Great Adaptations
What does it take to study the deepest places on Earth? The same kind of mettle required to survive them. Tim Shank has spent a lifetime doing both.
Remembering September 11
We turned our eyes to Manhattan, we turned our eyes to Washington D.C., we turned our eyes to a lonely field in Shanksville, Pa., and then we turned our eyes to ourselves: Who, we wondered, will we become now?
Relevance Rediscovered
At 49, Greg Michie gave it all up. His tenure-track position. His flexible schedule. His unhurried lunch hour. (His lunch hour, period.) In 2012, as a citywide teacher’s strike loomed, Michie left the relative comforts of higher education. He returned to the undervalued but indispensable work of public school teaching in America.
Shades of Gray
Jake Lawler came to UNC in 2017 with a football scholarship, a passion for movies and a talent for writing. A longtime foe followed him there, one that he had known since middle school — when he wore crooked glasses and ill-fitting clothes and was teased for being a mixed-race kid.
Compassion as an Action Verb
"How do we institutionalize compassion? If we are all products of our systems, how do we make these systems compassionate? Imagine police departments whose main focus is caring for the community, is compassion. What if, from the very beginning, compassion is the anchor for all our social institutions?"
Weaponized Cells: A Sobering Message About the Virus
Lung researcher Dr. Camille Ehre felt like she was flying a drone over a dense forest, looking for poisonous apples on the ground or in the swaying trees. For more than a month, she piloted her powerful microscope over an area 12 millimeters in diameter populated by cells from the lungs’ airways. Zooming in and out, she hunted between and below their hairlike protrusions for the infectious, spiky orbs of COVID-19.
From Video Store to the Oscars
When Parasite became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for best picture this year, the spirit of Chapel Hill’s VisArt Video hovered inside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles like a house ghost at Hogwarts.
The Smoke You’ve Been Missing
“When I realized how bad e-cigarette use was in the high schools, I thought, ‘If I don’t do this, who will?’ ” said Ilona Jaspers, who also directs the toxicology curriculum at UNC and is the mother of a junior and a senior at Chapel Hill High School. “If I don’t go out and talk to people and educate them about it and find a way to communicate with them, who will?”
Next Research Launch: Carolina’s Own Satellite
Andrew Mann told all the universities who interviewed him for faculty positions that he planned to buy his own CubeSat, but Carolina’s response intrigued him: “They said, ‘Don’t buy it. Build it.’ ”
To Build a Cure
They’re the most promising cancer assassins to come along in your lifetime, but their mission is far from complete. CAR-T is still largely experimental — a futuristic, staggering, frustrating therapy that sometimes works and sometimes does not.
Custom-Made Therapy Comes With Sticker Shock
(sidebar to "To Build a Cure") What’s the difference between commercial CAR-T therapy and the cancer treatments that have come before it? The same things,…
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The Banghart Way
Last spring, Courtney Banghart earned the job of a lifetime when she was named the first new Tar Heels women’s basketball coach in 33 years, replacing a coach and taking over a program whose shine had faded under the tarnish of scandal and disconnection. The role is tailor-made for Jim Banghart’s daughter: An opportunity to repair a beloved thing that has fallen out of favor, to patch its holes and mend its stitches — and then go out and win with it.
Holding Onto Herself
For the first time in the almost two years since she began dating Alex Honnold, the most accomplished free solo climber in the world, she allows herself to think about all the things that could go wrong on El Capitan the next day — when Honnold would attempt to become the first person to climb Yosemite’s monolith with no ropes or safety gear.
The Student Body Shop
What you see, smell and hear here is shop class and home economics refurbished for the digital age. Hundreds of willing participants know this as BeAM, or “be a maker,” UNC’s answer to the worldwide makerspace movement — the collaborative culture of making physical objects using both digital and traditional tools. Now entering its fourth year, BeAM makerspaces are leading the Carolina community and its students through a re-emergence of know-how, in and out of the classroom.
The Art of Perseverance
Students are incredulous when Walters proffers this deal. “You’re going to give me more time and a higher grade? What’s the catch?” But that’s how making and inventing works in the real world, he said. Like pumping gas in a Vermont winter, the first decisions you make often are not your best.
The BeAM School of Engineering
Of the 15 colleges Charlotte Dorn was considering, only Carolina didn’t offer the mechanical engineering degree she wanted. The High Point native’s family had a good laugh about that.
Can I Make You Something From the Davie Poplar?
D. J. Fedor rummages through a drawer in his office in the BeAM makerspace at Hanes, a no-nonsense room scattered with woodworking supplies. From these unpretentious surroundings, he brandishes a pen, laying it gently in your palm as if it were a royal scepter.
Ultimate Rising: UNC’s Darkside Overshadows its Rivals
When Mike Denardis started playing ultimate Frisbee at the University of Iowa more than 20 years ago, the game — for the uninitiated, think soccer…
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Why Not? The Art of Believing
When Katie Ziglar believes in the power of an idea or a project, it persists — across the decades, across continents, through the halls of the Smithsonian, in the mansions of maharajas, over the demolition of gender barriers and through her polite-but-persistent, lifelong takedown of the phrase, “That can’t be done.”
The Guiding Light
Cancer can magnify the darkness and light we all walk around with — the electricity that fuels a good day with our kids, and the bottom floor of our souls where we struggle with all that we are and all that we could be. The forces are always competing. But the crazy, beautiful thing about Sam Anthony is that he finds a way to let the light win.
