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 can at least vaguely remember that time during our awkward preteen years that our parents made us aware of our smell and introduced the concept of deodorant. I’ve been applied deodorant daily, been aware of and at times self-conscious of by body odor for almost two decades, yet, it never occurred to me to investigate the cause of this odor and how my activities are affecting it. As a microbiologist, I know that bacteria cause this odor. Several studies have linked a few key microbes [...]
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 for life's under appreciated creatures. Thank you, G, you know who you are. Keep them coming. From the Your Wild Life mailbag:] I Was Just Reading An Article About Camel Crickets On The Internet. This Article Encourages People (such as myself) Who Have Had Them In Their Home To Share Their Experiences. As It Just So Happens, I Have Had Them In My Basement For Years. There Is Plenty I Could Tell You About Them. For Now, Let Me Just Say That Actually, I Am Quite [...]
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 don't have a cat!). Have you ever wondered just how your cat thinks? Maybe you’re curious about that friendly feline from around the corner? We may not be able to read the minds of cats but with the help of our partners in Australia and New Zealand we’ve been able to develop a way to tap into determining their personality. How do determine the personality of a cat you ask? Excellent question! The Cat Tracker team is using a survey based on a template from our [...]
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 in 1492. On that landmark voyage, and in subsequent trips, he was not alone. On his small ships, he was with other sailors, as well as a wilderness of other species quietly stowed away. We don’t usually think of the ships as wilderness. In fact, the travels of some of the species Columbus and later conquistadors brought with them from Europe to the Americas, are well studied. They brought, we know, terrible pathogens to which Native Americans had never been exposed. They brought agricultural plants [...]
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. They had also begun to explore ways to mitigate the effects of the potato blight through shifts in the timing of planting and harvest and strict quarantines. In addition, some farmers had noticed a way to control the blight through the use of copper sulfate (which is still used). But in this moment, the voice of the scientists was too quiet and the willingness of the scientists to listen to those in the public who had ideas was too modest. As a result, the potato [...]
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 co-create citizen science projects and middle school lesson plans. The products of these partnerships can be found at StudentsDiscover.org.** This past summer I worked with middle school teachers in the Kenan Fellows Program and undergraduate students from Shaw University and North Carolina State University at the beautiful North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Our goal was to develop a citizen science project that would engage middle school students in the classroom while providing data for authentic scientific research. Our goal was to develop a citizen science project [...]
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 through over a century of scientific literature to find the heart beats of all of the studied vertebrates on the planet and their lifespans and she needs your help!** With the stress of starting new classes and buying new binders, pens, pencils, and notebook paper, our heart rates can increase this time of the year. Rumor has it, that this strain on our hearts can lessen our lifespan [1], or at least studies of animal heart rates suggest it [2]. Animals that have a faster [...]
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. Geologists consider it. Toxicologists too. Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes look to dust to discern where a criminal might have traveled. But perhaps the most telling feature of dust is its life. Each mote of dust is an entire world composed both of living organisms and of those in the process of falling apart. Run your finger along a surface, even one that seems clean, and in the particles you retrieve will be a measure of the life near that spot. The bits of [...]
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 his efforts came late one afternoon in 1508 when... "[D]a Vinci was at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, a church hospital. He was not a doctor, but he already knew more about the human body than almost anyone else who had ever lived. He was talking with a very old man, a centenarian. The man, who is known to history simply as il vecchio, the old one, was kind and garrulous. He had lived a grand life. Da Vinci had just returned from Milan, and [...]
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 ages. As an intensely curious man, a furiously curious man, he could not fathom how even a single generation of humans lacked the spirit necessary to try to understand their world better than the generations prior. He couldn’t understand a single such generation much less the hundred of them that actually occurred. And yet history is unequivocal. For more than a thousand years knowledge failed to advance. Rome was sacked. The ignorant book-burning masses moved in. The quest to understand stopped. Among historians it has [...]