In just over a week, the new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences opens with a 24-hour kick off party. The new wing, called the Nature Research Center, will be a one-of-a-kind, 80,000 square-foot building in downtown Raleigh, where research scientists can work in public view and hopefully inspire science educators and students, all led by the Center’s director, Dr. Meg Lowman.

While the current Museum of Natural Sciences does a great job of teaching visitors what scientist know, the goal of the new wing will be to answer the question, “How Do We Know?” The Museum has come up with some unique examples of this new research into figuring out how we know what we know. Below are a few examples (and for more, visit the Nature Research Center website).

Dinosaurs Taste Like Chicken

“Some of the world’s leading paleontologists are attempting to recreate a dinosaur — or something a lot like a dinosaur — by starting with a chicken embryo and working backward to engineer a “chickenosaurus” or “dinochicken,” project leader Jack Horner told Discovery News. Such “reverse evolution” has been successfully performed in mice and flies, but those studies focused on re-introducing just a few bygone traits. The dinochicken project instead has the goal of bringing back multiple dinosaur characteristics, such as a tail, teeth and forearms, by changing the levels of regulatory proteins that have evolved to suppress these characteristics in birds. “Birds are dinosaurs, so technically we’re making a dinosaur out of a dinosaur,” said Horner, a professor of paleontology at Montana State University and curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies.”

Excerpt from “‘Dinochicken’ Scheme Puts Evolution in Reverse” by Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News.

One Fourth of All Animals are Beetles

Beetles are the dominant form of life on earth: one of every five living species is a beetle, and one fourth of all animal species are beetles. Coleoptera is the largest order in the animal kingdom, containing a third of all insect species. Aristotle described beetles as insects with wing cases, thus Coleoptera, from the Greek koleon “sheath” and pteron “wing.”  There are about 300,000 known species of beetles worldwide, 30,000 of which live in North America. Various species live in nearly every habitat except the open sea, and for every kind of food, there’s probably a beetle species that eats it. Beetles first appeared during the lower Permian period, about 240 million years ago.

Spider Silk is 5 Times Stronger Than Steel

Spider silk may seem fragile, but it actually has a tensile strength that is a whopping five times more than steel! Scientists have been trying to replicate and harness the properties of the elusive material for years and now researchers from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the University of Bayreuth have actually unlocked the secret of how spiders construct the elastic fibers. Armed with this new knowledge, they’re planning to build an artificial spinning apparatus that will mimic a spider’s silk glands, which could eventually lead to a material that could have an unlimited number of applications from medical to construction.

Interesting, huh? Be sure to check out the Nature Research Center website for even more “How Do We Know?” facts and information on the new wing of the museum. If you’re planning on heading to Raleigh for the 24-hour party next week or are coming in the next few months, be sure to check out Raleigh’s New World for details, plus tons of great deals on hotels, restaurants, and things to do in town.

All information in the blog post was provided courtesy of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Join us for the much-anticipated opening of the [1] new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh. Lifelong learners can spend part of the day soaking up all the science and technology they want to, then continue learning at these other great mind-stretching options in Greater Raleigh.

Home tours at [2] Mordecai Historic Park and the [3] Joel Lane Museum House are led by costumed docents.

Head over to the official [4] Visitor Information Center, located in the corridor between the [5] Raleigh Convention Center and the [6] Raleigh Marriott City Center, a good place to grab a few brochures, an [7] Official Visitors Guide with more information for Lifelong Learners.

Move to the [8] Raleigh City Museum in the historic Briggs Hardware building and view special shows that bring the area’s history to life.

Make an appointment to tour the [9] N.C. Executive Mansion, the private residence of the Governor of North Carolina.

Cross the road and stroll down the tree-lined streets of [10] Historic Oakwood, one of downtown Raleigh’s oldest neighborhoods with grand Victorian houses and colorful gardens.

The historic [11] Oakwood Cemetery, established in 1869, is the final resting place of 1,500 Confederate soldiers, five Civil War generals, seven governors and numerous U.S. Senators.

Speaking of the Civil War, stop by [12] visitRaleigh.com/civilwar to learn more about Raleigh’s role in the War Between the States and the tour of war-related sites.

Grab a picnic lunch and make your way to [13] Historic Yates Mill County Park. This 174-acre park is home to a fully-operable 1756 gristmill that still grinds corn throughout the year.

You can’t visit North Carolina’s capital city without a trip to the [14] N.C. State Capitol, which turned 170 in 2010. This is one of the nation’s best-preserved examples of a major civic building in the Greek Revival style.

Across the street is one of the state’s most celebrated museums, the [15] N.C. Museum of History, which brings our state’s diverse history alive with an expansive permanent collection and rotating special exhibits.

Want a unique way to tour the historic sites of downtown Raleigh? Scoot along on a motorized Segway with [16] Triangle Glides, sit back and relax on with a guided tour on a Raleigh rickshaw or feel like you’re in the old South with a horse-drawn carriage from [17] J&L Carriage Company.

Take a stroll through the historic downtowns of [18] Wake Forest, [19] Apex, or [20] Cary. Charming streets with locally owned restaurants and specialty stores feel like a simpler time.

And if you need a Mayberry fix, [21] Pullen Park has the original TV Land statue of Andy and Opie from the popular Andy Griffith television show.

Thirsty after all of your touring? Stop in at [22] Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern where they concoct The Cherry Bounce, Raleigh’s signature beverage which is said to have played a part in the founding of Raleigh as North Carolina’s capital city.

Take a short drive from Raleigh to the [23] North Carolina Railroad Museum and [24] New Hope Valley Railway where you can take a self-guided tour of antique railroad equipment and take a train ride on this historic railroad.

Lifelong Learners tend to know who they are. They love to watch the History Channel, H2 and American Experience on PBS. (Did you catch the new Clinton documentary last week?) And they not only like history and science; they relish it.

So the new wing at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences is going to be perfect for all you Lifelong Learners. It combines the latest in research and technology, so that scientists will be able to beam their findings into classrooms and labs all over the world.

And visitors will be able to get their hands dirty and participate in science themselves. Listen to this from the museum’s staff:

“Adjacent public Investigate Labs will allow visitors to participate in real scientific research and other hands-on activities. Interactive, multimedia exhibits will engage visitors in a wide variety of cutting-edge research from Dinosaurs to DNA, to Weather, to Meteorites to Biodiversity to Nanotechnology to Space and Deep Sea Explorations.”

So get ready, Lifelong Learners. There will be a lot to learn when the new wing opens in Raleigh.