Well Said

Hanger isn't a word your mom made up, after all.

It's actually defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “feeling irritable or bad tempered when you’re hungry,” and has become the research focus of doctoral student Jenn MacCormack, who is studying how physical states — like hunger — impact human emotions — like anger.

Her research shows that hanger is not automatic whenever you need a snack. The environment you’re in and whether or not you’re aware of your hunger play a role in going from hungry to hangry.

On this week’s episode of Well Said, MacCormack and her advisor, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience Kristen Lindquist, take us through some research they’ve conducted on hanger.

To help celebrate University Day, Tar Heel alumni participated in community service projects across North Carolina, the country and the world for the annual Tar Heel Service Day.

In this episode of Well Said, alumna and UNC General Alumni Association Coordinator of Outreach Jennifer Chandler explains the variety of projects that took place this year and Charlotte Carolina Club board member Suzanne Cowden gives us insight on the club’s annual project.

On this week's podcast, Vice Chancellor for Workforce Strategy, Equity and Engagement Felicia A. Washington discusses University Day and shares her vision for Carolina's future.

Triffin Morris has more than 20 years of experience costuming Broadway stars in some of the most well-known plays and musicals, including Wicked, Shrek, and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Now she’s bringing her expertise to Carolina as a professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and as head of costume production at PlayMaker’s Repertory Company. An expert in quick-change and other trick costumes, she teaches Carolina students how to make costume-change magic on stage.

In this episode of Well Said, Triffin lets us in on a few of the costuming tricks she uses every day and how she's sharing her talents with students.

The gentle stream that flows beside McIver Residence Hall hasn’t always been part of the campus landscape. It just looks as though it has.

A pipe beneath the street combined with the natural path of rainwater and nearby springs presented an opportunity for staff in UNC Finance and Operations to collaborate on a unique solution for the perpetually wet field near McIver.

Instead of merely repairing and reburying the entire pipe, Sally Hoyt, a stormwater engineer in Energy Services, and landscape architect Jill Coleman worked with a team of consultants and Carolina staff to create an aboveground stream with a filtration process that naturally filters pollutants and contaminants out of runoff water.

On this episode, Hoyt explains the importance of the Battle Grove Restoration project and how it moves the University toward its Three Zeros goal.

Hans Paerl has lived in North Carolina since 1978, and in those 40 years, he hasn’t seen a storm quite like Hurricane Florence, which made landfall near Wilmington early in the morning on Sept. 14.

In this week’s episode, Paerl — the Kenan Professor of Marine and Environmental Sciences at the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences — updates us from the North Carolina coast on the damage caused by Florence, explains what made this storm so unique and addresses the lingering long-term danger left behind by storms like Florence: pollutants in the watershed that could poison people and kill fish.

To better understand the concerns about how this storm will affect water quality for weeks and months to come, we will also revisit our conversation with Paerl from 2017.

Rameses, a 7-year-old horned Dorset ram who roams the sidelines of Kenan Stadium during football games, has become one of Carolina's most famous and beloved Tar Heels.

Away from the football field and the public light, the same family has been caring for UNC-Chapel Hill's mascots since the first Rameses walked campus in 1924.

In this episode, three members of that family share their story and explain why they love caring for everyone’s favorite Tar Heel.

Two Carolina journalism professors have set out to change the narrative around one of the most pressing global issues of our time: sex trafficking.

In today’s episode, we talk with Anne Johnston and Barbara Friedman about their organization, The Irina Project, and how they’re empowering journalists to report on human trafficking in a responsible and ethical way.

This episode features music by So Far As I Know (“The Conqueror”), Lee Rosevere (“Keeping Old Letters”) and Scott Holmes (“Epic Cinematic.”)

Dr. Jonathan Parr of the UNC School of Medicine has spent his career studying diseases that disproportionately impact lower-income communities throughout the world.

His interest in conditions like malaria and hepatitis took Parr to central Africa to assist in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's first country-wide health survey and study the spread of hepatitis C. After discovering approximately 1 percent of patients were infected with the virus, the team was asked to conduct a similar survey on hepatitis B.

In this episode of Well Said, Parr describes his experience in the Congo and the expected impact this research will have on the country.

Legend has it that a sip from the Old Well on the first day of classes brings students good luck — even a perfect GPA. Thousands of Carolina students line up at the well every year to test the theory for themselves.

But the legend’s origin has been a bit of a mystery.

To find out when the tradition started, University archivist Nicholas Graham turned to a trusted tool: Facebook. He reached out to UNC-Chapel Hill alumni who graduated in the '70s, '80s and '90s to learn the whole story.