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The most emotionally difficult moment in Michelle Graham’s life was when five snakes in her lab died.
She had started a doctoral program studying jumping and flying snakes. There are several species of snakes that not only live in trees but can leap heroically from one to the next. Scientists still aren’t totally sure why they jump, but what Graham wanted to know was: How? How can an animal with no arms and no legs jump at all?
In hopes of observing them fly, her lab purchased from a reptile dealer several snakes collected in southeast Asia, then placed them in an improvised snake jungle gym fitted with GoPro cameras. The team wanted to learn how the snakes could curl up and then launch themselves toward tree branches and other targets, adjusting how they’re coiled to land each jump.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Seaside Bank and Trust has hired five veteran bankers to strengthen its team in the Sarasota area.
Joining in various roles across several departments, these new additions will be instrumental in helping the bank continue to support clients with customized banking solutions to help meet their financial goals.
Chad Campbell will lead the team as president, Gulf Coast Market and Middle Market Banking Florida. Joining him are
Jodi Allen, Susan Bowden, June Denton and
Alan Spence.
Campbell previously served as the Florida Market Executive for Commercial Banking for another bank, where he worked with the rest of the team. Throughout his career, Campbell has developed and led sales effectiveness strategies, managed a credit department and coached commercial banking teams to multiple No. 1 regional performance rankings.
The resolute expression on 83-year-old Ngoc Pham’s swollen, bruised face is hard to forget. So is the image of 75-year-old Xiao Zhen Xie, who was filmed in the aftermath of her assault, clutching a pack of ice in her left hand and wielding a wooden board with her right. With it, she was motioning in the direction of her and Pham’s white attacker, who was being wheeled away on a stretcher, bloodied from Xie’s board.
The assault against Pham and Xie on San Francisco’s Market Street occurred one day after the Atlanta spa shootings, stoking yet another wave of outrage and fear among Asian Americans. The seniors’ battered faces and testimonies garnered viral attention from various Instagram accounts dedicated to aggregating news, resources, and cultural content about Asian Americans.
Vox
The 2017 Great American Solar Eclipse left Chris Chartier feeling, well, a little jealous.
Chartier, like so many Americans, was awed by the whole country coming together to celebrate a force of nature. Chartier is a psychologist, and he also started to think of how precise the eclipse forecast was. Astronomers knew, down to the second, when the moon would cross the path of the sun; where, precisely, its shadow would land; and for how many seconds the sun would appear to be blocked out for those on the ground.
Chartier’s field social psychology just doesn’t have that type of accuracy. “Things are really messy,” says Chartier, who’s an associate professor at Ashland University in Ohio. Psychology “is nowhere near being at the level of precision of astronomers, or physicists.”
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