporidiaAndy Bruce (student): https://andibruce.com/Alan Rockefeller (Inspiration): https://www.instagram.com/alan_rockefeller/Boletus separans (Mushroom): https://boletes.wpamushroomclub.org/product/xanthoconium-separans/Tylopilus (mushroom): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tylopilus

Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.07.26.222117v1?rss=1 Authors: Jain, S., Xiao, X., Bogdan, P., Bruck, J. Abstract: Evolution is a process of change where mutations in the viral RNA are selected based on their fitness for replication and survival. Given that current phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 identifies new viral clades after they exhibit evolutionary selections, one wonders whether we can identify the viral selection and predict the emergence of new viral clades? Inspired by the Kolmogorov complexity concept, we propose a generative complexity (algorithmic) framework capable to analyze the viral RNA sequences by mapping the multiscale nucleotide dependencies onto a state machine, where states represent subsequences of nucleotides and state-transition probabilities encode the higher order interactions between these states. We apply computational learning and classification techniques to identify the active state-transitions and use those as features in clade classifiers to decipher the transient mutations (still evolving within a clade) and stable mutations (typical to a clade). As opposed to current analysis tools that rely on the edit distance between sequences and require sequence alignment, our method is computationally local, does not require sequence alignment and is robust to random errors (substitution, insertions and deletions). Relying on the GISAID viral sequence database, we demonstrate that our method can predict clade emergence, potentially aiding with the design of medications and vaccines. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info

Learn about the invisible harms of thirdhand smoke; massive viruses that blur the line between the living and non-living; and why whales get lost during solar storms. Moviegoers contaminate nonsmoking movie theater with 'thirdhand' cigarette smoke by Kelsey Donk Moviegoers contaminate nonsmoking movie theater with “thirdhand” cigarette smoke. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/aaft-mcn030220.php  Thirdhand smoke wafting off moviegoers hurts air quality in theaters. (2020, March 5). Science News. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/thirdhand-smoke-fumes-air-quality-movie-theaters  Sheu, R., Stönner, C., Ditto, J. C., Klüpfel, T., Williams, J., & Gentner, D. R. (2020). Human transport of thirdhand tobacco smoke: A prominent source of hazardous air pollutants into indoor nonsmoking environments. Science Advances, 6(10), eaay4109. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aay4109  Massive viruses that blur the line between living and non-living by Cameron Duke Al-Shayeb, B., Sachdeva, R., Chen, L.-X., Ward, F., Munk, P., Devoto, A., Castelle, C. J., Olm, M. R., Bouma-Gregson, K., Amano, Y., He, C., Méheust, R., Brooks, B., Thomas, A., Lavy, A., Matheus-Carnevali, P., Sun, C., Goltsman, D. S. A., Borton, M. A., … Banfield, J. F. (2020). Clades of huge phages from across Earth’s ecosystems. Nature, 578(7795), 425–431. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2007-4  Huge bacteria-eating viruses close gap between life and non-life: Large bacteriophages carry bacterial genes, including CRISPR and ribosomal proteins. (2020, February 12). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200212131458.htm  Solar storms blind whales because they mess with magnetoreception by Cameron Duke Solar storms may leave gray whales “blind” and stranded. (2020). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200224111356.htm  Granger, J., Walkowicz, L., Fitak, R., & Johnsen, S. (2020). Gray whales strand more often on days with increased levels of atmospheric radio-frequency noise. Current Biology, 30(4), R155–R156. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.028  Johnsen, S., & Lohmann, K. J. (2008). Magnetoreception in animals. Physics Today, 61(3), 29–35. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2897947  Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing

Podcast 59 Where we discuss Clades for Deviant: the Renegade by Patrick Cossel

On today’s episode of After Ullanor, David and Greg tackle the first part of Nemesis, by James Swallow, the thirteenth book in the Horus Heresy series. Horus Heresy takes a Law and Order twist with police investigating a string of murders while each of the Clades of the Officio Assassinorum send their best in as...

Game designer and author, Jonathan Tweet, returns to the podcast. We discuss the lack of nonfiction books for preschoolers, teaching science with games, and RPGs for all ages. Tweet details his quest to introduce evolution to preschoolers with his book, Grandmother Fish, and his newly released game Clades.   Twitter @justonemorefix Facebook  Just One More Fix Podcast Support us on Patreon Gonna Geek Network

It's the Chaosium 13th Age in Glorantha Panel from Gen Con 2018!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Michael O'Brien is Vice President for Chaosium. His role encompasses creative development, community engagement, licensing and MGF. Better known in the gaming community as “MOB”, he has been a long-time creative force for RuneQuest and Glorantha.

It's the Chaosium 13th Age in Glorantha Panel from Gen Con 2018!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Michael O'Brien is Vice President for Chaosium. His role encompasses creative development, community engagement, licensing and MGF. Better known in the gaming community as “MOB”, he has been a long-time creative force for RuneQuest and Glorantha.

It's Pelgrane Press Week on DSPN Presents! Amazing audio from the makers of 13th Age, Night's Black Agents, Cthulhu Confidential, TimeWatch, and so much more! We've got seven panels of their Gen Con audio coming straight to your ears.This panel: 13th Age Monster Design!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Wade Rockett is a writer and game designer whose credits include adventures, monsters, and sourcebooks for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, as well as material for D&D, Pathfinder, and Hillfolk.

It's Pelgrane Press Week on DSPN Presents! Amazing audio from the makers of 13th Age, Night's Black Agents, Cthulhu Confidential, TimeWatch, and so much more! We've got seven panels of their Gen Con audio coming straight to your ears.This panel: 13th Age Monster Design!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Ars Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Wade Rockett is a writer and game designer whose credits include adventures, monsters, and sourcebooks for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, as well as material for D&D, Pathfinder, and Hillfolk.

It's Pelgrane Press Week on DSPN Presents! Amazing audio from the makers of 13th Age, Night's Black Agents, Cthulhu Confidential, TimeWatch, and so much more! It's their panels of their Gen Con audio coming straight to your ears.This episode is the 13th Age Adventure Design Seminar!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Arc Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Wade Rockett is a writer and game designer whose credits include adventures, monsters, and sourcebooks for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, as well as material for D&D, Pathfinder, and Hillfolk.

It's Pelgrane Press Week on DSPN Presents! Amazing audio from the makers of 13th Age, Night's Black Agents, Cthulhu Confidential, TimeWatch, and so much more! It's their panels of their Gen Con audio coming straight to your ears.This episode is the 13th Age Adventure Design Seminar!Thanks to Wade Rockett of Natural 20 PR for this audio!Rob Heinsoo is the creative director at Fire Opal Games and line editor for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, which he designed with Jonathan Tweet. His card game designs include Three-Dragon Ante, Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, and the first two Epic Spell Wars games for Cryptozoic. Rob worked in Wizards of the Coast R&D and led the design of the 4th Edition D&D Roleplaying Game.Jonathan Tweet has been a games designer for 30 years, with credits including Arc Magica, Over the Edge, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, Magic: the Gathering, and his evolutionary card game Clades. He is the author of Grandmother Fish: A Child's First Book of Evolution.Wade Rockett is a writer and game designer whose credits include adventures, monsters, and sourcebooks for 13th Age Roleplaying Game, as well as material for D&D, Pathfinder, and Hillfolk.

Rev talks with Jonathan Tweet about his card game Clades & a hint at a returning RPG; Rev gets comic book recommendations from Scott from Comics Dungeon; and Rev talks with Gareth von Kallenbach about what he saw at Wondercon! See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In Games in Schools and Libraries 84 Jonathan Tweet joins Donald Dennis to discuss evolution science activities for schools and libraries. http://www.grandmotherfish.com/ https://www.facebook.com/grandmotherfish/@GrandmotherFish ‏Grandmother Fish: a child’s first book of Evolution is a story time activity book which engages a young child’s imagination with sounds and motions that imitate animals, in particular our direct ancestors. Clades is an animal-matching game based on evolutionary relationships.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1849623603/clades-the-evolutionary-card-gameThe Games in Schools and Libraries podcasts and blogs are produced by Inverse Genius in association with the Georgetown County Library SystemEmail us: schoolsandlibraries@gmail.comMusic by Ian Sovine

This episode Derek has another conversation with Jonathan Tweet, game designer, book author, and past Skepticality guest. After the success of his last book, 'Grandmother Fish', a book aimed at teaching pre-school children about Evolution, his follow up is a card game, Clades. Clades is a kids card matching game which centers around the evolutionary concept of Clades. Find out more about the new game, and maybe some updates on the status of Grandmother Fish.

We sit down with Jonathan Tweet to talk about Clades, an educational card game to teach children (and adults!) a little bit more about evolution. We're also joined by Jeromy French. You can find Clades on Kickstarter until December 6, 2016. You can find more information about the game and Grandmother Fish at the Grandmother Fish website. You can also follow Jonathan on Twitter! Outro Music: Port_City_Music_-_29_-_Night_Terrors from ‘Silber Sounds of Halloween' Freemusicarchive.org

Author and Game Designer join the party to talk Grandmother Fish and Clades.

In this episode, the gang tries desperately to talk about a really interesting plant paper and fails miserably. Meanwhile, James stops caring, Amanda relishes in being right, and Curt really tries to keep this one together (he fails). Also, despite the podcast not being about it at all, James has to talk about the new gliding dinosaur.   References: Stevenson, Robert A., Dennis Evangelista, and Cindy V. Looy. "When conifers took flight: a biomechanical evaluation of an imperfect evolutionary takeoff."Paleobiology 41.02 (2015): 205-225. Hughes, Martin, Sylvain Gerber, and Matthew Albion Wills. "Clades reach highest morphological disparity early in their evolution." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.34 (2013): 13875-13879.

The gourd family, Cucurbitaceae, is among the economically most important families of plants, with many crop species that form the basis of multi-million dollar industries. Knowledge of these species’ geographic origin and their closest wild relatives is fundamental to breeding efforts, genetic improvement, and conservation. Surprisingly, these aspects have been unknown or misunderstood for many widely cultivated species, even though plant material that could have been used for broad phylogenetic studies has long been available in herbaria. For the thesis presented here, I focused on the phylogenetic relationships within two clades of Cucurbitaceae that comprise cultivated species: the genus Cucumis, to which cucumber (Cucumis sativus) and melon (Cucumis melo) belong, and the New World Sicyoeae, which contain vegetable pear or chayote (Sicyos (Sechium) edulis) and tacaco (Frantzia tacaco), locally important in Mexico and Costa Rica, and the former also cultivated worldwide. I used a combination of DNA sequence data from up to 175-year old herbarium specimens and molecular phylogenetic methods as well as traditional morphological and ecological data from my own fieldwork in Asia and Australia to infer the phylogenetic relationships among these clades. I also discovered and described several new species, and reconstructed plausible scenarios for the two clades’ geographical unfolding over time. Until recently, only two species of Cucumis, namely cucumber and its closest relative C. hystrix, were thought to be of Asian origin, and melon was thought to have originated in Africa, from where 30 species were known. Using DNA sequences from plastid and nuclear markers for some 100 Cucumis accessions from Africa, Australia, and Asia, I have shown that cucumber and melon both are of Asian (probably Indian) origin and form a clade with 23 previously overlooked species-level relatives in Asia, Australia, and around the Indian Ocean, at least nine of them new to science and some described as part of this thesis. Fieldwork I carried out in Thailand and Australia contributed new knowledge about the life forms and habitats of some of these species and resulted in fertile material essential for the descriptions. My study furthermore revealed that the sister species of melon is the re-discovered C. picrocarpus from Australia. Future breeding efforts and investigations of wild species related to melon and cucumber should therefore concentrate on Asia and Australia, instead of Africa. In my second study group, the Sicyoeae, my aim was to test long-problematic generic boundaries and to reconstruct the history of the tribe’s name-giving genus, Sicyos, which has an exceptional geographical distribution. Using a densely sampled molecular phylogeny that included type species of 23 currently or formerly accepted genera of Sicyoeae, I showed that morphology-based concepts did not result in monophyletic genera, and that species from numerous smaller genera, including chayote, need to be part of Sicyos if monophyly is to be established. Sicyos, in its new circumscription, has a center of distribution in the Neotropics, where c. 50 species occur, but long-distance dispersal has resulted in the group’s presence on Hawaii (where it radiated into 14 species), at least two arrivals on the Galápagos archipelago (but no radiations), and one arrival in Australia and New Zealand, now with three species, two of them new to science. Using molecular clock models, I dated these four trans-Pacific dispersal events, all from the American mainland, to the last 4.5 to 1 million years. The mode of dispersal may have been adherence of the small, spiny fruits to birds, which would fit with the documented occurrence of Sicyos plants near seabird nesting colonies. The rapid diversification on Hawaii may have followed the loss of the fruit spines in the ancestor of the 14 Hawaiian species, leading to lower dispersal ability and faster allopatric speciation in the diverse habitats of the archipelago.