Staff

May 14, 2020

Global Health: A Minor and a Calling for Two Recent Grads

Global health officially became a designated minor in biological sciences in 2019 and has since had four graduates, including two this past spring.

May 13, 2020

Some States That Have Reopened During Pandemic Aren’t Seeing Spike in Coronavirus Infections

WRAL
Alun Lloyd, a mathematical biologist at North Carolina State University, said he believes it’s way too early to tell whether Georgia and South Carolina made the right call. He points to inconsistencies in other states that opened earlier.

May 11, 2020

1,000 Coronavirus Particles Can Infect You. Here’s How to Avoid Hitting That Threshold.

WRAL
“Anytime you’re close to somebody, you’re increasing the risk of spreading that,” said Frank Scholle, a virologist at North Carolina State University. Scholle said he feels comfortable keeping a distance outside. The research, so far, shows that simply walking past someone in a park, or even a store, is a fairly low-risk scenario.

May 7, 2020

Welcome to a ‘Real World’ Turned Upside-Down. NC College Grads Are Scared, but Excited.

News & Observer
Two 2020 College of Sciences graduates share their feelings about graduating in this uncertain time.

May 7, 2020

Touching the Asteroid Ryugu Revealed Secrets of Its Surface and Changing Orbit

The Conversation
Planetary scientist Paul Byrne looks at what researchers learned from the Hayabusa2 mission, which not only rendezvoused with an asteroid as it whizzed around the Sun but also collected a sample.

May 6, 2020

Physicists Criticize Stephen Wolfram’s ‘Theory of Everything’

Scientific American
“I think the popular notion that physicists are all in search of the eureka moment in which they will discover the theory of everything is an unfortunate one,” says Katie Mack, a cosmologist at North Carolina State University. “We do want to find better, more complete theories. But the way we go about that is to test and refine our models, look for inconsistencies and incrementally work our way toward better, more complete models.”

May 4, 2020

Back on Earth, NASA Astronaut Christina Koch Is a Pro at Social Distancing

WRAL
It's been an unusual, incredible year for NASA astronaut and North Carolina State University graduate Christina Koch.

May 2, 2020

Fluids Only Get So Runny as Physicists Put a Universal Lower Limit on Viscosity

PhysicsWorld
Thomas Schäfer of North Carolina State University in the US says that the pair’s formula might be a good estimate for what he calls “typical fluids”. But he reckons that assumptions about length being on the scale of the Bohr radius and time being tied to the Debye frequency may not always hold true. In ultra-cold Fermi gases, he says, such as laser-cooled atoms of lithium or potassium, the length and time scales “are quite different”.

May 2, 2020

So Your Sourdough Is Ugly. Now What?

Mashable
Dr. Mike Taveirne, a microbiologist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University, believes that sharing these losses — or “unexpected results” — can be instrumental in not only understanding a scientific process, but also getting closer to one’s desired outcome. In fact, he’s uniquely suited to speak on the internet’s collective sourdough project: He’s in the middle of that experiment himself.

Apr 30, 2020

Lending Expertise: NC State Organic Chemistry Virtual Reality Labs Shared Globally

Maria Gallardo-Williams of the Department of Chemistry shared her organic chemistry virtual reality labs to help other instructors continue teaching during the COVID-19 outbreak.