Shawn Fitzmaurice

Scientists are often not the greatest communicators, so most often, to bring science to the public requires one or more forms of art. But who teaches the artists, whose job it is to captivate you, about Science?

Some of the great scientific theories unify our knowledge and have fundamentally changed the way we look at the world. Heliocentrism, for example, is the theory that the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. Though the community soundly rejected it at one time, it best explained the motions of objects in the sky. In […]

You’re made of atoms. The fact that you’re not all hydrogen means that your home star (in your case, the Sun), is made from recycled material. In fact, the Sun is made from atoms that have come into being over several star’s lifecycles; Star is born, star manufactures new and different atoms in its core, […]

If your papa was actually a rolling stone, his whereabouts would be predictable. If a boulder and a small rock are rolled down a hill together, logic, instinct, and all the insight you have will tell you that the boulder will travel further than the stone. What you might not have realized is that both […]

Humans aren’t the only members of the animal kingdom that work hard to impress and attract a mate. Often, guys battle it out in front of a desirable girl – hissing, flapping, ramming each other with horns. When the competition is over, the girl either accepts or rejects the boy. In this episode of Sciworks […]

In this episode of Sciworks Radio, Shawn spoke with Dr. Courtney Fitzpatrick, former postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a co-author of a paper in the journal Evolution investigating the purpose of female animal beauty. And it’s not as straightforward as you might expect. Male animals are often more “attractive” than their female counterparts – […]

Crocodiles and their ancestors were around a hundred million years before the dinosaurs. One of the largest of the early crocodile family was discovered right here in North Carolina. It has been investigated and described by Dr. Lindsay Zanno, Director of the Paleontology and Geology lab at the Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, and […]

Dinosaurs are still here, and they’re an incredibly successful species. Ok, what about the fact that earth was hit by an asteroid 65 million years ago, resulting in the extinction of the dinosaurs? Three decades of evidence have forced us to re-think the story: Sixty-five million years ago, an astroid collided with Earth, resulting in […]

Winner of the National Science Foundations’s Science 360 Best Science Podcast Award, 2014. The Galapagos islands are famous for their association with Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution by natural selection. But the islands also have species who live there, but did not evolve there; Blue-Footed Boobies for example. Interestingly, they might be relying […]

Yes, we’re still discovering new dinosaurs! In this podcast, learnabout a new dinosaur discovered by paleontologist Doctor Lindsay Zanno of the  Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina. A predator, carnivore, 2-legged animal, Siats Meekerorum may have looked and behaved a lot like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but it lived in a much earlier time […]