Archive for the ‘Science Museums’ Category
Duke: How germs influenced the Civil War
Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 11:01 pmNowhere are the medical advances of the past 150 years more obvious than during war. A U.S. soldier who is injured today on the battlefield in Iraq has about a 95 percent chance of survival. In World War II, the chance was 50 percent and during the Civil War it was 19 percent.
But the benefits of modern medicine go well beyond combat surgery.
Dr. Margaret Humphreys
Dr. Margaret Humphreys, a Duke University professor in the history of medicine and a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, issued a reminder Tuesday during a lecture at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh that germs bag a bigger punch than bullets.
“It wasn’t until World War I that more soldiers died from wounds than from disease,” Humphreys said during her lecture on the role malaria and yellow fever played during the Civil War. Read more…
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with Russ Williams
Thursday, March 11, 2010, 12:19 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Russ Williams from North Carolina Zoological Society and the Russlings blog to answer a few questions:
Megalodon and other sharks at Darwin Day
Saturday, February 13, 2010, 8:44 amLast night, braving horrible traffic on the way there, and snow on the way back, I made my way to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences for the Darwin Day shark lecture co-organized by NESCent and the sneak preview of the Megalodon exhibit which officially opens today.
RTP Weekahead 2/8
Sunday, February 7, 2010, 5:24 pmEvents taking place the week of Feb. 8 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public: Read more…
N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences: a jewel in The Triangle
Saturday, January 16, 2010, 7:02 am
NC Museum of Science whale skeletons. (Photo courtesy of NCMNS)
The decision to build Research Triangle Park was made about 230 million years ago in the Triassic period. At least, it was according to the director of exhibits at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. Roy Campbell, leading a tour of participants in the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, pointed to a satellite image of the state and swept his hand across a swath of green that ran from Asheboro northeast to RTP. “The soil here is just awful, you can’t farm it,” he said. “This is the Triassic Basin, it used to be the poorest part of the state.” He pointed to breaks in the green canopy of land cover, noting where RTP was located as well as Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State University. “Today there is a think-tank here, here, here and here,” he said pointing out each university. “And now this is the richest part of the state, and one of the richest areas of the nation.” Read more…
Hibernation devastation: White-nose syndrome and our bats
Thursday, December 10, 2009, 12:53 pm
Little brown bat showing characteristic fungus growth associated with WNS. (Credit: USGS)
A video camera pans the mouth of Aeolus Cave in Vermont. Limestone rock slabs angle downward into knee-deep snow pack. It zooms in on a handful of bats huddled in a crevice, then descends into the cave. Leaf litter is piled up in drifts on the cave floor. The camera zooms in, and suddenly you realize these are not leaves… they are bats: hundreds and hundreds of dead bats. The footage is all the sadder because this cave houses the largest colony of hibernating bats in the northeast.
This video clip, filmed by CBS news on a Nature Conservancy property last February, was shown at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences yesterday during a public lecture on white nose syndrome, an emerging pathogen affecting northeastern cave-hibernating bats. Lisa Gatens, curator of mammals at the museum spoke to colleagues, students and interested public about the documented occurrences of WNS and the extent of current research. Read more…
