Helen FieldsScience Writer

Last Monday I went for a day hike at the Grand Canyon and stopped by the visitor center on the South Rim. And I thought, hey, this is totally a museum! Sweet! Ok, it is quite a thin museum. There is more open space than stuff, and I think people mainly go in there to ask the rangers questions.

But still, there was enough to make a Museum Tourist post, because check this out. It’s a boat.

Nowadays, people go down the Colorado River on inflatable rafts, often motorized. The first people to run the river did it in 1869, led by a one-armed Civil War veteran. This boat is from much later, the 1930s; like Powells’ boats, it was custom-made for the Grand Canyon. (Unlike Powell’s team, the people who built this boat actually knew what they were getting into.) This boat, the WEN, was built in the 1930s to run the Grand Canyon’s rapids. It was part of what made taking people down the Grand Canyon on a boat into a viable commercial enterprise.

Enough about boats. Here’s what you see if you walk about 5 minutes from the visitor center:

And here is what you see if you take a bus about 10 minutes from the visitor center and walk downhill for an hour:

And if you keep going half an hour beyond that, and you look another couple thousand feet down, or if you squint very closely at this picture, you see: the river.

It’s the brown thing right down at the bottom of the canyon. See? I brought it back to boats.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

“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.

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.

Cases and cases of minerals. Stuffed animal skins. Grand staircases. This, my friends, is what a natural history museum should be. It’s on a hill at the end of Wenceslas Square in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and I was delighted to get to visit it a few weeks ago on a business trip to Central Europe (with some vacation thrown in, too).

The sign by the door tells you you’re getting “PREHISTORICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND PETROLOGICAL, ZOOLOGICAL, OSTEOLOGICAL, PALEONTOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM LIBRARY.” So right away you know this is a museum to be reckoned with. And then you go inside, buy your ticket, and approach the collections from the bottom of this grand stairway:

Then imagine your excitement when you enter the first gallery of minerals and it looks like this:

The old wooden cases! The endless ranks of rocks, labeled only in Czech and completely uninterpreted!

My boyfriend and I had fun figuring out what the minerals were – some, like “kuprit” and “zinkit” were pretty easy, but we had trouble with “zlato” – the team was split between gold and pyrite. (It was gold; pyrite is “pyrit.”) “Smithsonit” was quite self-explanatory. Most I probably wouldn’t know in English, either, like “diopsid” and “smaragd” and “axinit.” We went from there into a room of meteorites (chondrites is “chondrity”), also displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets – which, the English sign told me, were designed by the architect of the National Museum building and a professor of mineralogy. The cases were installed soon after the building was completed in 1891.

The fun of working out what the minerals are is fairly representative of the kind of fun you can have in the National Museum in Prague. Now, you know I love my natural history museums, and this one is lovely. It’s great at one of the functions of natural history museums: displaying cool stuff. But it scores low on another function: educating the visitor. The schoolkids we saw wandering through looked pretty universally bored, with the exception of these girls:

The zoology halls were redone in the 60s – note the somewhat more modern-looking cases. Here’s a closer look over one girl’s shoulder:

Other exhibits in the museum included fossils, birds, reptiles, and an exhibit on Czech fairy tales that was really quite hard to follow if you are not familiar with (a) Czech fairy tales and (b) Czech.

The exhibit was kind of exciting to walk through, because it was modern and was done to feel like a forest and villages and such, so it had dim lighting, ramps and passageways, and a very different feel than the glass-cases-in-large-rooms aesthetic of the rest of the museum. There were even labels in English, but we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on; the exhibit appeared to be blending artifacts from the tribes that lived in the area thousands of years ago with the tales that Czech children grow up with, and it just didn’t make a lot of sense to a person who didn’t grow up with those stories.

I think that’s enough Czech natural history for one day. More soon.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me

Here’s a set of links from Sarah Zielinski’s Surprising Science blog at Smithsonian.com on the science of the earthquake and tsunami.

The place where I lived in Japan seems to have been unaffected by the earthquake and tsunami – it’s in the southwest, and most of the damage has been in the northeast. It’s even on the wrong side for the tsunami. I feel awful for all the people who are affected and thankful for Japan’s strict building codes.

New story! On meteorites! Read all about it!

When I was working on my story about the origins of life, I kept coming across meteorites. Scientists study them to understand the early chemistry of the solar system, including the chemistry that led to the basic building blocks of life.

I’m fascinated by these little emissaries from space. Other than moon rocks collected on Apollo and a few unmanned missions to comets and such, the only stuff we have from outside Earth is what’s fallen in the form of meteorites. They’re kind of tricky  - we don’t know much about their history or where they came from – but they’re just about all we’ve got.

The meteorites didn’t make it into that story, but my wonderful editor, Laura Helmuth, found a way for me to write about them anyway: an article in a Smithsonian Collector’s Edition. This special edition of the magazine is called Mysteries of the Universe and yes, the only way to read my article is to buy the special issue for $8.99 plus $1 shipping and handling. (Some of the articles are online, but mine isn’t one of them.) I know, that’s $9.99 you could otherwise spend on yarn or a movie, but it’s a really good article! Surely that’s worth 10 bucks. There are nice stories on lots of other topics, too, from Galileo to black holes to the search for Earth-like planets around other stars.

Scientists use meteorites to learn lots of things about space. My article includes this behind-the-scenes visit to the meteorite collection at the National Museum of Natural History. I also visited some astrobiologists at NASA who crush bits of meteorites and had a very funny phone conversation with the guy who runs ANSMET, the Antarctic Search for Meteorites project.

The ANSMET FAQ includes these instructions on how to apply: “Here’s the first step- think about it for a minute. Do you really want to freeze your rear end off, living in a tent for 45 days, with no contact to the outside world, no warm bathrooms, no showers, no web surfing, no cable? If you fail that intelligence test, then the next step is simply a letter (on paper, please) stating your interest in the program.”

I don’t plan to apply. But anyway. Buy the special issue.

On Saturday I went on a geology tour of D.C. – Callan Bentley, who teaches geology at Northern Virginia Community College, took a group of science writers around the bottom of the zoo, through a bit of Rock Creek Park, over the Duke Ellington Bridge, and down to an abandoned quarry near Georgetown. It was kind of mind-blowing to add this layer of geological history on top of an area I’ve driven through hundreds, probably thousands of times. We used to be under some pretty tall mountains here, a really long time ago.

Sarah Zielinski at Smithsonian wrote on her blog about finding fossils in building stone – Bentley stopped to point out some fossil crinoids in a block of Indiana limestone on the Duke Ellington Bridge. She used my pictures in the blog post, which is exciting, but it is somewhat ego-deflating to note that the first comment is about how the picture isn’t good enough to make out the fossils. Well, ok then. (I think the actual problem is that they aren’t very exciting fossils. We’re not talking, like, T. rex ribcages here.)

Bentley also stopped at one end of the bridge to point out an interesting variation in color:

Up above, it kinda looks like standard aged building; below, it’s white. (I suspect this looks standard because Indiana limestone is used in a lot of buildings.) Here’s what’s happening. Up above, the Indiana limestone has interacted with sulfur in acid rain to make gypsum, which is calcium sulfate. Gypsum is white, but the stone is dark because the gypsum traps bits of dirt and pollution and crud. The stone below that line doesn’t look that way because it gets cleaned regularly – because that’s where graffiti-writers can reach.

Here’s Callan Bentley’s blog and a nifty-sounding new site that tells you where to find fossils in D.C. buildings.

A friend asked if I referenced the CHON movie in my story about the origins of life. I did not. Which is tragic, really – the CHON movie is an absolute classic of science cinema, and for more than a decade now it’s been a required stop on the Helen Fields Tour of the Smithsonian. (It ranks below the Hope Diamond, which everyone wants to see despite the fact that it is just a sparkly rock, and above the artifacts from Troy, which are less exciting than you’d expect.) It plays in a little theater area off the dinosaur hall, although the last couple of times I stopped by, it was not running, which makes me nervous.

Enter…the internet. Now you, too, can watch and learn why we call it the CHON movie, even though its title is “Enter Life.” This version of the video doesn’t have the narration, but I think you’ll be able to follow it anyway. And no narration means you can pay more attention to the catchy tunes.

A story I worked on for nearly a year is finally out in Smithsonian. It’s about the origins of life. We’re talking way, way, way back, billions of years, to the time when Earth was rock and water and a very different atmosphere, because plants didn’t exist and therefore hadn’t started spitting out oxygen yet. It’s about how the very first building blocks of life, in this case amino acids, were formed and found each other on an unfriendly planet.

Read the story.

The story ended up being a profile of Bob Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science here in Washington who also collects trilobites and Hudson River School paintings, writes a lot of books and articles, and plays professional trumpet.

I’ve blogged about this story a number of times, which I can now point out – this visit to the lab became the section in the story where I watched Kateryna Klochko do her work. This and this were for a section of the story that got cut. This…was never in the story. I just thought it was funny. This is a question that came up in my reporting.

And I started going to these concerts because Hazen was playing in one, and I haven’t missed one since. Free Bach at lunchtime – you can’t beat it.

Last week I reported on some strange rocks from South Australia that may preserve the oldest animal fossils. Or may not. Ok, nobody knows. But they look kind of like animals. Read about it here.

I like that the function of the journal article was basically to throw the idea out there, see if any other geologists come across anything interesting. There’s plenty of rock of the right age exposed on the planet; you just have to tell geologists to look for it, and other samples of these animals (or whatever they are) could turn up.

In the I know everybody category, the lead author’s name sounded vaguely familiar. Before I called him I looked at his website, and indeed – he went to Carleton College at roughly the same time as me. We have four friends in common on Facebook. Fifteen years ago, I might even have been able to pick him out of a lineup. Today, his name just sounded vaguely familiar.