sciworks

February 12th is Darwin Day, an international, annual celebration commemorating the birthday of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist and geologist made famous for his theory of evolution by natural selection. We've all heard of Darwin, but what do we know about him?

www.wfdd.org/story/virus-kills-cancerA team of biomedical engineers, including Duke University Pratt School of Engineering's Dean, Dr. Ravi Bellamkonda, has programmed Salmonella bacteria to seek and destroy brain cancer.

Most of us with brains understand that our body is controlled by the noodle in our noggin. Through the sciences, we know how the heart works to pump blood and how our digestive system processes food. But we still don't understand, on many basic levels, how the brain itself works.

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.As in many…

Recently, Drs. Lindsay Zanno and Victoria Arbour took a brief scouting expedition to New Mexico, looking for dinosaur fossils exposed at the surface of 90-million-year-old rock. Only three North American dinosaur species have been identified from this time period. They want to find more.

Rock, once a seafloor of mud, sand, and pebbles, towers into the sky, only to erode away, becoming a new and different seafloor, layered like pages in a book.Appalachian State University's Dr. Ellen Cowan reads these pages, most recently off the coast of Alaska. They tell the full story of geological changes on the continent, as written by glaciers over millions of years.

How can you tell the age of a turtle? This is an important question, especially when it concerns the critically endangered Hawaiian hawksbill turtle. The answer is the bomb!

What is keeping a genetically altered super-villain bug from escaping Duke University's synthetic biology labs, and destroying humanity Holloywood-style? A Duke University scientist has engineered genetically altered “swarmbots” that can only survive in a swarm of their own kind. And that's just the start of it all.

As a parent, I can tell you that naming a child can be a drawn-out exercise in creativity and diplomacy. So with that said, why does my mom still call me by my aunt's name? I always took this as a character flaw. But recently, when I called my 6-year-old son for dinner - using the dog's name - I concluded that this must be science! And it seems I was right.

As one of 10 finalists in the National Science Foundation's Community College Innovation Challenge, this team of students from Forsyth Tech is developing cost-efficient energy sources through the use of nanotechnology.