Author Archive
N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences: a jewel in The Triangle
Saturday, January 16, 2010, 7:02 am 5 Comments | Post a Comment
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…
Fuels from the Sun
Thursday, January 14, 2010, 8:42 pm 1 Comment | Post a Comment
Photon waves. (Wiki Commons)
The search for clean energy technologies is sparking a renewed effort to create fuels from sunlight-driven chemical reactions. Solar fuel technologies exist today but chemists across the nation are trying to figure out how to increase the efficiency of the reactions and create the next generation of photovoltaics.
About 100 faculty, students and visiting scientists gathered at the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus on Thursday to discuss advances in solar fuels research.
The event, organized by the Solar Energy Research Center, drew speakers from Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. SERC itself is a consortium of UNC-CH, Duke, N.C. State University, N.C. Central University with RTI in Research Triangle Park. Read more…
Deep sea paradox: little food, tons of life
Wednesday, December 16, 2009, 7:31 pm 1 Comment | Post a CommentWhen Craig McClain was a young boy he dreamt of piloting the NASA space shuttle into unknown corners of the Milky Way. As an adult, he explores a different unknown — one that lies in an opposite direction from the space shuttle’s launch trajectory: the deep sea.
McClain is a marine biologist with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) in Durham, N.C. where he is associate director of science. He spends his days mulling over ecological and evolutionary conundrums of the deep, like why the nearly food-barren deep sea floor is riddled with pockets of biodiversity rivaling that of coral reefs and terrestrial rain forests. Read more…
Hibernation devastation: White-nose syndrome and our bats
Thursday, December 10, 2009, 12:53 pm 3 Comments | Post a Comment
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…
Acid ocean test looks to the past
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 10:03 pm 4 Comments | Post a Comment
UNC marine scientist Justin Ries holds two tropical pencil urchins grown under different seawater acidities. (Photo by Tom Kelindinst, WHOI)
Unlocking causes of past mass extinction events is a nifty – if not controversial – trick. But forecasting the future while also explaining the geologic past is even niftier. And that is just what a new study attempts to do by documenting experimental effects of ocean acidification upon shelled marine invertebrates.
The study, published Dec. 1 in Geology and led by a University of North Carolina scientist, reports a spectrum of positive to negative responses across seven major groups of calcifying marine organisms. It also offers supporting evidence for understanding patterns of past mass extinction — and survival — seen 251 million years ago at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Read more…
Tomorrow’s free energy vision
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 9:54 pm No Comments | Post a CommentEnergy woes are pervasive in the news and loom heavy in people’s minds these days. Even though grass-root supports exists for alternative energy development throughout the nation, significant and vast change is slow to gain inertia. So it was with interest and an open mind that I attended a lecture last Tuesday at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park where Alex Huang, director of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems (FREEDM Systems), discussed what his group was working on to mitigate what he called “the looming energy crisis.” Read more…
Projectile weapons and carnivores
Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 2:50 pm 2 Comments | Post a CommentOn Tuesday, October 20, Duke University paleontologist Steven Churchill gave a talk at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park about how projectile weapons literally changed the trajectory of human evolution — and caused the extinction of Europe’s large carnivore guild. Churchill views projectile weapons of all kinds as “potent tools of persuasion” that can be used for both social control and social disruption. In his view, modern weapons like guns are more than objects that a person wields, they are social tools that can be used either to bully others or to control and persuade people. If you accept his assertion, try carrying this idea with you back in time — way back to Pleistocene Europe between 60 and 15 thousand years ago.
Urban farming grows food and nourishes minds, social justice
Tuesday, November 10, 2009, 4:42 am No Comments | Post a CommentInner-city “concrete jungles” are starting to look more like real jungles thanks to urban farms. Under the tutelage of former Miami Hurricanes basketball star Will Allen, a growing cadre of city-farmers are growing their own food on rooftops, next to industrial railroads, on old baseball fields and even on abandoned concrete pads in downtown Chicago.
Lovin’ the Numbers
Thursday, November 5, 2009, 8:56 am No Comments | Post a CommentAfter a few minutes of listening to Amory B. Lovins you see that, at heart, he’s a numbers guy. He even counts the fruit yield from tropical trees growing inside his energy efficient greenhouse-warmth-capturing home in Colorado, and he fondly refers to the current batch as “banana crop number 32.”
Lovins is not your run-of-the-mill environmentalist. Far from it. He is a physicist who harbors a vision for lowering global greenhouse gas emissions by 3 to 4 percent annually — without government subsidies or policies — and he has a lengthy performance record of creating profits from sustainable business solutions that eviscerate conventional wisdom.
