Dr. Anne’s Book of Common Microbes and their Wonders
In the Dunn lab we have worked for the last decade to study the life in homes. We have swabbed belly buttons, searched under beds, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Why We #CitSci
Your Wild Life is relocating to the West Coast this week to participate in the inaugural meeting of the Citizen Science Association in San Jose, [...]
ICYMI: Holiday Break Edition
Happy New Year! Classes are back in swing today here at NC State and we’re slowly but surely digging ourselves out from under the pile [...]
Navel-gazing Newsflash
A few quick updates on Belly Button Biodiversity and related projects: Azeen Ghorayhshi recently wrote a short bit for Wired Magazine UK recently about Belly [...]
Navel-gazing in NYC
We’re headed back to the Big Apple this week – this time, not in search of ants, but BELLY BUTTONS. We’re launching a new research [...]
Belly Button Portraits – An Opportunity to Create Art through Science!
We’d like to think that over the course of the last few years, our Belly Button Biodiversity project has inspired quite a few things. We’re [...]
The Common Yet Relatively Unknown Bacteria in Your Belly Button
Two weeks ago, we (finally) returned data to participants in the Belly Button Biodiversity project and unveiled some slick, new data visualizations to help participants [...]
Time to Explore the Umbilicus: New Belly Button Biodiversity Website
It’s been many moons since 500 or so intrepid citizen scientists twirled a Q-tip in their belly buttons for science. With that swab we did [...]
The Future of Discovery
In March 2014, Rob spoke at TEDxSantaCruz, explaining how much we don’t know about the species living on us, in us and around us – [...]
Quiz Time!
Everyone loves a good quiz – even the Buzzfeed variety, you know the kind that you see on Facebook ALL. THE. TIME. The kind of [...]
Delayed Gratification, Citizen Science and Why You Might Not Have Received an Email about Your Sample Yet
But, If You Are So Willing, You'll Receive Emails and Updates for the Next 10 Years. Also, Did I Tell You about the Cats? I [...]
How to turn any dataset into a glowing worm
A few decades ago gene expression, the process by which the code books of genes are turned into proteins, was invisible. It happened in every [...]