Helen FieldsScience Writer

This weekend I swung by the National Museum of Natural History to check out a temporary exhibit that opened about 10 days ago. The museum has a fellowship program where artists can spend time hanging out with scientists and looking at collections, or probably doing more or less whatever they want. For his fellowship, the artist Shih Chieh Huang wanted to learn about bioluminescence. The result is a small gallery with nice glowy, wavy art.

It’s kind of mesmerizing – I spent more than an hour in the gallery. The guard said some lovely things about the art. (Guards spend all day with the exhibits. They have opinions.) But he hasn’t been at the museum that long and didn’t know what the policy was on talking to the media, so I agreed not to quote him. They were good quotes, but they weren’t worth getting a guy fired over. Read my blog post here.

photo: me

“The dinosaurs!” That’s what my boyfriend, who is British, told me I had to see at the Natural History Museum in London. So the museum and I sort of got off on the wrong foot when I discovered that the dinosaurs were all involved in some special exhibit that required payment. And I was feeling cheap. I was also feeling like a person who did not want to wait in a long line with a lot of excited children.

This may be unreasonable of me, since standing in a long line with a lot of excited children seems like it might be central to the NHM Experience. Now, to be fair, I was at the Natural History Museum during the August school holidays. And I also must point out that this museum, like all the museums I wanted to see in London, has free admission to most of the exhibits. That is pretty great. But I’d already had the line experience once, with about a 20-minute wait to get into the museum in the first place, so I decided to stick to the free parts of the museum.

The Natural History Museum has an astounding, late-19th-century building. It looks like this on the outside:

and like this on the inside:

That is the one and only dinosaur that was free to view. It’s a Diplodocus. Actually a cast of a Diplodocus, donated by Andrew Carnegie, who owned the original. (Read about it here.) The original is at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

My favorite object in the museum was this. Take a look. What do you think it is?

Looks kind of tree-like? Kind of pretty? Colorful? And a little bit spiky? And…like a Victorian chamber of horrors?

Yes, the case contains hundreds of hummingbirds mounted on branches among bits of lichen and nests. The label says they don’t know exactly where it came from, but this was the sort of thing Victorians went in for. It’s a way of thinking about nature where you appreciate it as things of beauty to be brought indoors and admired, not something you leave in its place for other people to enjoy. That’s a modern way of thinking, I suppose, and it’s probably a modern thing to feel sorry for the hummingbirds. I don’t really feel sorry for the hummingbirds as individuals. They would have died a long time ago anyway. But it’s a shame that they died just to be pretty in someone’s house.

I also enjoyed this intersection of earth and human life, from the earth sciences hall:

That’s a chunk of flint on the left and a paleolithic flint hand-axe on the right. This seems so delightfully English to me. Flint forms in chalk – and you know southern England has chalk, right? The white cliffs of Dover? Right. That’s chalk. The Cretaceous period gets its name from that layer of chalk. (The Latin word is “creta.”) And I like that they pair the chunk of flint with a real-life axe made more than 100,000 years ago. I know it’s the stereotype, that Americans go to Europe and are amazed at how old everything is, but, look. Everything there is OLD. It is really different. And totally cool.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

From the British Museum in London, I bring you a lady spinning fleece into yarn:

The label says it was made in Athens around 490 BC. Some people who make their own yarn still spin this way, with a drop spindle. You hold the wool in one hand and spin the yarn around with the other, just like the nice lady is doing on the vase.

This was in a section on daily life – apparently Ancient Greek ladies made their families’ clothing from scratch.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

For the August issue of the HHMI Bulletin I wrote about how neuroscientists try to measure all those little electrical impulses going around in the brain and figure out how we think. Read it here.

See? SFO isn’t the only airport with exhibits. This hallway in the C Terminal at Washington-Dulles used to have pictures of planets, but now it’s photos of D.C. Kind of nice photos. If you want to see them, buy yourself a plane ticket and get on out to the end of the Dulles Access Road.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A museum…in an airport? What? That’s crazy! Ok, actually, it’s not crazy. There’s a little Air & Space Museum photo exhibit at Dulles that I’ve seen twice and never blogged about. But the San Francisco airport really goes all out. They appear to have a full-blown operation going on – I saw maps listing a ton of different exhibits. There’s a pretty prominent downside, though. You would have to have airplane tickets to get to a lot of the displays, which makes admission somewhat more expensive than even at some other expensive museums I’ve complained about. (But they throw in a free plane ride with your ticket.)

On the way home from a recent wedding, I had lots of time – thanks for the delays, United – to examine the exhibit Second Chances: Folk Art Made From Recycled Remnants.

It’s from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. I’m not totally clear on what that means about the relationship between them, but I’m guessing a curator in Santa Fe put it together and they lent it to the SFO Museum.

The items in the exhibit are charming – it’s fun to look at something, see its current shape, and also be able to see what it was before. License plates turned into dustpans, bottle caps strung together on wire to make a toy snake. Of course, it’s not like people were recycling to be cute; a lot of this is recycling born out of necessity.

That’s a trunk made out of tin, wood, and paper, Dakar, Senegal, c. 1994. I just looked up “arachide” in the handy French dictionary next to my desk and am delighted to tell you that these tins used to hold peanut oil.

This kind of recycling also funnels into a souvenir trade. One of my favorite Christmas tree ornaments is an angel made from an insecticide can that I bought in Mali. I also love a little dump truck I got there, made from pieces of a can of the “Gino” brand. Something that involves tomatoes. I bought it from a small boy atop a mud-brick building in Djenne. So I was pretty amused to see the exact same design (made from a different can) in the exhibit:

It’s also from Mali, but from 1994 – I bought mine in 2005. So I guess that particular form of folk art manufacture has been going on for a while. It’s really a pretty sophisticated toy. The dump truck dumps.

There was quite a variety of stuff in the show – early American furniture and duck decoys, for example, and some items made by contemporary artists who just like working with old stuff. I think my favorite item was this eagle:

It was made by some Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1993. I’d forgotten this, although it sounded vaguely familiar when I looked it up. Their ship ran aground off a beach in Queens and over 200 immigrants were stuck in prisons while the U.S. figured out what to do with them. The last people weren’t freed until 1997.

While they were in prison they did a ton of origami. This eagle is made from magazines and papier mache of rough prison toilet paper. Google tells me that some people now call this style of paper folding “Golden Venture Folding,” after the ship that the immigrants came in. Some were granted asylum; many ended up back in China or in other countries.

The SFO Museum’s website says it was founded in 1980 and was “the first cultural institution of its kind located in an international airport.” That’s a lot of qualifiers, so I guess that means it isn’t the first museum in an airport. But it’s still pretty neat. I loved having the opportunity to lose myself in this art for a bit while I killed time before my flight.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

My friend Brian Vastag just wrote a story about some research on Kandula, the awesomest elephant at the National Zoo. (This was based on a journal article, so some other people wrote the story this week, too.)

Kandula was born at the zoo in 2001. One of the highlights of my journalism career was in the summer of 2002, as an intern at NPR. Kandula was about seven months old and I got to go into the elephant enclosure and follow him around with a mic to get sounds of him playing in the water. SO CUTE. Here’s the story about elephant lungs.

Look, it’s the West Virginia Geological Survey Museum:

It’s in a rest stop on interstate 68 just over the border when you’re driving west from Maryland.

Ok, I don’t actually think this is the museum. I think it’s an advertisement for the museum. But it had real live rocks inside, so maybe it counts?

Geology is an incredibly big deal in West Virginia. I guess I don’t think about geology very much – maybe it’s an incredibly big deal everywhere. But it’s so explicit in West Virginia, where a lot of the economy is based on digging up rocks, loading them on trains, and sending them out of state.

Here’s some sulfur, “derived from West Virginia coal.”

I’m not really sure what that means. Did someone derive this from coal, or did it, like, leach out of coal by itself–can you tell I don’t know anything about minerals–or what?

Ok, this may be the rare museum that did not in fact make me smarter. But it was a pleasant surprise at the rest stop. Maybe someday I’ll run across the actual museum, which appears to be near Morgantown.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Another new story for ScienceNOW – this one about chimps being generous. It’s been kind of a mystery of primatology that chimps seem to be quite generous and sharing in the field, but stingy in experiments. The authors of the new study I wrote about thought maybe the experiments just hadn’t been designed in a chimp-appropriate manner, so the participants didn’t really know what was going on. So they came up with a new way to test their sharing and found that chimps actually are nice.

My favorite line in the study was in the part about how they got the chimps to take part in the experiments. The authors wrote: “If a chimpanzee declined to participate that day, her test was rescheduled for another day.” These chimps live outdoors in a research colony in Georgia. On a day when the researchers were planning to work with a particular chimp, they’d open the door of the research building and call her name. The chimps think experiments are fun, but sometimes they just don’t feel like it – if there’s nice weather, say, or some interesting social interaction they don’t want to miss out on. And if that happens, well, they just don’t participate that day.

Read it here.

I was sad to hear yesterday that a former colleague of mine died over the weekend. Bernadine Healy did basically everything. She was head of the NIH. She ran the Red Cross for two years, resigning after the controversy over how the organization handled donations after 9/11. She was a professor at Johns Hopkins and dean of the Ohio State med school. (Not at the same time.) She raised two daughters. And she was a columnist at U.S. News & World Report, where she sat across the hall from me for several years.

My favorite memory of Bernie is when some executives from a major medical association came to try to convince the U.S. News health section that they, the doctors, had the right position about some issue of the day. She tried her darnedest to get them to engage in intellectual discussion on the topic, which was fun to watch, because they weren’t interested in anything but repeating their position. She was opinionated and smart and a lovely colleague, and the world is worse off without her.

Here’s a nice remembrance by my former colleague Deborah Kotz.