3….2….1….HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Fine, so maybe I’m a little early here on the US east coast, but in a mere number of hours millions of people will be ringing in 2016 with that very mantra. And in the midst of falling confetti, popping champagne (or sparkling grape juice), and renditions of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ people … Continue reading
This article is a guest post by ODU undergradaute Ben Maxie. Ben works in the Barshis Lab and studies the evolution of stress tolerance in corals and other organisms. Despite an adverse but nonbinding vote by the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan has sent a whaling fleet south to Antarctica. The fleet left on December … Continue reading
Merry Christmas from UNdertheC! In blog tradition, we’re kicking off our holiday hiatus with a poem. (For more, check out Kelsey Ellis’ versions of Christmas classics, updated for grad students: The Twelve Days of Christmas and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.) See you in 2016! A Bioluminescent Christmas Below the grey Atlantic waves, a starfish … Continue reading
What if we threw away the airplane every time we flew from L.A. to New York? We would never fly. This analogy is one I repeatedly hear from people at SpaceX, a California-based company with the mission “to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” The core of achieving this … Continue reading
The dungeness crab fishery in the US represents a $170 million market, but you may have seen in the headlines that this year’s crab pots will remain empty and fishing vessels are staying in their harbors. The root of the problem can be traced back to Pseudo-nitzschia, a common type of phytoplankton which produces a toxin … Continue reading
Venoms are complex chemical cocktails designed to be actively injected into another organism and wreak cellular havoc (not to be confused with poisons, which need to be ingested). Venoms have a rich evolutionary history, with each independently evolved lineage accumulating new duplicate genes that can then mutate and alter existing proteins to produce an extraordinarily … Continue reading
Virtual Reality (VR) has had an arduous and disheartening history over the past several decades, but things have recently been looking up. There are many reasons you aren’t currently able to play Fallout 4 in a computer generated landscape projected right onto your eyes, but the foremost probably comes down to limitations in technology. VR … Continue reading
This guest post was written by Ben Maxie. Ben is an undergraduate researcher at Old Dominion University who studies zooxanthellae genetics with Dan Barshis. Aside from marine biology, he is interested in beer brewing, car modification, and hiking. In a small refuge in the Elizabeth River near the Chesapeake Bay, my colleagues and I trudged … Continue reading
Can corals survive climate change? This is a question on the minds of many environmentalists and researchers these days. The short answer is: probably, but coral reefs as we know them likely cannot. Every coral may not go extinct, but reefs are degrading and will continue to do so if the status quo is not … Continue reading
UNder the C 