Helen FieldsScience Writer

My coral reef is finished! I dropped it off at Now and Then, a store in Takoma Park, Md., that sells yarn (and lots of other neat stuff).

The only addition since my last update is the brown-black one at top left – that’s the tape from one audio cassette. It is not the easiest material in the world to crochet with. The finished product sure is neat, though!

The National Building Museum is currently hosting an exhibit of Lego models of famous works of architecture. I haven’t been yet, because it costs $5, and I’m waiting for a time when I’m in the neighborhood with one of my parents – they’re members of the museum and can get in the exhibit for free. I swear when they first posted that exhibit, there was one day a month when it was free, but that information disappeared from the webpage long ago.

Anyway, I was cutting through the museum on the way to my bank the other day and saw this:

I didn’t look that closely – I just saw a big red box. It was only on the way back I realized it’s a Lego model of the museum itself!

The museum is in a beautiful building, which is used for inaugural balls and lots of other fancy events. It was built in the 1880s to house the U.S. Pension Bureau. It’s definitely worth a visit. The space itself is stunning, even more so because it’s tucked in a big square brick building, and they have exhibits about things you wouldn’t necessarily think were all that cool, like parking garages, or rest stops along Norwegian highways.

Here’s the inside:

Here’s what the actual inside of the museum looks like, for comparison:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Back in April, I went on my first work travel in ages. A magazine sent me on a big, exotic trip to…West Virginia. Ok, it doesn’t sound so exotic, and it’s certainly not very far. But it was fascinating. I was in McDowell County, the southernmost part of the state. It’s a coal mining region – and there are a lot fewer jobs in coal mining than there used to be. In the 1950 census, the county had 98,000 people; in this census, they say they’ll be lucky to break 25,000. Two high schools were closing at the end of this spring to reopen in a new, consolidated school. (Read my story here.)

I had a wonderful couple of days in the town of Welch. People were very friendly. I realized after I came back that I’d managed to meet everyone who was running to represent the area in the state legislature. The Democratic primaries were coming up and there were yard signs all over town. One was the incumbent, so we stopped in to say hi at his office across from the beautiful old court house.

I met another of them when I had dinner with the Kiwanis Club. (I was like a visiting dignitary. I was hardly allowed to pay for any meals.) We ate at a drive-in, which also had indoor seating – not to worry.

I met the third candidate when I visited the high school, where he’s a teacher. The stop at Mount View High School was the reason I went to West Virginia. I was there to report on an after-school and summer program that’s designed to get high schoolers excited about careers in science and health. The program is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, whose magazine I was writing for.

Here’s the only motel in Welch, West Virginia.

That’s me with Cathy Morton-McSwain, my gracious host and chauffeur. She works for HSTA and drives all over the state visiting schools.

McDowell County really is beautiful. Spring was just arriving, the hillsides were green and lush, and everyone was so nice. I’d love to go back sometime. Here’s my story – enjoy!

My own personal Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef now has four pieces:

I’m pleased that I haven’t bought any new yarn for this. The caution tape is recycled, of course, and the bright orange and red acrylic yarns came from the great-aunt of a fellow science writer. They gave me the dark blue at the coral reef workshop, and the light edging on that piece came from the yarn stash of another fellow science writer. Good times!

A friend brought me a box of cassette tapes that she was about to throw out, so I may see what I can do with that next. When all this is done, I’ll drop it off at a local yarn store or take it to the museum, and it’ll all be on display starting in October! It’ll be fun to see if I can find my pieces on the community reef.

Read about the Smithsonian’s display of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef here.

People who like to mess with yarn fall into two camps: knitters and crocheters. In knitting, you use two sticks and it’s a disaster if you drop a stitch. In crochet, you use one hook and I don’t know if it’s even possible to drop a stitch. There’s a lot I don’t know about crochet. In fact, until the beginning of July, the only thing I knew how to do was to crochet a single chain of loops that I could use to start knitting a sock or a hat.

The first weekend of July, I was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and saw a table for the Smithsonian Community Reef. Someone taught me how to crochet a pseudosphere – it’s like a sphere, kind of, but in hyperbolic space, which is this other kind of geometry that is not the Euclidean geometry of planes and squares and nice normal things that you learned about in ninth grade. Crocheting hyperbolic shapes turns out to be kind of hypnotic. Here’s me learning how:

The reef is being built by hook-wielding volunteers like me; the pieces all have to be turned in by sometime in September and will be on display at the Natural History Museum as part of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef starting October 16. Last week I went to a workshop at a local yarn store to learn more, and I’m now working on my third piece of coral. Here’s the collection so far:

You’ll see that it’s a great way to use up that hideous orange acrylic yarn.

I wrote a blog post about the reef for Smithsonian magazine.

I took the occasion of a visit to Colorado last week to drop in on the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The building opened in 1908, which is positively ancient for Colorado. And like any self-respecting natural history museum, it is chock full of dead animals. As a special bonus, though, they extend this to the human animal. Not only because one of those dead-modern-humans exhibits was on when I was there (this one – I skipped it). The museum also has a nifty little exhibit of Egyptian mummies.

First: A dead reptile of the Mesozoic Era. Or what’s left of it. I thought this Stegosaurus was particularly lovely. I don’t remember seeing those scutes below the neck before. Aren’t they pretty?

This fossil was found in 1937 near Cañon City, Colorado by a high school teacher. They redid the pose after discovering another Stegosaurus skeleton in 1992 – that showed them things like how the back plates and tail spikes were arranged.

You know how birds eat grit to help them digest their food? Dinosaurs did that, too:

They’re called gastroliths.

Check out how tough this fish is. It’s a big predator from the sea that covered Kansas late in the dinosaur era.

See how tough it is? It died with a whole fish in its belly. You can see the tail at left and the vertebrae scattered along toward the right. (The head and everything were there, too.)

On to the dead humans!

In the old days, visiting Egypt was a lot like it is today in some ways. People marveled at the pyramids and the Sphinx. It was really hot. They bought souvenirs. The souvenirs were just a little different, that’s all. Until 1946, a visitor to Egypt could pick up a mummy to show the folks back home. In 1904, a wealthy businessman from Colorado went to Egypt and came home with a couple of mummies. They were displayed in a museum in Pueblo until the last 15 years or so; they’re on long-term loan to Denver now.

In the late 90s, the scientists in Denver took the mummies to get CT scans at a university medical center. (They rode in an ambulance.) This is much less destructive than the old way of figuring out what’s inside a mummy – unwrapping it. Without messing with the linen at all, they could look inside and learn about the people inside. First, this lady:

At some point in her history, somebody thought it was a good idea to unwrap her head. She’s in a very simple sarcophagus, so they had a good bet she was poor to start with. When they did the CT scan, they learned that the mummifiers hadn’t even bothered to remove her internal organs – they just shriveled in place. Her linen covering is only a few layers thick, and there are no charms or amulets wrapped into it.

Another mummy was also in a poor person’s coffin – a poor man’s coffin, from the way it was done. But the CT scan showed that the innards were a wealthy woman.

See the two white things – I think the top one is the heart, wrapped in linen and ready to go for the afterlife. So that’s part of what shows you she’s wealthy. The other part is the thing below that – a scarab tucked into her wrappings. They don’t know how she wound up in the wrong coffin – it could’ve happened in ancient times, or it could’ve been done by the souvenir seller in 1904.

Amazing preparations, aren’t they? The Egyptians took the afterlife seriously. The museum also displayed some of the tools and ornaments people had buried with them. It seems like a waste of effort, but what do I know? I’ll sure feel dumb if I die and get to the afterlife and find out I was supposed to bring my stuff with me.

The museum also has a lovely set of dioramas. There’s a whole room showing all the environments of Colorado, from low-ish desert, through the plains, to the alpine tundra. And a whole section of Botswana – the trip I was planning last year to Namibia and Botswana fell through, so I was able to imagine just a bit of what it would be like by looking at this:

I’m inclined to be a little disdainful of dioramas, but I guess they’re good for imaginary vacations.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The other day I was at the National Museum of Natural History and thought the elephant was looking particularly fine:

This enormous bull elephant was shot in Angola in 1955 by Hungarian big game hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Read all about it on the museum’s website. It took 16 months to mount the skin for exhibition. Fun fact: the tusks are fiberglass casts. The real ones are in storage because they’re too heavy for this mount.

If you want a serious taste of a bygone era – you know, an era when someone sees the biggest elephant track ever and thinks, “I should shoot that” – read the account of the hunt Fénykövi wrote for Sports Illustrated.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

And, finally, an extra-cool feature of the American Museum of Natural History: It connects right up to a subway station. So if you’re going on a rainy day, you don’t even have to go outside. Unless you’re me, you fail to locate the underground entrance to the museum, and you go out the wrong exit of the subway station into the rain. That’s ok – it feels a little more impressive to go in through the big doors on Central Park West.

It’s a cool subway station, with decorations that relate to its location. The downtown platform has bronze casts of fossils, and the uptown platform has beautiful mosaics. The definitive blogging about this subway station has been done by Grrlscientist. She wrote about the history of the station (here) and then took pictures of most of the art (here). But here are some of my pictures.

You can’t really tell on this picture, but that whale tail connects to a whale body on the floor.

On the stairs up to the uptown platform:

And the other set of stairs:

I missed a train because I was trying to get a good picture of people going down those stairs.

And, finally, lookit this cute snail:

Aww. Snail.

Well, I think that is now all I have to say about AMNH for now. I’m ready to go back – I never got to a lot of the museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York: Way too much museum to fit in one blog post. Here’s my first post about the visit.

Next topic: Butterflies. This is a trend at natural history museums these days, apparently, or at least the two big natural history museums I’m familiar with. They set up a shed in an unpopular gallery (poor unpopular galleries) and fit it out for butterflies. It costs extra on top of museum admission, and it’s one of the things I got into free because the communications office set me up with an admission voucher.

You go in through double doors and discover: people. And also butterflies. They do timed entries so it can’t get too crowded. I was nervous the whole time about stepping on a butterfly. I mean, what’s to stop them from landing in the path? You also see heat and humidity, or you would if they were visible. This place is set up for tropical bugs.

My favorite was the blue morpho, a butterfly I saw in Costa Rica many years ago. I took a picture but it doesn’t really do it justice – they’re these enormous insects, the size of your hand when the wings are open. The undersides of the wings are brown, but when they fly, they flash a beautiful shiny iridescent blue. It’s a wonderful sight when a blue morpho flits by in the rainforest.

Butterfly exhibits cost extra because they’re a lot of work to maintain. Butterflies don’t live long, so the museum has to keep getting new pupae. These are raised from eggs at butterfly farms in Florida, Costa Rica, and other tropical places. As soon as the caterpillars hit the pupal stage, the farmers pack them up and ship them off.

Insect development is the most amazing thing. That little white butterfly there used to be a caterpillar. It made a chrysalis, then it sat inside, broke itself down, and grew its adult body. It made *wings* for goodness’ sake. And little spindly legs. Think how different that is from a caterpillar. That is wild.

Look, you can see the butterflies’ mouthparts sucking the juice out of the orange:

The mouthpiece is the second long skinny thing from the left on the front butterfly. When a butterfly isn’t using its mouth, it keeps it rolled up in a neat spiral.

I think this is a monarch butterfly. I like how it’s posing against the background of a classic museum floor.

This sign by the exit made me paranoid:

I mean, I didn’t have anyone with me who could check the back of my head. It turned out they had a big mirror and a butterfly net between the two sets of exit doors, so I could determine that I didn’t have any hitchhikers.

I’m not sure the butterfly exhibit would be worth the extra cost of admission. It’s just a bunch of bugs flying around. And I say that as a person who loves bugs. Once I got in there and established that there were butterflies, there wasn’t really much to do other than go around trying to take pictures of them, and the fluorescent lighting made the pictures come out with strange colors. Kids seemed to be pretty excited about the exhibit, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A few weeks ago when I went to the National Aquarium in Washington, I got quite a surprise: this guy, staring me down from inside his tank.

He’s a northern snakehead, a kind of invasive fish who made quite a splash when they showed up in the Potomac River a few years back. Such a big splash that Smithsonian magazine went looking for someone funny and local to write a story about snakeheads for them, and ended up with me. Here’s the story.

You should go read it, but, to summarize, I went looking for snakeheads with the Virginia fish and game folks, a professional bass fisherman (sponsored by “Team Spouse”), and some guys with a boat, and the only snakeheads I saw were dead at the natural history museum. It was the summer of 2004, and they just weren’t that established in the Potomac yet.

So I was excited to see one in the flesh at the aquarium. They’re pretty well settled into the river now. This one was collected from the river when the Virginia fish and game folks were out on one of their sampling expeditions. Ok, ok, if you insist, here’s another picture:

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.