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SciWorks Radio Podcast – Educational and Scientific Narration

Voiceover Nerd Productions, Inc. remains committed to science learning and accessibility. I am therefore refurbishing many of my SciWorks Radio Podcast episodes and making them available for anyone (students, teachers, science enthusiasts) to listen to and/or read. These educational science podcasts were created between 2014 and 2017 when I worked at SciWorks, now called Kaleideum. Located in Winston-Salem, NC, Kaleideum is an interactive museum of arts, sciences, and exploration formed by the merger of The Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks in July 2016. The two museums merged into a single organization to reimagine learning and better meet the needs of our diverse community by providing more access to informal science discovery and cultural experiences.

Darwin

Evolution and the Predictive Power of Science *

November 11, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

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

Filed Under: SciWorks Radio Tagged With: Appalachian State University, biology, boston, Darwin, doctor, educational, educational narration, elearning, evolution, instructional, interview, kaleideum, learning, ma, massachusetts, museum, narration, natural selection, NC, North Carolina, phd, podcast, podcast intro, podcast narration, providence, science, scientific, scientific narration, scientist, sciworks, voice over, voiceover, winston-salem

The Dinosaurs in your Back Yard – SciWorks Radio Podcast

October 29, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice
Shawn Fitzmaurice
The Dinosaurs in your Back Yard - SciWorks Radio Podcast
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Dinosaurs are still here, and they’re an incredibly successful species.

Ok, what about the fact that earth was hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago, resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs?

Three decades of evidence have forced us to re-think the story:
Sixty-five million years ago, an astroid collided with Earth, resulting in the extinction of many or most dinosaur species. 

Dinosaurs were a specific group of animals. One evolutionary line of them, which shared a close common ancestor with Tyrannosaurus Rex, evolved into birds. That all happened before the extinction! 

Birds were flying around other dinosaurs’ heads! 

All but that specific line went extinct. That means that that the birds in your backyard are living, breathing dinosaurs! 

Today, dinos are more diverse than any other invertebrate group.

In this podcast, Dr. Lindsay Zanno, Director of the Paleontology and Geology lab at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, at NC State University breaks down what we know, and how we know that dinosaurs live among us.

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

Filed Under: SciWorks Radio Tagged With: #science #voiceover #voice over #scientific narration, #science #voiceover #voice over #zanno #birds #dinosaurs, biology, birds, boston, Darwin, doctor, educational, educational narration, elearning, evolution, instructional, interview, kaleideum, learning, ma, massachusetts, museum, narration, natural selection, NC, North Carolina, ornithology, phd, podcast, podcast intro, podcast narration, providence, science, scientific, scientific narration, scientist, sciworks, voice over, voiceover, winston-salem

Blue-Footed Boobies’ Struggle To Survive in the Galapagos

October 29, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice
Shawn Fitzmaurice
Blue-Footed Boobies’ Struggle To Survive in the Galapagos
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Blue-footed-booby

Winner of the National Science Foundations’s Science 360 Best Science Podcast Award, 2014.

The Galapagos islands are famous for their association with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection.

But the islands also have species who live there, but did not evolve there; Blue-Footed Boobies for example. Interestingly, they might be relying on more deep-seated and complex survival strategies.

The driving goal of life is to reproduce. But that doesn’t work if you don’t survive.  Over billions of years, life has adapted so many weird and wonderful strategies to cope with hard times, and Doctor David Anderson, professor of Biology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem believes the Boobies kind of waiting for financial stabilitie before having children… Sort of…

First aired August 8, 2014

Filed Under: SciWorks Radio Tagged With: biology, birds, boston, Darwin, doctor, educational, educational narration, elearning, evolution, instructional, interview, kaleideum, learning, ma, massachusetts, museum, narration, natural selection, NC, North Carolina, ornithology, phd, podcast, podcast intro, podcast narration, providence, science, scientific, scientific narration, scientist, sciworks, voice over, voiceover, winston-salem

A New Dinosaur Discovery

January 5, 2021 by Shawn Fitzmaurice

Shawn Fitzmaurice
Shawn Fitzmaurice
A New Dinosaur Discovery
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Yes, we’re still discovering new dinosaurs!

In this podcast, learnabout a new dinosaur discovered by paleontologist Doctor Lindsay Zanno of the  Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A predator, carnivore, 2-legged animal, Siats Meekerorum may have looked and behaved a lot like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it lived in a much earlier time period, and was not closely related. What in evolution would cause the similarity? And why did this one particular person become a scientist? Listen to find out on this podcast episode of SciWorks Radio.

Here are some related links.

  • What is a dinosaur is (for kids).
  • Jurassic 
  • late Cretaceous (more dino times).
  • Most dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago (Learn about geologic time).
  • Siats is from a completely different group of predators then tyrannosaurs are; Carcharodontosauridae.
  • convergent evolution.
  • And so Siats, it was the man eating monster. Meekerorum was chosen to honor the Meeker family for Their contributions helping young scientist.

Filed Under: SciWorks Radio Tagged With: biology, birds, boston, Darwin, dinosaurs, doctor, educational, educational narration, elearning, evolution, instructional, interview, kaleideum, learning, ma, massachusetts, museum, narration, natural selection, NC, North Carolina, ornithology, phd, podcast, podcast intro, podcast narration, providence, science, scientific, scientific narration, scientist, sciworks, voice over, voiceover, winston-salem, zanno

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