Browse Physical Science and Mathematics Stories
- general sciences
- astronomy
- biology
- chemistry
- computer science
- earth science
- environmental science
- marine sciences
- math, statistics
- physics
general sciences
- What Don’t We Know? Dark matter, holes in our genes, climatic calamity, population overload, and other questions that keep us up at night. (spring 2008)
- A Bit of Salt, a Trace of Life: What Jack Griffith unearthed near Roswell, New Mexico. (spring 2008)
- Feeling the Heat: Global warming is real. Oil is running out. Time is running out. What happens next? (spring 2006)
- The Next One Could Be Worse: Have Floyd and Katrina braced us for North Carolina's next big storm? (winter 2006)
- Rhiannon's Aster: A toddler's tantrum helps a new flower get its name. (fall 2005)
- Her Kind Of Science: Wanted: Women in the ranks of research. (spring 2003)
- Mole In The Mouse House: What really happened in Carolina’s lab-animal facilities? (winter 2003)
astronomy
- What Opened this Gigantic Hole? Is it the sign of a parallel universe? (spring 2008)
- The Oldest Explosion Arrives: Daniel Reichart and a cast of students document the arrival of the most distant—and oldest—event in the universe. (winter 2006)
- Star Power: With our zippy new telescope, we’ll zero in on the southern sky. (fall 2004)
- Mighty Magnetars: These intensely magnetic stars were just a theory—until now. (winter 1999)
biology
- The Wizardry of Green: To confound their enemies, plants conjure all kinds of tricks. (spring 2008)
- Sex and the Spadefoot Toad: Puddles, procreation, and the not-so-picky spadefoot toad. (winter 2008)
- Lethal Lights at Sea. (fall 2007)
- Sizing Up an Old Bone Hound: Was Edward Drinker Cope on the right trail? Or was he barking up the wrong tree? (winter 2006)
- Fish Get Frisky Quick: Male cichlid fish can change from subordinate to dominant in minutes. (winter 2006)
- Love, for the Birds: Songs for fetching finches. (fall 2005)
- No Solo Crickets: It's better to be a groupie than a loner. (spring 2005)
- No Lost Loggerheads: Homing isn't just for pigeons. (spring 2005)
- The Oldest Land Plants: Getting scrappy with the liverworts. (winter 2005)
- Antwise: A computer scientist works out some bugs. (winter 2004)
- Two at the Top: Grad students have big-time science covered. (winter 2004)
- Boot Camp for Botanists: Mapping the plants of the Carolinas. (fall 2003)
- No Lost Lobsters: When it comes to directions, you can’t fool a lobster. (spring 2003)
- A Bird In The Hand: Ostrich hand development may disprove a dinosaur/bird link. (winter 2003)
- Not-So-Simple Plants: These plants are more precocious than they seemed. (fall 2002)
- There’s Plenty of Life in the Cut and Dried: A library of plants grows. (winter 2002)
- Creative Destruction: The upside of natural disasters. (winter 2002)
- A Striking Resemblance: A biologist calls the kingsnake’s bluff. (fall 2001)
- Preserving the Pitcher Plant: New hybrids take the strain off their wild cousins. (winter 2001)
- A Feathered Fossil: A 220-million-year-old fossil offers evidence that dinosaurs were not ancestral to birds. (fall 2000)
- KinFood: Nutritionally, cannibalism makes sense. So why can’t we stomach our own kind? (spring 2000)
- A Taste of the Woods: For almost 100 years, botanists and gourmands have looked for a rare treat in the woods just a few miles from the UNC campus. (fall 1999)
- Alien Invasion: Exotic plants are gaining a chokehold on our landscape. (spring 1999)
- Wild as the Hills: Every wildflower has a story to tell. (fall 1998)
- The Royal Family Revealed: South American stripe-backed wrens pass on some fascinating family traditions from one generation to the next. (fall 1998)
- Zap!: Our muscles use our bones as levers and pivots. But squids have no bones. So how can they move so amazingly fast? (spring 1998)
- Death by Design: When microbes invade, a plant launches an elaborate defense, and somehow the plant’s own cells turn up dead. Biologists unravel the plot. (winter 1998)
- Toward Cleaner Runs and Riffles: Testing North Carolina’s environmental laws. (fall 1997)
chemistry
- Tiny Steps on a Tightrope: Mapping the structure of an ancient protein. (winter 2008)
- Just say NO: Nitric oxide was the molecule of the year, but can medical science tame its wild ways? (fall 2007)
- Powered by Proteins: Proteins, like pandas, have to be studied in the wild. (winter 2007)
- A DNA Test Pushes the Envelope: A test for cystic fibrosis. (fall 2006)
- Coal gets a Second Wind: Liquid coal for cars. (fall 2006)
- Honey, I Shrunk the Lab: Mike Ramsey has been doing some plumbing, but you'll need a magnifying glass to see the pipes. And someday, you may carry one of his little laboratories around in your pocket. (winter 2006)
- The Chemist and His Chalk: For Bob Parr, the lab is a blackboard chock-full of ideas. (fall 2004)
- Quick Chips: A new dip for tiny chips. (spring 2002)
- Skunky Beer in a Whole New Light: The chemistry of good brew gone bad. (winter 2002)
- Extreme Chemistry: Warning: high voltage. (winter 2001)
- Mind Reader: How we get hooked. (spring 1999)
- Quicker Catalysts: Designing and perfecting catalysts—chemical compounds that speed up reactions—usually takes years. But now two Carolina researchers can pinpoint effective catalysts in a fraction of that time. (fall 1998)
- Hopping Hydrogen: John Boland and his research team have been watching hydrogen atoms hopping around on the surface of silicon wafers. And they’ve seen some surprising things. (spring 1998)
- The Man Who Taught Carbon Dioxide to Clean: Joseph DeSimone helps clean up the cleaning industry with his new invention and launches a start-up company. (winter 1998)
- Green Light: Tom Meyer explores the possibility of artificial photosynthesis. (winter 1998)
- The Sense in Going Green: Saving money and waste, industries make green chemistry a serious business. (winter 1998)
- Finding Herself in Research: An undergraduate shapes her career among peptides and lasers. (fall 1997)
computer science
- Fair Games: What good is a video game to a child that can’t see? (fall 2008)
- Virtual Danger, Safer Places: Computer simulations can help people survive war and disaster. (spring 2008)
- You: Film at Eleven. In pursuit of perfect memory. (winter 2007)
- Seeing what Others Hear: For hearing-impaired students, taking notes just got easier. (spring 2006)
- Toy Power: Inventions that help kids learn. (spring 2004)
- Seeing Eye to Eye: Facetop puts partners on the same page. (spring 2004)
- True To Form: From cave to car crash to scene of the crime. (winter 2003)
- Maps By Sound And Feel: Students create maps for the blind. (winter 2003)
- Paintless Painting: Some artists are more interested in brush strokes than mouse clicks. (fall 2001)
- The Whole Elephant: For the big picture, start small—with the exotic new landscapes of nanoscience. (spring 2000)
- Reaching into Microspace: Wherein several high school students get to examine viruses more closely than even scientists could just a few years ago. (fall 1998)
- Virtually Real: A History of Future-Building: Computer scientists create some new realities for the digital age. (spring 1996)
- Making the Images Fly: Graphics processors help render images in "real time." (spring 1996)
- The Driving Force: Meet Fred Brooks, a frontiersman of computer science. (spring 1996)
earth science
- Under the Volcano: Rock-solid results rewrite the geology texts. (fall 2007)
- An Ominous Rumble of Ice: Jose Rial hears Greenland crack apart. (spring 2007)
- Carolina Rocks: Get the hang of thinking in rock time. (spring 2007)
- A River Runs Backward: The Amazon’s mysterious past. (winter 2007)
- Jonathan vs. the Volcano: Jonathan Lees holds a fond place in his heart for the smell of rotten eggs. (winter 2007)
- A Big Idea that Bombed: What, exactly, was “nuclear earthmoving?” (spring 2006)
- Life in Stormy North Carolina: Nature deals wild cards when it comes to the weather here. (winter 2006)
- Alien and Extreme: An undergrad journeys to the bottom of the world. (fall 2005)
- Plankton’s Testimony on Global Warming: A missing piece in the puzzle. (spring 2004)
- Groundtruth: Getting to the bottom of climate change. (fall 2003)
- Predator Assembled: An undinosaur unveiled. (spring 2002)
- Volcanoes on a Tear: The hot topic of busted crust. (spring 2001)
- Scenic Substance: Exploring North Carolina’s Natural Areas: Parks, Nature Preserves, and Hiking Trails. (fall 2000)
- The Predator in the Stone: There’s nothing like a big, predatory reptile to awaken a childlike fascination for the overpowering wildness of life. (winter 2000)
- Ice Would Suffice: A geophysicist detects the subtle celestial rhythms that govern the fate of the earth. (winter 2000)
- Rocks Aren’t So Heavy Online: An electronic atlas of igneous and metamorphic rocks. (winter 2000)
- A Wave is a Wave: What do heartbeats, earthquakes, and whitecaps have in common? (fall 1999)
- Sea Beds Hold Potential Fuel Source: Gas hydrates have been difficult to study. But Carolina researchers, led by Professor of Geology Charles K. Paull, have found a way to look at them up close. (fall 1996)
environmental science
- Biofuel for Thailand. (fall 2006)
- Drought: Coping with North Carolina’s dry summers. (winter 2003)
- In the Breath of the Forest: In the Amazon, researchers are cooking with gas. (spring 2001)
- Spray Away: Researchers learn how to get more paint on the product and less on the painter. (fall 2000)
- How’s the Water?: The answer is equal parts politics, business, science, and plain common sense. (winter 1999)
- The Man Who Taught Carbon Dioxide to Clean: Joseph DeSimone helps clean up the cleaning industry with his new invention and launches a start-up company. (winter 1998)
- Green Light: Tom Meyer explores the possibility of artificial photosynthesis. (winter 1998)
- The Sense in Going Green: Saving money and waste, industries make green chemistry a serious business. (winter 1998)
- Toward Cleaner Runs and Riffles: Testing North Carolina’s environmental laws. (fall 1997)
- Sustainable Development: It’s a balancing act—meeting the needs of people today while saving resources that others will need in the future. (fall 1996)
- Where the River Meets the Sea: Researchers at the Institute of Marine Sciences study the forces that shape the coast’s environment and the lives of its people. (fall 1995)
marine sciences
- Slime and the City: Algae blooms choke China’s third-largest lake. (fall 2008)
- In Hot Water: Coral reefs lose their cool. (winter 2008)
- The Flow Below: Going deep with underwater waves. (fall 2007)
- Life Down Deep: Hard-core critters below the bottom of the sea. (winter 2007)
- Charley and the Aquanauts: What’s a little hurricane when you’re sixty feet under? (winter 2005)
- Fishy Fish: These researchers have their own fish story to tell. (winter 2005)
- Taking the Pulse of a Reef: Please don’t feed the coral. (spring 2004)
- Sharks and Their Kin: Carolina’s sharks, skates, and rays. (fall 2003)
- Net Benefits: Science and fishing: what’s the catch? (spring 2003)
- When Giants Ruled the Seas: The balance that people upset. (winter 2002)
- Treasures Untold: The wreck of the Queen Ann’s Revenge lies just off the coast of North Carolina. Historians and archeologists are learning more about her and her captain—Blackbeard. (fall 1999)
- A Wave is a Wave: What do heartbeats, earthquakes, and whitecaps have in common? (fall 1999)
- How’s the Water?: The answer is equal parts politics, business, science, and plain common sense. (winter 1999)
- Jewels in the Sand?: A guide to the seashells of North Carolina. (winter 1999)
- Shades of the Neuse: Microscopic images capture the diversity of the Neuse river. (winter 1999)
- Sunscreen From the Sea: Creatures that can protect themselves—and humans, too. (winter 1999)
- Life on Ice: Despite Antarctica’s sub-zero temperatures, deep in the ice, tiny life survives. (fall 1997)
- Weather Aloft: John Bane goes airborne to solve the mystery of the Southerly Surge. (fall 1997)
- A Coastal Insider: An ecotourist’s guide to the North Carolina coast. (fall 1997)
- The Magnetic Mysteries of Turtles: Out of all the strands of sand in the Atlantic, how do adult loggerhead turtles find their way back to their birthplace? (winter 1997)
- Where the River Meets the Sea: Researchers at the Institute of Marine Sciences study the forces that shape the coast’s environment and the lives of its people. (fall 1995)
math, statistics
- Mickey By Mickey, Twip By Twip: Meet the measurement guy. (winter 2003)
- Golf Handicaps: Is the system biased in favor of the better golfer? (spring 2001)
- Numbers by Nature: Yes, numbers misbehave—it’s only natural. (fall 2000)
- A Wave is a Wave: What do heartbeats, earthquakes, and whitecaps have in common? (fall 1999)
physics
- Running on Fumes: Is hydrogen good for the long haul? (fall 2007)
- Rip the Big Bang: This physicist isn’t buying it. (fall 2007)
- Power Tools: Fuel cells for energy. Tiny tubes for sharper x-rays. Nanoparticles to deliver drugs or genes. (fall 2005)
- TUNL Vision: If you’re a particle smasher, the universe can seem like a zoo. (spring 2003)
- Mighty Magnetars: These intensely magnetic stars were just a theory—until now. (winter 1999)
- Super Tubes: Carolina scientists use the nanoManipulator to bend carbon nanotubes, which prove to be more flexible and stronger than any other substance. (winter 1998)
