Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Sunday, October 6, 2024
The Print Edition
Donate | About | Join Us | Advertise
Subscribe to our newsletters

Features

The Setonian
Columns

Human: Home

By Quinn Pham | October 22

You know that weather app that comes with the iPhone? I think my mom added a Medford tab to hers because a couple days ago, out of the blue, she nagged me about wearing my puffy winter coat and an extra layer of pants since the temperature had dropped to below 10℃. I did not, but I told her I appreciated her concern. Her reminder did, however, make me feel a little homesick. This time of year invariably brings my thoughts closer to home than usual.

el-centro
Columns

El Centro: Dance

By Haruka Noishiki | October 17

Senior Leila Li, an international relations major from China, wishes she could ask her younger self to fall in love sooner with dance. She clearly stated that she doesn’t consider herself a dancer despite having taken four dance courses, being the captain of Tufts Wuzee and the excitement she feels ...

henry
Columns

The Weekly Chirp: Snack caching

By Henry Stevens | October 16

The particularly observant and ornithologically biased eye will have noticed recently that our neighborhood blue jays are busy. Doing what, you ask? Winter is coming, and blue jays across the Northeast have begun preparing for it. As humans, we worry about the colder temperatures and dangerous storms associated with winter. While these factors certainly pose a threat to blue jays as well, the main threat for them is a reliable source of food during the winter months. What if there was a food source of generally high abundance now that could be stored and eaten later when no other food sources exist? Turns out, there is — acorns!

The Setonian
Columns

Human: Formula

By Quinn Pham | October 15

Lately, while procrastinating on convoluted assignments, I ask myself why I chose college over the variety of options I could have gone with after high school, each leading me down a complex and unpredictable path. But then I look at the clock, fret about grades and go back to studying. The real questions that keep me up at night or some mornings while staring at my cereal in Dewick are: What was the decisive factor that made me who I am? What does it mean to exist? Where do I go from here?

180429-Daily-0217
Features

The people behind 'The Tufts Daily'

By Jessie Newman | October 11

Editor’s note: The Daily’s editorial board acknowledges that this article is premised on a conflict of interest. This article is a special feature for Daily Week 2018 that does not represent the Daily’s standard journalistic practices.Tufts is the smallest university in the country to have a daily ...

el-centro
Columns

El Centro: Dancing through

By Haruka Noishiki | October 11

I sat on a brown, wooden floor sprinkled by sunlight, drawing a cautious half-circle around my folded legs. I was four. I was on the second floor of my preschool building where we had after-school programs, first-year homerooms, and an upstairs dance studio. I was at my after-school gymnastics program, ...

The Setonian
Columns

The Tide: Lucy McBath

By Matt Rice | October 10

Georgia’s 6th Congressional District vaulted into the national spotlight early last year. Its sitting representative, Tom Price, had been confirmed as President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, triggering a special election in the suburban district just north of Atlanta. The runoff between Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel and former congressional aide Jon Ossoff, a first-time political candidate, was seen as a referendum on the young presidency. Handel barely edged out a win in the district formerly held by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and she is facing a substantial reelection fight this fall. Last year, Ossoff was painted as an out-of-touch, Washington-based political operative who cared more for his own ambition than he did for the district where he had grown up. This fall, Representative Handel must overcome a well-funded, inspiring opponent.

henry
Columns

The Weekly Chirp: Concrete jungle

By Henry Stevens | October 9

It’s always fun to examine the beautiful, crazy, wild, extravagant species of birds from around the world online, but at the end of the day, there’s nothing better than going outside and actually seeing birds yourself — even if they don’t happen to be pretty and decorated like a bird-of-paradise. Turns out, our campus attracts all sorts of cool birds annually. In just four years of data collected by a handful of bird nerds, we’ve collectively recorded 136 species of bird! On the right day during spring migration in May, you could walk from Dewick to Dowling and find over 20 species in 10 minutes. Hard to believe, right? At first it doesn’t seem possible, but if you consider where we are located geographically, it starts to make some sense.

el-centro
Columns

El Centro: Deeper into Halligan

By Haruka Noishiki | October 4

Last week, I explored the value that Halligan and the computer science community has for me. It’s a space where I find supportive women. The undergraduate teaching assistants (TAs), students with more experience in the computer science department, proved essential to a computer science and international ...

The Setonian
Columns

The Tide: Ilhan Omar

By Matt Rice | October 3

Minnesota State Representative Ilhan Omar has already made history as a millennial legislator, as a person who came to the U.S. as refugee and the first Somali-American legislator in U.S. history. Omar was first elected in 2016 to serve a central Minneapolis state house district. This November, she, ...

henry
Columns

The Weekly Chirp: Find your niche

By Henry Stevens | October 2

Put simply, a niche is the ecological role a species plays in its environment. Think about the classic backyard birds and the niches they occupy — American robins hop around on the ground hunting for worms, downy woodpeckers drill holes in trees extracting insects and house finches crack thick seeds in their powerful bills. If you live somewhere like the tropics, the increased availability of resources leads to a higher quantity of occupiable niches. With more available niches, more species can coexist. And once two species start to utilize the same resource, they attempt to avoid competition by specializing on one part of that resource over years of evolution, effectively dividing — or partitioning — that niche. (For example, a hummingbird eats the nectar of a flower, while a tanager eats the insects on or around the flower.) This is one of the leading theories explaining the marvelously diverse array of species present in these ecosystems. Twenty species of shorebirds can happily coexist on the same mudflat because their unique bill lengths and foraging strategies target different invertebrates living just below the surface. Mixed flocks exceeding 30 species of Amazonian songbirds can hang out in a fig tree together gulping down insects, flowers, berries, fruit and lizards, among other things. It makes me wonder — do we, in our modern, civilized world, partition niches too?

Trending
The Tufts Daily Crossword with an image of a crossword puzzle
The Print Edition
Tufts Daily front page