Today I talk to Kari Wouk, Senior Manager of Presentations and Partnerships at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I live in Durham, NC and work at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh, NC. Philosophically, I believe that educating the public on science, and specifically the natural sciences, is the best way to make our world a better place. Educated people make the right decisions, whether to not kill a snake in their yard, or to go to school to become the next groundbreaking scientific researcher.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

After college, I traveled and worked day-to-day jobs, finally settling in the non-profit world. Working in the Museum has been my first “career” job. I have worked on many interesting projects. I was an AmeriCorps VISTA with Habitat for Humanity International and coordinated a initiative called Youth United, where youth fundraise and build a Habitat home. I worked for a computational science education non-profit and was the volunteer coordinator for a free clinic.

Most recently, I’ve worked with educational events at the Museum. I coordinate about 12 educational events per year – the largest, BugFest, gets 35,000 visitors. Right now, concurrent with BugFest planning, I am working with a team to plan the 24-Hour Opening for the Museum’s new wing, the Nature Research Center (NRC).

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

The Museum’s regularly-scheduled events are still happening, in addition to the 24-Hour Opening, where we expect 80,000 visitors over the 24 hours. Most of my time and passion are devoted to these two projects! Additionally, I am working with many outside partners to leverage their expertise to reach a broader audience. Many researchers find that working with the Museum, and the Museum’s excellence in education, helps them achieve their goals of broader impact. These projects are fun and sort of like a puzzle – I get to figure out where their project will fit best with the Museum’s many different programs and then I bring everyone together to brainstorm and make an action plan.

One goal is to continue the Museum’s excellent educational events and to add more with the opening of the NRC. The NRC’s focus is research and is tackling topics (microbiology, genetics, astronomy, technology) that the current Museum does not, which is very exciting and full of possibilities!

I am also striving to refine the process of partnering with outside organizations so that Museum staff is not taxed and the end product is of superior quality. Also, I would like to have science communication training so that researchers can, effectively, communicate directly with the public.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I would love for scientists to be able to communicate directly with the public without boring them or being too technical. When done effectively, the scientist’s passion is communicated and the audience gets excited and inspired. As important as science communicators are, there is nothing like talking one-on-one with the person doing the research.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and others? How do you intergrate all of your online activity into a coherent whole? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Uh oh! Blogging does not figure into my work, unless I’m doing research for interesting topics to add to an event. I use Twitter and Facebook (well, our webmaster does) to advertise our events. I definitely feel that Facebook is a positive but not really a necessity. However, for the Museum as a whole, I DO feel that Facebook is a necessity. I’m still unsure about Twitter. Sorry!

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I truly wish I had the time to read ALL the science blogs! You sent out that list recently and I read a couple and want to read them all, but then that’s all I would do! I am not very familiar with any of them.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2011 for you? Any suggestions for next year?

I really enjoyed meeting all the participants last year. I am so new to this field of “science online” and am just feeling my way around. Next year, I would like to see more offerings targeted to educators and researchers. Hopefully, the Museum can help with this for 2012.

Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, or to your science reading and writing?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I discovered the world of science blogging at the Conference. This is a fun and useful reference for all aspects of my job. It’s such an interesting world of communication that I had never exploited before.

Thank you so much for doing this, and I hope to see you soon down at the Museum, as well as at ScienceOnline2012 in January.

Cross-posted from A Blog Around The Clock.

Rosemary and Peter Grant during a reception in their honor at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences

Peter and Rosemary Grant, husband-and-wife evolutionary biologists at Princeton University, have written about a medium ground finch that is heavier, has a broader beak and sings a different song than its closest relative.

The Grants have documented the emergence of this medium ground finch lineage since 1981, when they caught what they believe was an immigrant bird on Daphne Major, a tiny Galapagos island where they’ve measured, weighed and tagged ground finches several months every year since 1973.

The new lineage, which nobody has dared to call a new species yet, has been molded by droughts, above average rainfall and competition for food – factors that also affected other finches living on Daphne Major.

“In the 2000s, the birds are not the same as the ones that were on the island when we started,” Peter Grand told a crowd of more than 200 who had come to his and his wife’s presentation April 11 at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

That evolution can happen as researchers watch was unexpected. That the Grants documented the making of what might be a new species in 20 years has turned them into legends.Their research has won multiple awards and is featured prominently in biology textbooks and one Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.

The couple’s visit to North Carolina’s Research Triangle was the result of a collaboration of the museum, N.C. State University and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center.

Thirteen species of ground finches live on the Galapagos archipelago, a cluster of more than a dozen islands located in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles west of Equador. They are plain birds with brown, gray or black plumage that have been famous since they helped Darwin develop the theory of evolution.

Darwin's finches

All descend from one species that lived on the South American mainland.

The smallest finch species on the Galapagos Islands weighs about one-fourth of the largest species and each species has developed a specific beak to eat a special diet.

The Warbler finch has a slender beak to probe for insects. Ground finches have broad beaks to crush seeds of various sizes. Cactus finches have long, curved beaks to probe flowers for nectar. The large tree finch has a powerful, curved beak to strip bark and extract insects and termites.

The diet has a lot to do with where a species lives. The medium tree finch, for example, can only be found on Floreana Island. The common cactus finch lives on all but the five Galapagos Islands that are inhabited by the large cactus finch.

Daphne Major is home to four species, the Grants reported. The couple caught small, medium and large ground finches and cactus finches, including some that had immigrated from neighboring islands.

The males of each species sing a different song, which male and female birds learn as nestlings listening to their fathers. Males and females of a species recognize each other by that song. Interbreeding can occur, Rosemary Grant said, for example, when the fatherly lesson gets garbled because the nest is close to the nest of another species in the same cactus bush.

Immigrant hybrid male the Grants caught in 1981. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

In 1981, the Grants caught a medium ground finch immigrant whose plumage was particularly glossy and black. The male bird was about 20 percent bigger than the biggest medium ground finch captured on Daphne Major and had a wider beak. It also sang an unusual song and a blood test determined that it carried cactus finch genes.

The immigrant hybrid male mated with a female hybrid that also carried genes of both species. Three generations of offspring – finches live up to 16 years – bred with local medium ground finches and other hybrids.

Then, all but two of the birds in the lineage died during a severe drought in 2003 and 2004. The remaining two birds, a sister and a brother, mated and their offspring has mated, but only with each other.

This has led to two distinct groups of medium ground finches on Daphne Major that do not mix, the Grants reported. They differ in weight, beak shape and song and breed in two different areas on the island.

(More in the Grants’ inaugural article in the 2009 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.)

Cover of the Adventures Among Ants, by Dr. Mark W. Moffett.

Not many scientists beg perfect strangers to eat the species they study. But that’s just what “Doctor Bugs” did when visiting tourist-magnet ruins in Cambodia. Dr. Mark W. Moffett proffered a dish of scrumptious crackers topped with herbs and, um, plump ant larvae to passersby — at times literally pleading with them to try it. It’s just one of the ways the world-famed ecologist, and Smithsonian Institution research associate, gets people to stop and notice the trillions of ants that share our world.

Moffett’s comedic showman personality was on display in full force on Tuesday night as he entertained an auditorium full of people at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences with stories about ants. And boy does he have stories. There’s the time he snaked a small camera attached to a long cable into a nest of weaver ants, capturing engaging footage of the ants at work… the camera pushed farther and farther past hundreds of ants, until ants swarmed the other end of the cable and overran him. The footage ended abruptly with audio of Moffett yelping in pain. Then there’s the time he stepped barefoot on a pair of ant forceps in his camp and spent the day worrying he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake, a fair concern considering there was a nest within a foot of his hammock. And let’s not forget the time he actually did sit on the world’s most poisonous snake in South America, too engrossed with photographing ants to notice.”If you must sit on a poisonous snake, sit closest to their head,” Moffett deadpanned to the crowd. “It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

National Geographic cartoon of Moffet squatting on a pit viper.

More often, Moffett’s stories are about the ants themselves — their diverse ways of sensing the world, interacting, and divvying up labor to achieve survival goals efficiently. Moffett’s high-energy slide show was centered around promoting his new book, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With a Cast of Trillions, published by the University of California Press.

“Ants differ from us in that the individual doesn’t matter, it’s all about what’s good for the group,” Moffett said. But they’re colonies are a lot like our cities, he went on to explain, drawing analogies between small cities/small ant colonies and large cities/large ant colonies. In smaller colonies, where there is less specialization of labor, each ant has to be a jack-of-all-trades and perform a variety of tasks.”They have their toolboxes built-in to their faces,” Moffett said, flashing a picture of a type of trap-jaw ant with extra long pitch-fork tipped jaws. It uses the long levers to pick up struggling prey and carry it safely back to the nest. But a much smaller, second pair of jaws tucked closer to its mouth allows it to eat.

Larger colonies, like our larger cities, tend to have more job specialization, Moffett said. Scientists can often tell what role they play by their size. Sometimes the largest ants of the same species outweigh the smallest ones by 500 times. The goliath ants are often used to deliver the death blow (a sting, or a bite) in battles with other ants or interlopers, and even act as “school busses,” allowing smaller ants in their colony to hitch rides. “Basically, it’s more energy efficient for the colony if the smaller ants ride on the bigger ants,” Moffett explained.

Leaf cutter ants cooperate to bring leaf fragments to their underground nests, where "gardener" ants cultivate a fungus upon the decaying vegetation. The colony harvests and eats the fungus. (Photo by Dr. Mark W. Moffett)

He also talked about various ways that ants work together, like the free-diving ants in Borneo that live in pitcher plants. They fetch crickets out of the water pooling in a pitcher’s basin, then haul it to the lip of the pitcher where they stash it and have a feast. The crickets are often too large for the pitcher plants to digest, he explained, so the ants are doing the plant a favor by saving it from experiencing an overdose of acid as the cricket decays. “They’re basically antacids for the plant,” Moffett joked.”But they also must have the strongest toes in the world to carry these large crickets up the slope of the pitcher plant, which is made so that insects will fall into its trap.” Ants also form chains to create living bridges that they use to cross from one tree to another high amid the canopies of rainforest trees, hundreds of feet from the forest floor. And some ants will sacrifice themselves to fill “pot holes” along highways the colony uses to move things to and from their nest. Then there are the leaf cutter ants, which divvy up leaf harvesting and fungus cultivating duties like nobody’s business (see photo at right).

Moffett’s photographs have been widely published and he often contributes work to National Geographic magazine. He searches for images that tell a story within their frames, he said, like the one he took of a battle between two ant species that shows a Goliath ant fending off attacks from smaller ants, with the carnage of warfare in the background: headless ants frozen mid-stride, and ants with their torso’s chopped in two and legs torn asunder. He encouraged the kids in the audience to “not lose that weird point of view you have when young,” because it can be valuable to being a scientist. He credits his own path to biology and entomology with reading too many Jane Goodall adventure books when younger, and climbing too many trees.

Moffett’s talk deftly distilled insights about ant ecology and social interactions into anecdotes that enthralled kids and adults like me who are in touch with their inner kids. If you missed his talk, you did miss out — but don’t sweat it, you can always order the book.

MORE MOFFET, LINKS:
Moffett on NPR’s Fresh Air; June 17, 2010
The hidden world of ants, Smithsonian Magazine; July 2009

The second session, much more un-conference in style, was a panel “Old Media in a New Media World” with Scott Huler, Misha Angrist and Patric Lane. After lunch, the tone became more somber, talking about money, as Sabine Vollmer and Robert Panoff showed us the data – some of it grim, some very encouraging – in their session “Science and Society: The Business Side of Research in the Triangle”.

Finally, the meeting ended with a completely uncoference-style session (moderated by me, with help from Anton Zuiker): after discussing what topics were of interest to all the attendees, we all set in a circle and discussed blogging, state of science journalism, pros and cons of social media, definitions of what counts as “interactive” in education and museum exhibits, and the difficulties of writing brief text plates for museum exhibits.

The main take-home message from the meeting is how fortunate we are in North Carolina, where science, technology and media meet. With the UNC system and numerous state and private organizations devoted to scientific research, education, reporting and outreach, North Carolina – and especially the Triangle area – is at the forefront not just in research but also in new endeavors in communicating that research to local and global residents.

With the foundation of the Research Triangle Park 50 years ago, the region was provided with a structure not just for supporting academic research, but also for industrial research, technological development (including in communications) and the improved communication and collaboration between science and technology institutions in the area.

With technology companies, like IBM, making their home in the Park, it is also not surprising that the state is a home to pioneers in the use of online technologies in communication, including some of the earliest bloggers in history, and other innovators in the field. Triangle Tweetups attract several hundred attendees every three months. Science Cafes in Raleigh and Durham are monthly affairs that are always packed. Events like Ignite, Pecha Kucha and TEDx are now a regular part of the local scene.

Both online and offline science communication has really taken off in the state over the past few years. In addition to the old stalwarts, like American Scientist, the excellent popular science magazine published by Sigma Xi, located smack in the middle of the RTP, there are all sorts of new endeavors. The members of SCONC are busy building all kinds of new communications channels.

There is, of course, the site you are on right now – Science In The Triangle – the hub of local science and technology news. Several months ago, The Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer started producing a collaborative Science/Technology page on Mondays, often featuring interviews with science bloggers. Radio in Vivo is the local science radio program. The first ever blog carnival was invented in Chapel Hill, NC. ScienceOnline is an internationally renowned annual conference (now preparing for its fifth meeting next January, in RTP) on science and the Web. The North Carolina Science Festival and The Triangle Science Festival are in the making. The Open Laboratory, annual anthology of best writing on science blogs is produced in the Triangle and published by Triangle-based Lulu.com. ResearchBlogging.org, the aggregator of blog posts covering peer-reviewed research, was conceived in Davidson, NC. Those are just some of the most notable examples – there are many more.

Last week, another such project was unveiled – Scienceblogging.org. It is an aggregator of notable feeds from science blogs, aggregators and services. Just like general media watchers use services like JournalismNews, Memeorandum and Mediagazer, we felt a service like that is needed for watchers of science news.

It is not meant to be comprehensive (that is impossible), nor does it try to decide which blogs are “better” than others, but is designed as a good one-stop-shopping place where a busy journalist can, in a couple of minutes, glean what is new in the world of science, i.e., what has percolated up from the blogging community to a number of such sites and networks. The site contains the feeds for all the major science blogging networks, some of the media-hosted science blogs, and a few aggregators and news services. Interesting stuff from the thousands of independent blogs also shows up on the page, e.g., in the feeds for ResearchBlogging.org, Blog Carnivals, and several group-feeds of independent bloggers. More such combined blog feeds (as well as Twitter and Flickr feeds, etc.) are in the making for the future. The site is in Beta – it started with what was easy to gather and include – but we are asking the community to help with suggestions, technical know-how and whatever they are willing to do to help the site evolve over time into something that is useful both for the media and for other users. Read the posts on the site’s blog for updates, and post comments with your own suggestions or offers to help.

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.

Before the onset of modern medicine, infectious diseases had much influence on daily life, even during peaceful times. But it was during war, when food was scarce, sanitation was non-existent and many soldiers lived in close quarters away from home, that diseases brought on by viruses and parasites flourished.

The Bubonic plague ravaged parts of Europe during the Thirty Years War. Smallpox was a problem during the American Revolution. Typhus fever crippled Napoleon’s army. Yellow fever and malaria contributed to twice as many soldiers dying from disease than from wounds during the Civil War, Humphreys said, but malaria was of particular importance to the outcome of the war.

For much of the 1800s, Americans suspected bad smells had something to do with disease. They knew disinfectants made the odors go away and people who were exposed to them and didn’t die could become less vulnerable. But not until the 1880s did Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, raise the idea that microorganisms, or germs, existed and spread disease. It would take another two decades before mosquitos were identified as carriers of yellow fever and malaria.

Until then, “they don’t know about the mosquito,” said Humphreys. “Think poisonous air and bad smells” – and lots of them.

The first yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia in 1793 and several more followed in ports along the East and Gulf coasts during the next century. In 1862, an outbreak in Wilmington sickened about one-third of the town and killed 446 of the town’s 5,000 residents.

Yellow fever was feared, Humphreys said. About half of the severe cases ended in quick deaths from liver and kidney failure.

In 1864, Luke Blackburn, a physician and supporter of the Confederacy who would later become governor of Kentucky, tried to use dirty shirts and sheets from yellow fever patients in Bermuda in one of the earliest known cases of biological warfare. He packed the sheets and shirts in trunks with the intent to have them delivered to Northern cities, including one bound for President Lincoln’s White House.

There’s no record the trunks reached their destinations and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Even though Blackburn had much experience treating yellow fever in the American South, he had no idea the virus didn’t spread through personal contact.

Library of Congress map showing prevalence of malaria in 1870s.

Yellow fever traveled on ships and mostly affected U.S. ports. Malaria came aboard European immigrants and African slaves and was widespread. A mild version, called vivax malaria, came from Europe and affected even areas with temperate climate. The more severe and deadly version, called  falciparum malaria, came from Africa and required the warm and humid climate of the American South.

During the Civil War, malaria raged in coastal North Carolina, the South Carolina Sea Islands, the Mississippi delta and on the James River peninsula in Virginia.

The combination of yellow fever outbreaks and falciparum malaria made the southern lowlands so dangerous, Confederates considered the diseases their secret weapons, Humphreys said. Southerners believed that “when the Yankees come down here, our very land will throw them out.”

But Union troops had two advantages that made a difference, particularly in battling malaria: Up to 10 percent were African-American and had at least partial immunity and the North had unrestricted access to quinine, a medicine that was regularly dispensed.

The blockade of Confederate sea ports limited the South’s access to quinine, especially after 1864, Humphreys said. Southern women smuggled the medicine in their hoop skirts and the South developed an alternative made from willow, poplar and dogwood bark and whiskey. But the “Southern quinine” didn’t work.

Also, the North brought along its own diseases, such as smallpox and measles, she said. And in the end, the Union suffered fewer deaths from disease than the Confederacy.

Today, I asked Russ Williams from North Carolina Zoological Society and the Russlings blog to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m an English major from Northeastern Pennsylvania who works at the North Carolina Zoo (24 years executive director, N.C. Zoological Society). I try to stay somewhat current, despite my age (north of 60). For example, I am listening these days to music by Death Cab for Cutie, Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips, Radiohead and Pole Cat Creek, along with the oldies (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Hank [and Lucinda] Williams, Coltrane and Bach).

Started personally blogging about zoo animals and issues about five years ago. (Took an intro course in blogging at UNC-Greensboro by G’boro blogfather Ed Cone (Word Up). Found I was learning much from Google searches, and then by following the blogs and tweets of certain science journalists and bloggers, conservation researchers, etc. (The blogs and tweets of Wild Muse/@tdelene and you, BoraZ, are favorite sources.) Flickr and YouTube have provided much for my blogs and tweets too.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Had no idea I’d work for a Zoo. (Even named a son Noah; would never do that to someone by plan!) Growing up, I knew I would have a career in advertising, like my father. Did do some retail advertising (broadcast and newspaper) after graduation – early 1970′s. Didn’t like it. Backpacked in Europe for two months. Returned to work with weekly newspapers. This led to public relations/communications for non-profits. This led to fund raising. This led to North Carolina (United Way in Winston-Salem, 1980-85). This led to the NC Zoo Society – 1985-now.

Result: accidental zoology tinkerer.

What does it mean to be the Director of the NC Zoological Society? What does the job entail?

Always remember that I have about 100,000 bosses, in about 27,000 NC Zoo Society member households. Our staff tries to provide excellent customer service to our members and to be their “champions” when it comes to getting a good return on their investments in the Zoo in general or a very specific program, like Field Trip Earth (recognized as a Landmark website by the American Association of School Librarians – one of 21, including Google Earth, Library of Congress, NASA and Smithsonian Education).

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Proud of my small role in how the NC Zoo and Zoo Society have grown and the creation of both Field Trip Earth (our educational website featuring journals and other media offered by conservation researchers around the world) and Sylvan Heights Waterfowl Park (the largest such gathering, offering and breeding of rare and endangered ducks, geese and swans in the world).

Really enjoy helping folks accomplish what they want to accomplish for the future of the NC Zoo through “The Lions Pride“, a grouping of people who have made planned arrangements for their Zoo, mainly through wills.

Capital campaigns, like Project: Pachyderms (African elephants and southern white rhinos) and Project: Polar Bears also meet my need to attain goals requiring some considerable preparation and effort. (I’ve also plodded through a few full, running marathons and to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, at 55).

NC Zoo has something else unique about it – the Zoo School! Can you tell us more about it?

A “magnet” Asheboro City high school, the Zoo School is right on site here. It uses the Zoo as a teaching tool not just to study biology and geography, but for all learning, making use of the Zoo for English composition and communications, mathematics, business and many other studies.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you?

Appreciate your prodding, Bora, to demonstrate Field Trip Earth at ScienceOnline2010. The Charlotte Observer science editor attended our demonstration and the result was an 85-column-inch article in both the Observer and Raleigh News & Observer by T. DeLene Beeland, whose Wild Muse blog and tweets were already favorites of mine, introduced by your RTs, Bora. I want to take in more of the sessions the next time. Only got to one session (other than our own series of demos) and it was exceptional.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I’ll see you at the Zoo soon….and at ScienceOnline2011, of course!

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I have to say that the trip was very much worth making – the exhibit is excellent! I like the way the exhibit is making good use of the space – so many exhibits feel cluttered and an all-out assault on all of one’s senses. Upon entering the room, it looks quite sparse. Yet, once I started going around I saw how much it actually covers, how well organized the exhibit layout is, how much information (including a lot of new-to-me information) is included and presented so very clearly and tastefully, and how much it has something for everyone independent of age, background or interest. And of course – the fossils! Absolutely amazing and stunning fossils! From the magnificent Megalodon jaws, to some of the strangest teeth arrangements one has ever seen in any jaw of any animal.

Then, exhausted and a little faintly from the lack of food yesterday (yes, it was a busy day), I entered the lecture hall afraid I’d fall asleep or pass out in the middle of the talk. I need not have worried – Adam Summers is an amazing speaker. I was able not just to pay attention throughout, I was excited throughout the talk. For a jaded biologist and blogger, when many public lectures tend to present stuff already well known to me, it was refreshing to keep learning new stuff every couple of minutes or so. And not just new factoids, but new questions and new ways of thinking about them – why are sharks larger than bony fish, why sharks have no bone, how do sharks swim, how do sharks and bony fish manage to swim very fast, etc. Questions I never asked myself before.

There were things in there that are outside my realm of expertise, for which I am essentially a layman: engineering principles, a formula I am unfamiliar with, a couple of graphs….yet all of that was made very clear on an intuitive level. How? Because Adam is really good at using analogies (“think of this as…”) and metaphors (snuck into the description without any warning). Be it water-filters, armor, stacks of coins, or houses made of sponges, it all becomes vivid and immediately makes sense.

It is also obvious that a lot of research went into this, yet very few actual data were shown – only the key data that are essential to make the point. This is a public lecture – there is no need to drown the audience in gazillions of graphs and discussions of statistics. The slides, including the images and brief video clips were both beautiful and essential for grasping the point he is making. And then there was quite a lot of humor, mainly of the self-deprecating kind making fun of himself and his students in the context of scientist stereotypes – how they look, talk, think and behave.

All in all – well done. Who ever said that scientists don’t know how to communicate to lay audience, eh?

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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.”

Poor soil was only part of the story that Campbell shared with his tour guests. Practically running between destinations, Campbell led an enthusiastic tour of the museum’s exhibits, and its collection holdings which are typically not open to the public. He breathlessly rattled off facts about the state’s natural resources and pointed out his favorite details in the four levels of displays and dioramas. On the first floor, nestled below the suspended skeletons of a sperm whale, a humpback whale and a manatee — Campbell’s favorite critter is a small shrimp, a few inches long, that vomits bioluminescent material to escape predatory fish. He walked the tour through explanations of sand dune progression, how sea level rise will affect the Outer Banks, and the stories behind how the museum collected each whale skeleton. “This one still drips oil now and then,” he said, pointing up to a blue whale skeleton whose bones alone are estimated to weigh three tons, with the head alone weighing one ton (alive and with flesh, it would have weighed more).

As the tour progressed up through the museum’s exhibit levels, Campbell shared factoids about the state: N.C. has the greatest diversity of salamanders and fungus in the world; it contains the oldest river in North America, ironically named the New River; dinosaur fossils could be found here, excavated from quarries where the dense overburden was removed; N.C. has the highest mountain on the East coast, Mt. Mitchell, and it’s the state with the most number of peaks greater than 6,000 feet. The tour group peered at a siren salamander that breathes through gills, and a hellbender that breathes through vascularized tissue folds running the length of its torso. They looked into a longleaf pine forest exhibit with giant fox squirrels, a flashback to the pine savannas that used to stretch from the East coast to Texas. And they walked through displays of dinosaurs, proto-reptiles and proto-mammals — all creatures that used to live in what we call N.C. today. Campbell’s knowledge of the scientific details embedded in the exhibits was immense.

In an age when most people don’t come into contact with the out-of-doors as often as they do cyberspace, this museum is a jewel in The Triangle because it’s not only a repository for a catalogue of the state’s natural resources, but because it does such a good job of telling the story of these resources to visitors. The exhibits are engaging and utilize enough live animals to bring out the curious kid in most adults.

But perhaps the best part of the tour, at least to me, was the portion that wound through the collections in the basement. Forgive me for reminiscing here, but I used to be a staff science writer at a large southeastern natural history museum, and I knew from my past work that some of the best science stories come from museum collections and the scientists who maintain them.

Ornithologist Becky Desjardins led the group through the birds collection, popping out drawer after drawer of specimens. Kestrels, perregrine falcons and hummingbirds, she had a story about each species. Mammalogist Lisa Gatens walked the group through  the mammals range, passing around paper-thin hoary bat skulls, jumping mice skins, an articulated mole skelton and pointing out a whale skeleton. She systematically showed the group the humerus, radius and ulna of each species, imparting a lesson in comparative anatomy. The tour ended with a trip to the paleontology lab where scientists knock dirt and rock matrix off of fossils with air drills, dental tools and an array of other tools to expose treasures from the past.

It seemed fitting to end the tour in the paleontology lab. Afterall, it’s here that scientists peer into the fossil record of the Triassic. And it was in the Triassic, after all, that the decision was made to make Research Triangle Park.

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FUTURE EXPANSION, NATURE RESEARCH CENTER:
The museum is building an expansion, an 80,000 square foot Nature Research Center. The new building will house collections and lab spaces, and will be designed to allow visitors visual access to the scientific processes that are usually hidden from view in traditional museums. By bringing scientific research to the forefront of it’s exhibits, the center will function to communicate not just scientific findings, but how researchers come to know what they know. Read more, and see a rendering of the new facility here.

IF YOU GO:
If you’re a ScienceOnline 2010 participant, and you have a few hours to kill, I highly recommend visiting this museum. You can find visitor information here. Give yourself at least two hours to tour all four floors of exhibits. You needn’t bring snacks, there is a cafe on the fourth floor. Make sure to visit the whale skeletons, the coastal plains, the mountains-to-sea ecosystems, and the pre-historic N.C. sections, including the acrocanthosaurus – the only skeleton of this proto-T-rex species on exhibit in the U.S.

{Correction: an earlier version of this post erroneously stated that NC has the “greatest density of salamanders” instead of the “greatest diversity.” It is now corrected.}