In the past year or so, the idea of drone robots filling our skies has captured our collective imagination. Drones have already been used for not-so-great things, such as the U.S’s drone strikes, but they have also been used to collect scientific data, in filmmaking, as a part of search and rescue operations, to prevent … Continue reading
Throughout the warm summer morning, I carried crates and boxes up the gangplank of the R/V Melville to the tune of barking sea lions. Stopping to watch them flop across the rocks near the port reminded me that I was no longer in North Carolina, but was about to board an oceanographic research ship in San Diego. … Continue reading
My lab group looks at small stuff–for example, our organisms of choice are microscopic, single-celled plantlike creatures called diatoms. But because gosh darn it that just ain’t small enough, we like to look at the genetic machinery (DNA, RNA, all that jazz) inside those organisms. So a lot of our time is spent in the … Continue reading
Check out A Scientist at Sea: California Current Research Cruise (Part I) as well! This research cruise is about halfway over and we find ourselves within sight of Big Sur, off the coast of southern California. Everyone is searching, frantically, for water. The dark irony of it hasn’t escaped the scientists aboard the R/V Melville—we’re … Continue reading
UNder the C 