NC State paleontologist Mary Schweitzer was on 60 Minutes on Sunday, in a story about her colleague Jack Horner. It’s a fascinating look at the work they’re doing on dinosaur bones and how it has shaken up their field.
The tricky thing about Schweitzer’s work is that she needs to get her hands on the insides of dinosaur bones, which means literally breaking the bones apart and sometimes dissolving pieces of them in acid. Most paleontologists won’t let her near their precious finds.
“Jack [Horner] is the only paleontologist out there who lets me dissolve his dinosaurs,” she told Stahl.
Tune in to 60 Minutes this Sunday. Lesley Stahl reports on Jack Horner, the Montana State University paleontologist, and the work he has done with NC State paleontologist Mary Schweitzer. She’s the researcher who has attracted attention for her discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils.
Physics professor Newton Underwood in the 1950s. He worked on the Manhattan Project and was one of a handful of faculty members who led the development of NC State's nuclear reactor, the first university nuclear reactor in the world. (Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, NCSU Libraries)
With all sorts of university-related organizations using Twitter, the popular microblogging site is a wealth of NC State news and info. We have our own feed to help keep you up to date on news from the blog and around campus. We’ve also compiled a list of other Twitter feeds from around campus. If we missed any, add them in the comments or e-mail them to alumniblog@gw.ncsu.edu.
Each summer (for the past 18 years) “Dr. Beach” releases his annual list of the Top 10 beaches in the U.S. and national news outlet such as The Los Angeles Times report on it. Who’s “Dr. Beach”? Stephen Leatherman ’70, a professor of environmental science at Florida International University. And how big of a deal is the list? Well, The Tampa Tribune claims it’s “to a sea-shore what the Oscar is to actors and movies.” This year top honors went to Hanalei Beach in Hawaii, and North Carolina’s own Cape Hatteras ranked seventh.
NC State magazine profiled Leatherman in our 2007 issue; in that story we explain how Leatherman became known as “Dr. Beach” and why The New York Times once described him as “Jimmy Buffett meets Carl Sagan.” A preview is below, and the rest of the profile is after the jump.
Even Oprah Winfrey envies Stephen Leatherman ’70. She called his job one of the world’s best when he appeared on her show in 1996. “Dr. Beach,” his nickname propagated by the likes of The New York Times, explains why.
The July issue of Wired magazine has a feature article on the controversy surrounding the work of NC State researcher Mary Schweitzer. She’s the paleontologist who in 2007, with colleagues, “announced in the journal Science that [they] had indeed uncovered seven preserved fragments of protein” in a sample of Tyrannosaurus rex femur. The story — “Origin of Species: How a T. Rex Femur Sparked a Scientific Smackdown” — is a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of scientific research and what happens when others reject your findings.
The discovery generated international headlines—”Study: Tyrannosaurus Rex Basically a Big Chicken” — as the first molecular confirmation of the long-theorized relationship between dinosaurs and birds. It was also the first-ever evidence that protein could survive even a million years, much less 68 million. The New York Times reported that the finding “opens the door for the first time to the exploration of molecular-level relationships of ancient, extinct animals.” Some news outlets couldn’t resist drawing parallels to a certain popular fictional tale. The research, suggested the UK Guardian, “also hints at the tantalizing prospect that scientists may one day be able to emulate Jurassic Park by cloning a dinosaur.”
Before long, however, a distinctly human subplot emerged. Within 16 months, three separate rebuttals appeared, two in Science itself. Many researchers were skeptical of the quality of Asara’s data and doubted that collagen could survive so long, even partially intact. “You’re talking about something a hundred times older than anything ever sequenced,” says Steven Salzberg, director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland. “If you have extraordinary results, they require extraordinary evidence.”
NC State researchers predict 2009 will be a “near-normal [Atlantic] hurricane season,” which begins today and runs through Nov. 30, with 11 to 14 named storms forming in the Atlantic Ocean.
Of those named storms, six to eight may grow strong enough to become hurricanes, and there is a 45 percent chance that one of those storms will make landfall along the coast of the southeastern United States as a hurricane. . . .The researchers expect two to four named storms to make landfall along the Gulf, and there is a 70 percent chance that at least one of those storms will be of hurricane status.
The predictions are based on the research of Lian Xie, professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, and his collaborators Montserrat Fuentes, professor of statistics, and Danny Modlin, a graduate student in statistics.
Matthew Parker, an associate professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, and a group of NC State graduate students are spending the next month in the Midwest studying tornadoes.
The scientists will roam from state to state following severe weather outbreaks through the plains, and the fleet will use an array of instrumentation to literally surround the tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that form them.
Parker’s team will form a four-vehicle portion of the caravan. The NC State researchers will launch weather balloons near tornadic thunderstorms in order to measure the vertical profiles of temperature, humidity and winds in the atmosphere.
They’re blogging, too, at Wolfpack in the Vortex. We’ll keep an eye out and share highlights here.
Update: The Weather Channel has some cool video of the team. Nice “Red Means Go” T-shirts.
Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer and a group of researchers report in a recent issue of Science magazine that they have found soft issue in an 80 million-year-old hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. Report of the find comes nearly four years after Schweitzer, an associate professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, led a team that recovered soft tissue from a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurs Rex. The News & Observerreports:
The new evidence not only undermines skeptics of Mary Schweitzer’s earlier work, but also may point the way to where more bones with such material may be found. That could help other scientists replicate the findings and investigate questions such as how such delicate material could last for such an extraordinary length of time.
NC State researchers predict 2009 will be a “
Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer and a group of researchers report in a recent issue of Science magazine that they have found soft issue in an 80 million-year-old hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur. 
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