Shawn Fitzmaurice

Science Communication is Often Done Through Art

November 15, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

Science Communication is Often Done Through Art

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Dr. Janna Levin, University of North Carolina School of the Arts

You probably know a lot about science because of art. Think of the expertly built T-Rex at a science museum, the beautiful animations of stars and planets in your favorite sci-fi film, maybe you’re reading your child an illustrated book about bugs, or those creatively shot photos in your biology text?

Art is communication, and when pared with Science, is a powerful tool to inspire, entertain, and educate.

Scientists are often not the greatest communicators, so most often, to bring science to the public requires one or more forms of art. But who teaches the artists, whose job it is to captivate you, about Science?

Dr. Janna Levin, for one, does! She is the Associate Professor in the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and I was privileged to talk with her about it in this podcast episode of SciWorks Radio.

First Aired Nov. 20, 2015

The Virus That Kills Cancer

November 12, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

The Virus That Kills Cancer

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(Audio returning soon)

The cure for cancer is the brass ring everyone in healthcare fights to achieve. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy have been the standard treatment, yet success is inconsistent, and the side effects are terrible. These treatments can’t tell the difference between normal and cancer cells, so they kill both. Cancer cells are aggressive, so triggering the body’s immune system to fight back just as hard is the key. That’s called Immunotherapy. Associate Professor of Neurology at Duke University Medical Center Dr. Annick Desjardins and a team led by Dr. Matthias Gromeier are working on this.

We’ve known for a long time that the polio virus clings to every solid cancer cell, so we want to make that work to our advantage. First, we need to tame the virus, so the Team at Duke is genetically modifying it and giving it a cold.

The first trial was a patient with a brain tumor. The Sabin vaccine contains active, though weak, poliovirus. Then they removed part of the virus’s gene that is toxic to the spinal cord, nervous system, and gut. The cold virus is inserted in its place, so the body cannot detect the modification. It is injected into the tumor, where it infects a few of those glioblastoma cells. The immune system thinks it is killing the polio virus, but it is actually targeting the cancer cells in the tumor. This process has been used with varying success.

The first patient was treated at the beginning of 2012. It was a young woman diagnosed when she was 20 years old. She had surgery and radiation. The tumor came back nine months later, and her expected survival rate was less than one year. In January 2012, we injected her with the poliovirus; three years later, there was no sign of cancer in her brain. Several other patients had similar results, and others did not. This result leaves us with questions such as:

Is it because of the dose?
Was it because of the size of the tumor?
Is it their immune system or the different treatments they were on?
Did something else interfere with the poliovirus?

The possibility of curing brain cancer is exciting. So what about other kinds of cancer? Finding the optimal dose that triggers an immune response is critical. Once the right dose is determined, we can test it on other types of cancer. Waking up the immune system is something we have worked on for many years, and the reality is inspiring.

Caution is still essential because there are always new factors to consider with new treatments. The cancer cells may react unexpectedly and learn how to survive the treatment. Each time brings us closer to understanding the immune system.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

Evolution and the Predictive Power of Science *

November 11, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

Evolution and the Predictive Power of Science *

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Some of the great scientific theories unify our knowledge and have fundamentally changed the way we look at the world. Heliocentrism, for example, is the theory that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun. Though at one time it was soundly rejected by the community at large, it best explained the motions of objects in the sky. In science, a theory is an accepted method of interpreting facts. It’s based on evidence, and careful observation and cannot be disproved. Evolution, the process by which species change over many generations, is one such theory.

I teach a non-major’s intro to bio class. This semester, in fact, we’ll be talking about evolution. And, many of them have had just a few days of it. Some have never had it, even though it’s required in the state standards in North Carolina as a science, and so that can have repercussions.

That’s Dr. Howard Neufeld, professor of biological sciences at Appalachian State University. I asked him, “Why does understanding evolution matter?”

It’s the foundation of all biology, of all life. And so it’s the most important biological subject. It’s important in terms of medicine; if you understand evolutionary biology you can understand how organisms have evolved to be dangerous to humans and other organisms, and you can design strategies to deal with that. It’s important just for understanding science, and where we came from.

But, how can one observe evolution, a process that takes place over great spans of time? Can we see it happening or is it a guess?

We see this all the time; we see antibiotic resistance evolving in bacteria. That’s a form of evolution. And, when we look at the whole spectrum of life, then what we see is the same processes at work. You know, natural selection, organisms that are better adapted to those conditions leave more offspring for the next generation and so-on. And so, this way we can start asking questions about the interrelationships of living organisms and who’s descended from who. The way we do that is, we can look at the DNA and refer relationships, and look at the fossil record. And, you can begin to see that there’s a pattern.

Understanding evolution gives us the power to understand what we cannot see, or have yet to find.

If you look at Neil Shubin’s work, at the University of Chicago, he said “if we postulate that amphibians made the transition onto land and became reptiles, or became terrestrial amphibians, they should have these characteristics, and they should be found in the layers of the earth that are this approximate age.” Well, that’s a prediction, and they went looking over the world. Where are layers of rock that have fossils of that age? And so they looked and looked, and somebody found a snout sticking out of a rock, and there was this organism, Tiktaalik, and it was perfectly intermediate between a fish and amphibian. So in this sense, we used our knowledge of evolutionary science to make a prediction and then Neil Shubin’s group confirmed it.

Score one more for the predictive power of science!

Any student that doesn’t come away with an appreciation of evolution, which is how all life got to be like it is, is missing the main component of biology. And I like to divide it into two parts: evolutionary facts, and then there’s evolutionary theory. The facts are the fossils. The facts are homology and analogy in terms of structure, that many mammals have 5 fingers. If you look at a bat it has five bones in there, and it’s just webbing between them to make the wing, and so-on. And DNA evidence. And, we can see natural selection in action. Those are all evolutionary facts, and as I tell students, you cannot deny a fact. Then the theory is, what are the processes by which evolutionary change occurs? We have natural selection, and we can ask how strong or intense those selection pressures are and what ends up in the next generation. And when we put the whole package together, we have a whole comprehensive science of evolution. So, that’s how we do it, and I let the students make up their mind.

First aired Feb 12, 2016

Baby, I’m a Star. And so are you!

November 4, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

Baby, I'm a Star. And so are you!

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You’re made of atoms.

The fact that you’re not all hydrogen means that your home star (in your case, the Sun), is made from recycled material. In fact, the Sun is made from atoms that have come into being over several star’s lifecycles; Star is born, star manufactures new and different atoms in its core, star explodes. A new star is made from the materials and new atoms from the exploded star. Rinse. Repeat. Do this for 14 billion years.

In this podcast, I speak with Dr. John Barrow, Professor of Mathematical Sciences in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in England about the evolution and “archeology” of the known universe.

Hear the radio broadcast version in this player:

Barrow-Stars

Some key words:

Orion Nebula
museum
star party
supernova
recycling
evolution
universe
Expansion
elements
biology
Astronomy
Cosmology
Archeology
Physics
gravitational waves

First aired May 06, 2016

Papa Wasn’t A Rolling Stone, Otherwise he would have Obeyed The Law…s Of Physics

November 2, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

Papa Wasn't A Rolling Stone, Otherwise he would have Obeyed The Law...s Of Physics

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If your papa was actually a rolling stone, his whereabouts would be predictable.

If a boulder and a small rock are rolled down a hill together, logic, instinct, and all the insight you have will tell you that the boulder will travel further than the stone. What you might not have realized is that both objects, generally, rolled the same number of times. Based on this, the rolling stone’s travel distance is predictable!

This same principle applies to smoke plumes, river systems, migrating animals, your veins and arteries, tree branches, and even evolution.

Credited with defining a newly understood law of physics called the constructal law, Dr. Adrian Bejan, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, published his findings in the journal Nature Scientific Reports. He refined the constructal law to include forces shaping the earth’s surface, rolling rocks, and turbulent eddies in water and air. (Read about it here).

Have a listen to this episode of SciWorks Radio Podcast to hear more. How often can you personally relate to a new law of physics? Listen now.

Hear the Broadcast version of this program here:
Audio Player

First aired Aug 12, 2016

Boy meets Girl : Moves like Fuxjager *

October 31, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice

Boy meets Girl : Moves like Fuxjager *

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Humans aren’t the only members of the animal kingdom that work hard to impress and attract a mate. Often, guys battle it out in front of a desirable girl – hissing, flapping, ramming each other with horns. When the competition is over, the girl either accepts or rejects the boy.

In this episode of Sciworks Radio, Shawn Fitzmaurice spoke with Dr.Matthew Fuxjager, Assistant Professor of Physiology in the Department of Biology at Wake Forest University about how evolution has produced such strange mating rituals.

Hear the broadcast version in this player.

Fuxjager

Dr. Fuxjager specializes in studying this behavior in manikins, a tropical bird consisting of about sixty different species with a wide variety of elaborate mating displays. These displays go beyond demonstrating useful survival behaviors. These displays serve two purposes: attracting a mate and fighting with other males. They all come together and display, then a female will choose a mate based on his performance. If there are no females in these large groups, the males will display to each other.

Natural selection is about adapting to one’s environment over multiple generations. This piece focuses on another evolutionary force known as sexual selection – where the lineage of a species is driven by what individuals find attractive. For example – if beautiful purple feathers are found to be attractive, then that trait is more likely to be passed down through following generations.

But what do mating rituals have to do with this? And why is it often males working to impress females?

One theory is that animals’ neuromuscular systems are being shaped in a way that corresponds to hormones that control sex and reproduction. Specifically, testosterone seems to lead to these displays. With the increase in testosterone, muscles grow in strength and flexibility and showing these features corresponds to being a potentially superior suitor. In fact, when testosterone was given to females in labs, THEY began to move like males during courtship.

While birds are the specific model in this case, these elaborate displays can be seen throughout many different animal species.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.

First aired October 4th, 2014

Voiceover Nerd Productions, inc.

SciWorks Radio Podcast – Educational and Scientific Narration

Science Communication is Often Done Through Art

The Virus That Kills Cancer

Evolution and the Predictive Power of Science *

Baby, I’m a Star. And so are you!

Papa Wasn’t A Rolling Stone, Otherwise he would have Obeyed The Law…s Of Physics

Boy meets Girl : Moves like Fuxjager *