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
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
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
This post might be aiming for a bit of a niche market out there, but I’m going for it. As a graduate student in the Department of Marine Sciences at UNC-Chapel Hill, we have to take four core marine science courses: Marine Geology, Biological Oceanography, Chemical Oceanography, and Physical Oceanography (THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS). … Continue reading
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