Well Said

While sharks are often cast as the villain in movies, sharks on the coast of North Carolina aren’t ill-intended — they’re just trying to find food while avoiding risk.

With 50 species of sharks visiting the North Carolina coast throughout the year, they're typically foraging for meals in the same areas that tourists spend their summers in.

But Joel Fodrie, an associate professor and researcher at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences, explains that the likelihood of a shark encounter is incredibly low.

Swimmers can be within 10 or 20 yards of a shark more often than they think, and while movies will tell us that this can spell disaster, Fodrie disagrees.“Sharks are highly evolved,” he explained.

They can smell blood in the water much farther away than humans ever could, and also use electric fields and sound waves to sense injured animals closeby, but humans don’t put out the same cues as what sharks are foraging for, and these underwater visitors stay away from what they aren’t familiar with.

On this episode of Well Said, Fodrie discusses the ongoing shark survey performed by IMS researchers, as well as shares what any beachgoer should understand about sharing the water with sharks this summer.

When Katrina Morgan explains to people that she studies math as a doctoral candidate in the College of Arts & Sciences, they often respond unfavorably, saying they just “aren’t a math person.”

“You wouldn’t just say, "Oh, I’m not a history person,’” Morgan said.

She argues that mathematics is a field where people decide whether they “are” or “are not” fit for the field very early in their academic careers. This is especially true for girls because there is less representation of women in mathematics, Morgan explained.

In 2016, Morgan, along with fellow doctoral student Francesca Bernardi, set out to change that by founding Girls Talk Math, which invites high school girls from North Carolina to UNC-Chapel Hill to participate in a two-week day camp that explores mathematical concepts.

The campers are given problem sets to solve as groups, with topics that span from quantum mechanics to computer engineering. But the camp also teaches the importance of communication skills. Aside from working on math problems, participants can record podcasts, research female mathematicians and write blog posts.

On this week's episode of Well Said, Morgan discusses Girls Talk Math and how the program has been giving local high school girls a new outlook on mathematics.

Are there other Earth-like worlds in the universe at the right size and with the right atmosphere to support life?

Carolina astronomers are trying to figure that out right now.

One candidate for such a planet is Proxima b, an exoplanet that orbits the closest star to our sun. Carolina researchers recently conducted a study using a first-of-its-kind telescope that sheds new light and poses questions about whether or not that planet could support life.

Currently, Amy Glazier of the physics and astronomy department has been using the Evryscope to find the nearest “Tatooine”-type worlds to Earth. With the Evryscope imaging the entire sky every two minutes, she can measure the small variation in the time taken for one star of a binary system to eclipse the other due to the gravitational influence of circumbinary planets perturbing the stars’ motion.

In this week’s episode, assistant professor Nicholas Law from the physics and astronomy department discusses his Evryscope, how researchers use it to monitor 50 million stars and what they’ve found so far.

Before enrolling at Carolina as an incoming first-year or transfer student, Tar Heels first complete an orientation program that acclimates them to Chapel Hill.

Each summer, current Tar Heels help guide these new students as orientation leaders.

Rising junior Excellence Perry is one of those students leading others. The public relations and advertising and management and society double major is helping welcome new students in this role for the second time.

He says the key to being a good orientation leader is going beyond simple logistics.

“Obviously, I want them to know where their classes are going to be, but those things come after the feeling of, ‘I can be here. I can do great things here. I can succeed here. I belong here,’” Perry said.

On this week’s episode, Perry shares how he empowers these new students to come to Carolina ready to pursue their passions — through answering questions, listening to students and dancing on stage.

Many people find themselves driving away from their house in the morning and thinking, “Did I leave the garage door open?"

It may bother them for a few minutes — even enough to turn around and check. Then, they get on with their day.

But people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Carolina psychology and neuroscience professor Jon Abramowitz explains, get “stuck” checking if that the door is really closed over and over again.

Abramowitz has researched anxiety disorders for over two decades and works with patients who display several different types of OCD behavior, which can include obsessive or intrusive thoughts and habits like the ritual of washing their hands several times or trying to “undo” an odd number with an even one.

He recently released the second edition of his workbook, “Getting Over OCD: a 10-Step Workbook for Taking Back Your Life," which includes a new method of treatment.

On this episode of Well Said, Abramowitz describes what OCD is, what it's not and explains how exposure and response prevention combined with a new method of treatment called "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" can be beneficial for some patients with OCD.

With more than 300,000 maternal deaths throughout the world each year, Carolina researchers are working to help pregnant women avoid becoming part of a startling statistic.

Dr. Jeffrey Stringer, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology in the UNC School of Medicine, is leading two studies that address the role of technology in predicting and revealing key risk factors associated with pregnancy, labor and delivery, with the goal of ultimately lowering the staggering rate of mortality during childbirth.

After receiving a $14 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in May, Stringer teamed up with experts from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and UNC School of Medicine to use common technology to reach their goal.

One study leverages small sensors, similar to a Fitbit, to monitor pregnant women and develop new algorithms that could predict the risk of complications during and after pregnancy.

“We can use the information from that [technology] to know which women are going to have a complication before they have it, and also make diagnoses earlier so that we can intervene earlier,” Stringer explained.

The second study considers another way to predict future complications for the mother or child using portable sonograms that plug directly into a smartphone. While this seems to provide significantly more access, Stringer explains there is one problem.

“Sonography is a very specific skill,” Stringer said. “Our sonographers here go to school for several years to get those skills. We’re trying to leapfrog that and teach computers to make these interpretations.”

The study would create data for artificial intelligence to read and analyze the sonograms.

On this episode of Well Said, Stringer explains the methods and reasons behind these two studies and how it can change childbirth worldwide.

The 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup is underway in France, and the United States is looking to defend its title from 2015. With three World Cup titles and four Olympic gold medals, the American team is certainly a dynasty in international women’s soccer.

The foundations for that dynasty were laid by Carolina’s legendary women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance, who coached the national team from 1986-1994 and led the United States to victory in the first Women’s World Cup in 1991.

Throughout that time, he was still coaching the Tar Heels, too. His Carolina team is another women’s soccer dynasty. More than half of the national titles awarded in women’s soccer history have been won by the Tar Heels.

On this week’s episode, Dorrance discusses how his two dynasties come together at the World Cup — when former Carolina student-athletes represent their countries on the world’s biggest stage. He also shares what excites him about this upcoming Carolina season, when the Tar Heels will return to Chapel Hill after playing their home games off campus for two years while a new stadium was under construction.

On average, children are diagnosed with autism between 4 and 6 years old, but assistant professor of psychiatry Mark Shen says that’s too late.

“The earlier you detect it, the earlier you can intervene and start treatment,” said Shen, who is also a researcher at the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities.

He’s seen those implications firsthand having spent six years training in behavioral treatment for children and adults with autism before returning to graduate school. Now, he’s on a mission to identify the signs of autism in the first year of life.

On this week’s episode, Shen shares what clues he’s been able to find and explains why they’re so important.

It’s hot outside, and you want to cool off with a dip in the water. Before diving in, you know you need to protect your skin by putting on sunscreen. But you also need to protect your ears after you get out of the water.

As an assistant professor of otolaryngology in the UNC School of Medicine and an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor, Dr. Christine DeMason treats a lot of common issues, like ear infections, tonsil issues and thyroid nodules.

During the summer, though, she sees a spike in cases of a specific type of ear infection called swimmer’s ear.

On this week’s episode, DeMason will explain what swimmer’s ear is, who is most at risk and some things you can do to protect yourself from this painful ear infection.

With video streaming services such as Netflix becoming more and more popular, associate professors of economics Brian McManus and Jon Williams are researching the economic implications of these services and the impacts of net neutrality laws on consumers’ wallets.

The increase in Americans’ reliance on video streaming services has, according to McManus and Williams, also forced internet service providers to provide faster speeds, leaving cord-cutting consumers with internet and streaming services costs equaling their original cable bill. 

Despite the popularity of video streaming services in the United States, McManus and Williams explained that there is little research on the economic impact of this new trend.

On this episode of Well Said, McManus and Williams describe their preliminary research and explain other interesting hypotheses they plan to investigate.