New Project: The Life of Pants
Do clothes contribute to body odor? Let’s be real: I have body odor, you have body odor, we all have body odor. Most of us [...]
They Are The Most Harmless, Innocent Creatures In The World.
[Every now and then we receive very special messages from folks who have read our blog, found our research or just share the same curiosity [...]
What is your cat’s personality?
We've officially launched our Cat Personality Test -- which you can take even if you haven't tracked your own cat (you can even take it if you [...]
The Wild Life of Columbus
The untold story of the species that stowed away on Columbus’s ship and how they have since changed the world. Columbus sailed to the Caribbean [...]
Announcement: 6 to 100 Hires in Public Science
[Positions listed at the end of this post] By the time the potato murrain arrived in Ireland scholars had already begun to explain its cause: a blight, a water mold. [...]
Students Discover: Ant Health Watch
**This is a guest post from postdoctoral researcher, Dr. DeAnna Beasley. Her research is NSF-funded by our Students Discover grant which partners scientists with educators to [...]
Back to School Heart Rate Checkup
**This is a guest post written by NC State undergraduate, Jakini Kauba. Jakini has been collaborating with Dr. Clint Penick on the Beats project, digging [...]
The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab)
In dust one can record the actions of storms, the wearing of mountains, the consequences of industrialization. The study of dust has a long history. [...]
The Value of Art to Science—A story of rotting bodies, belly buttons and the music of symbiosis
In The Man Who Touched His Own Heart I tell the story of the artist Leonardo da Vinci’s discoveries inside bodies. Among the most astonishing of [...]
How Islamic Scholars Saved Knowledge (and Science)
My grandfather was concerned with a relatively small number of things in the last years of his life; one of those things was the dark [...]
Ecological Medicine: Can intestinal worms cure us of our modern pandemics?
Hundreds of self-experiments, tens of thousands of worms In 1976, Jonathan Turton, a British parasitologist was suffering from allergies. Most of the time scientists suffer [...]
The Arthropods of San Francisco (and beyond)
What's that crawling under your bed... sitting in your light fixture... lurking in your cabinets? Perhaps it's a new insect species! The Arthropods of Our [...]
12 Questions from students about the (Wild) Life of Our Bodies
Today we have a special Q & A from Kelly Allen and her East Chapel Hill HS Biology II (Human Biology) students. Each year Allen's students participate in [...]
Help us Solve The Mystery of the Danish Underpants
Recently, Pernille Hjort from the Danish Museum of Natural History visited us in Raleigh to exchange ideas about new projects in public science. It was an [...]
On Joining the Lab (Boat)
Some people go from early life to death focused on one mystery. This approach, I am told, can be very satisfying. One of my mentors, [...]