All posts tagged: graduate student

Shark Teeth Are Time Machines

Shark Teeth Are Time Machines

Published by skeptic

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. When a real-estate development threatened the remains of a 13th-century coastal fishing site on southern Brazil’s Santa Catarina Island in 1996, archaeologists rushed to excavate. They rapidly collected what they could from the Rio do Meio site—pottery, tools, animal remains. The historical site now sits under a popular beachfront property. Fortunately, though, the artifacts are tucked safely away in the museum at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC). About 750 to 500 years ago, Indigenous peoples journeyed to the area to fish. Sharks were an important part of their diet, and, after a successful hunt, the fishers would butcher bull sharks, great white sharks, sand tiger sharks, and other species at Rio do Meio before transporting the meat away. Luckily for Guilherme Burg Mayer, a graduate student in ecology at UFSC, the hunters left the sharks’ severed heads behind. The university museum’s collection from Rio do Meio includes teeth from at least eight different species—and shark teeth are a treasure chest of information. In a recent …

Can the Remote-Work Era Fix How Scientists Study Kids?

Can the Remote-Work Era Fix How Scientists Study Kids?

Published by skeptic

There is an open secret in the study of child development: Most of what we think we know about how babies develop is actually based on a specific subset of kids—those born to families from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (a.k.a. WEIRD) nations. The acronym was first coined in an influential 2010 paper to describe the wildly unrepresentative populations that many psychology studies have long relied on. This is an issue in the field generally, and certainly a thorny problem in developmental psychology, which primarily studies children: According to one paper, WEIRD subjects make up 96 percent of the data used in published developmental-science studies but represent only 12 percent of the world’s population. As a result, it’s hard to be certain whether many things we think we know about babies’ development are truly universal elements of human nature. It means that we tell an incomplete story about the process of our own becoming. Yet the problem has remained hard to fix. Even within the U.S., similar demographic biases have arisen: The families that …

The Universities That Don’t Understand Academic Freedom

The Universities That Don’t Understand Academic Freedom

Published by skeptic

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT testified in front of Congress this week. Their performance was a disaster. The three leaders of these prestigious institutions seemed coached, presumably by a team of lawyers and PR consultants, to give hedging answers, and they doggedly stuck to their talking points. As a result, their responses were robotic, betrayed a lack of empathy, and never made a serious attempt to defend the larger mission that their universities supposedly serve. Throughout the hearing, the three presidents perfectly encapsulated the broader malaise of America’s most elite universities, which excel at avoiding lawsuits and increasing their endowments but seem to have little sense of why they were founded or what justifies the lavish taxpayer subsidies they receive. The most damaging moments came when the three presidents were asked by Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate their universities’ policies on free speech. Such a call could be a violation, “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements,” Sally …

These Corals Survived a Deep Freeze

These Corals Survived a Deep Freeze

Published by skeptic

This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than a grain of rice. It was also frozen solid. That is, until Narida, a graduate student at National Sun Yat-sen University, in Taiwan, thawed it with the zap of a laser. Now, just beneath the coral’s tentacles, she spies a slight divot in the skeleton where a second coral is beginning to bud. That small cavity is evidence that her hood coral is reaching adulthood, a feat no other scientist has ever managed with a previously frozen larva. Narida smiles and snaps a picture. “It’s like if you see Captain America buried in snow and, after so many years, he’s alive,” she says. “It’s so cool!” For nearly two decades, scientists have been cryopreserving corals—freezing them at temperatures as low as –196 degrees Celsius for long-term …

Where Are All the Missing Students?

Where Are All the Missing Students?

Published by skeptic

In 2006, the School District of Philadelphia, in partnership with Microsoft, opened the School of the Future. The idea was simple enough: Establish a learning environment centered on technology—no textbooks, just laptops and Wi-Fi—that would provide students in relatively poor districts the same benefits that those in wealthier areas enjoyed. The district built a handsome, well-lit building and filled it with state-of-the-art trappings including electronic lockers and Italian-marble bathrooms. It was heralded as a path-defining achievement for public-private partnerships in education. Two years later, Michael Gottfried, now an economist at the University of Pennsylvania but then a graduate student there, was part of a team examining whether such a technological revolution actually made a difference in student achievement. But he soon realized that the technology was somewhat beside the point: “We were talking to a teacher [at the School of the Future] and she said, ‘Here’s the thing, we can talk all you want about smart boards and laptops per student and curriculum moving online, but I have a bigger problem: Half of my class …

Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing

Spiders Might Be Quietly Disappearing

Published by skeptic

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine. Jumping spiders are an obsession for me. But it wasn’t always so. Although never a spider hater or an arachnophobe, I was pretty ambivalent about them for most of my life. Then I learned about jumping spiders: I’ve reported on their impressive vision (as good as a cat’s in some ways!), their surprising smarts (they make plans!), and the discovery that they have REM-like sleep (and may even dream!). I was hooked. I also learned that jumping spiders may be in decline. In tropical forests, finding them in a matter of minutes used to be easy, says the behavioral biologist Ximena Nelson, who studies jumping spiders at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. But for some species, that’s changed over the past couple of decades: “Now, I mean, you just can’t find them at all in some cases.” In fact, all over the world, all sorts of spiders seem to be disappearing, says the conservation biologist Pedro Cardoso of the University of Lisbon. He and a …

Black Success, White Backlash – The Atlantic

Black Success, White Backlash – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

For more than half a century, I have been studying the shifting relations between white and Black Americans. My first journal article, published in 1972, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was about Black political power in the industrial Midwest after the riots of the late 1960s. My own experience of race relations in America is even longer. I was born in the Mississippi Delta during World War II, in a cabin on what used to be a plantation, and then moved as a young boy to northern Indiana, where as a Black person in the early 1950s, I was constantly reminded of “my place,” and of the penalties for overstepping it. Seeing the image of Emmett Till’s dead body in Jet magazine in 1955 brought home vividly for my generation of Black kids that the consequences of failing to navigate carefully among white people could even be lethal. Explore the November 2023 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More For …

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Is a Gloriously Disorienting Thrill Ride

‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Is a Gloriously Disorienting Thrill Ride

Published by skeptic

The opening scene of Anatomy of a Fall achieves a rare, special kind of disorientation, one baffling enough to make the viewer question reality. Did I arrive late? I wondered, even though I knew I’d been sitting in the theater when the house lights had gone down minutes prior. Sandra (played by Sandra Hüller), a writer, is being interviewed in her home by a graduate student about her work. But it’s nigh impossible to parse the questions and answers, or the subtly flirty vibes between interviewer and interviewee, because loud music is blasting all through the house, something they try to ignore but eventually acknowledge as insurmountable, postponing the conversation until later. Sandra’s husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), is working upstairs in the attic, playing music on a huge speaker, but we don’t see him, and his motivation for such obnoxiousness is never explained. If Sandra is annoyed, she barely shows it; the viewer mostly identifies with the poor graduate student, mercifully excused from a dynamic loaded with tension. Only as Anatomy of a Fall progresses …

When Americans Abandon the Constitution

When Americans Abandon the Constitution

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Our excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney has many people talking about the Utah senator’s principles and character, but we should be deeply alarmed by Romney’s warning about the Republican Party. First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic: The End of Pretenses My colleague McKay Coppins has spent two years talking with Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. An excerpt from McKay’s forthcoming book confirmed the news that Romney has had enough of the hypocrisy and weakness of the Republican Party and will be leaving the Senate when his term expires; other stunning moments from their conversations include multiple profiles in pusillanimity among Romney’s fellow Republicans. (I am pleased to know that Senator Romney holds as low an opinion of J. D. Vance as I do; “I don’t …

Debating Trump Is Pointless – The Atlantic

Debating Trump Is Pointless – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Contempt for the Electoral Process Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations. Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize …