I am willing to bet most people have never heard of paleotempestology before. I hadn’t heard of it before I took a marine geology course. In a course I am taking this semester, we decided to reexamine the topic because a lot of individual studies are debatable. So, if the title of this post didn’t already give it …
Have you ever noticed a rip current at the beach? If you or someone you know was caught in a rip current, would you know what to do? If you’ve been paying attention to the coastal news along North Carolina recently, you may have noticed recent stories about rip currents and rip current safety. Dr. …
Having no publications to my name and only nebulous drafts of several (hopefully) publishable papers, I am not an expert on how to get published. This is why I attended a student workshop on this very topic at the 2018 ASLO summer meeting in Victoria, BC. In this workshop a panel of editors in chief …
Martín Benavides is a PhD student in Marine Sciences at UNC Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the variability of coastal shark communities in both time and space. He is also interested in the movement ecology of sharks in estuarine systems. Martín is a proud father of two boys and provides a unique prospective to …
Applications have been submitted. Recruitment weekends are near (or have already come and gone). Funding source notification dates are coming up. And most exciting of all–graduate school acceptances are around the corner. It is an exciting time to see your hard work pay off. But wait. Hold your horses. Here are some things you should …
The ocean is home to some strange and mysterious critters – including some that could give the Justice League a run for their money. From immortal invertebrates to flying fish, here are four super powered ocean animals. The one that can walk on land While there are a number of amphibious fish out there, …
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) application season is here. I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship for my application is 2017 after an unsuccessful one in 2016. From one rejected and one accepted, here is a list of resources that helped get me through it, a bit of my personal …
Most productivity gurus say that when you hit a wall, you should switch tasks. This is how I ended up reading a paper about beavers who managed to hijack a wetland restoration for their benefit. So congratulations! You’re in the right place to learn some fancy philosophy terms and think about wetlands from a whooole …
As modern marine scientists, we spend a lot of time learning to effectively communicate science to various audiences. That’s mostly so we can make friends at parties, but has some nice side benefits like educating the general public, whatever. Sometimes though, and I’m probably admitting to a cardinal sin of outreach here, there’s a certain …
In this day-and-age with flat-lined funding and increasingly smaller funding rates, you have to do more than just ‘good science’ to get $$$ (not that this isn’t important – doing good science is the first step!). In the competitive funding world, there seems to be more and more interest in funding science (that is not … Continue reading
Written by Emma Park. Emma is an undergraduate at UNC who spent her winter break working with The Ocean Foundation. Over part of winter break, I traveled to the eastern Caribbean to work with Hello Ocean, a nonprofit that showcases ocean conservation work through a series of online videos. I helped with the production of … Continue reading
If you have been following this blog, you have become familiar with a myriad of issues facing our oceans today: acidification, global warming, over fishing, ect. Yet, what is actually being done about it? While most of the environmental headlines have focused on the Paris talks, only recently has news coverage begun to highlight the … Continue reading
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
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