misciwriterseditors blog, ComSciConMI2025

Evolution in Plain Sight: The Simple Observations Explaining Nature

Written by: Elena Renshaw

Edited by: Courtney Myers

This piece was written in collaboration with the 2025 ComSciCon-MI Write-A-Thon.

Natural selection is happening all around us, shaping the living world and our future; we just need to observe. When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he proposed a revolutionary idea: organisms within the natural world actually change over time, through a process he called adaptation by natural selection. What made his work so groundbreaking was not any specific discovery, but how he applied what he saw to explain how species adapt and diversify. Darwin demonstrated that by carefully observing the natural world, we can trace how small differences in individual beings accumulate into significant transformations over generations.

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misciwriterseditors blog, ComSciConMI2025

Sensory Neurons: A New Target for Treating Peripheral Neuropathy in SCA3

Written by: Juan Mato

Edited by: Brenna Saladin

This piece was written in collaboration with the 2025 ComSciCon-MI Write-A-Thon.

Spinocerebellar ataxia type 3 (SCA3) is the most common inherited form of ataxia– a disordered loss of motor coordination. This rare, progressive disorder stems from a genetic error in the DNA sequence encoding the ATXN3 protein. Instead of functioning normally, this mutant protein becomes toxic, gradually damaging nerve cells.

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