Four students spent their summer in Colorado stalking Lincoln’s sparrows in search of answers to fundamental biological questions. Emma Reinhardt is recording male birdsong and remixing it randomly to study its evolution and determine if the order of notes in a song matters. Nico Frasson is collecting tissue samples to identify where the birds migrate in the winter to learn how migration affects health, survival and breeding success.
At Carolina, basketball coaches scout opponents with computer-generated video analysis, and a computer scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill are training computers to think on their own. Gedas Bertasius and his graduate students have created coding models that enable servers with 30-to-40 graphical processing units to recognize activities such as running and swimming in a dataset of 300,000 YouTube videos.
In the past two years, high-tide versions of king tides have contributed to flooding in Beaufort, Morehead City and other areas along North Carolina’s coast. They caused impassable streets and roads, temporarily closed businesses, damaged houses, buildings and vehicles, contaminated water supply and created dangerous conditions. Carolina researchers are studying these highest of high tides to predict how rising sea levels and increasingly frequent flooding will alter North Carolina’s coast.
Students in a hands-on anthropology course piece together ancient ceramics, learn to fire pottery and cook with pots over a fire to study the history of pottery. The class traveled to Pittsboro in February to visit Mark Hewitt, an artist who creates wood-fired, salt-glazed pottery. Hewitt walked the students through the creative process, including collecting clay from the earth; molding pots, plates, cups, bowls and art pieces; glazing the clay; packing the kiln; and firing.