What's the difference between a meteor, a meteorite, and an asteroid? In the Museum's Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites, curated by Denton S. Ebel, chair of the Division of Physical Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences), the differences are clearly explained.

Talk about an eventful Friday night! Tomorrow night, a small asteroid will travel nearer Earth than any astronomers have identified beforehand. “It’s the closest that we’ve seen ahead of time,” says Denton S. Ebel, curator in the Division of Physical Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences).

For more about the asteroid flyby, participate in a live Twitter chat with Ebel, this Friday, February 15, at noon ET. Post your questions here or use hashtag #asteroidchat on Twitter.

The dioramas in the Jill and Lewis Bernard Family Hall of North American Mammals have always been splendid, but after more than a year of painstaking restoration, they look better than ever. A multi-video series documents their renovation. In these videos, Museum artists Stephen C. Quinn and Joianne Bittle Knight describe how the 3-D foregrounds and 2-D backgrounds of the dioramas were originally created.

It's Darwin Day, 2013, and readers around the world can digitally peruse scientific manuscripts Charles Darwin wrote, thanks to the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, directed by David Kohn. 

Just six weeks to go until the opening of Whales: Giants of the Deep, a new exhibition devoted to the biology, anatomy, and evolution of whales—as well as their cultural significance to maritime human cultures, from New Zealand to New Bedford, Massachusetts.