Yuanchen Liu, who directed To the Light, a profile of Chinese coal miners, was named the winner of the 2011 Margaret Mead Filmmaker Award at the Margaret Mead Film Festival’s closing night on Sunday, November 13. The award honors filmmakers that embody the spirit of renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead while showing artistic excellence and originality of storytelling.

The American Museum of Natural History houses the largest collection of bird specimens in the world. Representing all continents and nearly 99 percent of avian species, these specimens help researchers study the evolutionary history of birds and patterns of geographic variation. In the video below, Department of Ornithology Collections Manager Paul Sweet offers a behind-the-scenes look at the collection and its role in scientific research and conservation.

Coming to the Museum over the holiday weekend? Remember to stop by the Museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space on 81st Street between Columbus Avenue and Central Park West for a unique type of space show. Bright green waves of laser light will ripple across the Hayden Sphere from 5 to 11 pm every evening until Sunday, November 27, to illustrate how the Hubble Space Telescope analyzes distant galaxies, quasars, and other celestial objects in the universe—and to mark the opening of Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration, the Museum’s latest special exhibition.

Call it the antithesis of Grey Gardens. While that famous documentary showed how Hamptons socialite Edith Beale and her daughter oversaw the eponymous estate’s slide into squalor, the inhabitants of the 17th-century monastery in Portugal at the heart of Convento, a selection at this year’s Margaret Mead Film Festival, lovingly resurrected a ruin into a home full of life and art.

Tomorrow, a producer with Science Bulletins, the Museum’s online and exhibition program, begins a seven-day journey to the South Pole to document the work of a research team working with the largest-ever telescope deployed in Antarctica.