You have your 3D glasses on, you’re settled comfortably, facing an enormous screen. The lights dim and you find yourself in orbit around the Earth. Or maybe you’re in a galaxy far, far away, or boldly going where no one has gone before. Whether you’re reading your child a book about bugs or on a class field trip to see dinosaurs at a museum, you are receiving your information through the interpretation of an artist. You have [...]
The holy grail of health care, arguably, is a cure for cancer. For decades we’ve relied on treatments like radiation therapy and chemotherapy, which don’t always work and can have some horrible side-effects. After all, chemotherapy was inspired by mustard gas around the time of World War I. But cancer cells are part of our own bodies so they are always with us, and our immune system recognizes them and kills them. Sometimes the cancer grows and [...]
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 [...]
At a local museum's star party, on a cold winter’s night, you are squinting through a telescope at the Orion Nebula. In this beautiful, interstellar cloud, you see a few of the hundreds of thousands of new stars being born in this stellar nursery, recycling the remnants of those that have long since died in a supernova explosion.Hear the radio broadcast version in this player:https://www.voiceovernerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Barrow-Stars.mp3This story of universal-scale recycling and evolution has played out repeatedly over the past [...]
If your papa was actually a rolling stone, your mama could have kept track of him. That’s because his travel distance and travel time would be predictable! In fact, you and mama could’ve used basic math skills to find him. He’d have been thrilled. As it turns out, the same principle used to find your daddy also defines the plume of his cigarette smoke, as well as river systems, migrating bison, the veins in your body, and the [...]
What was it that attracted you to your mate? How did they impress you? Humans aren’t the only animals that work hard to attract a partner, in fact it happens throughout the animal kingdom. Often it works like this: Boy meets girl, boy hisses, flaps, or rams his horns against another boy to impress girl. Girl either accepts or rejects boy. Baby animals are made… or not. How has evolution produced these often strange and sometimes beautiful [...]
If you’re a male animal, you might be far more gorgeous than your female partner. Think about the flowing mane of a lion, the majestic antlers on an elk, or the artistically intricate patterns on a peacock’s feathers. Hear the broadcast version in this player.https://www.voiceovernerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Fitzpatrick-female-animal-beauty.mp3But now researchers are zeroing in on what qualifies as female beauty among many animal species. They are far more muted than the signals that we see in males, so we don’t [...]
Crocodiles and their ancestors were around a hundred million years before the dinosaurs. One of the largest of the early crocodile family was discovered right here in North Carolina. It has been investigated and described by Dr. Lindsay Zanno, Director of the Paleontology and Geology lab at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, at NC State University. The Carolina Butcher Or Carnufex Carolinensis, to use the traditional [...]
The Galapagos islands are famous for their association with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection. Being isolated, the islands acted much like a controlled laboratory for clear observation of basic evolutionary adaptations among species. Within the Galapagos also live species which have not yet had their evolution defined by the islands’ environment. Interestingly, they may be relying on some more deep-seated and complex survival strategies. Blue-Footed Boobies are large sea birds that live [...]
