Museum Kicks Off Weekend Space Show Double Feature

Friday, August 20 2:56 pm

See how it all began: now you can catch the Museum’s first two Space Shows every Friday and Saturday night in the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater.

This new after-hours series is part of the year-long celebration commemorating the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space. The screening features the breathtaking Passport to the Universe, narrated by Tom Hanks, which takes viewers on an exhilarating flight through our universe, and The Search for Life: Are We Alone?,narrated by Harrison Ford, which explores a question that has always captivated the human imagination: does life exist beyond Earth?

Shows start at 7:30 and 8:30 pm every Friday and Saturday in the Hayden Planetarium. Admission is $15, $12 for Museum Members.  Click here to purchase tickets.

Museum’s REU Symposium Spotlights Student Summer Biology Research

Monday, August 16 9:02 am

Nearly 80% of interns from the first 10 years of the Museum’s REU program in biology have gone on to graduate school. Of those, 31% are now working in academia, and 25% hold non-faculty research positions. © AMNH/D. Finnin

The gene flow patterns of Amazonian birds, the diversity of bat teeth, mislabeled species at the local market: these were just a few of the topics presented at the 22nd Annual Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) biological sciences symposium held in the Museum’s Linder Theater earlier this month.

The symposium marked the conclusion of the 2010 REU program, a National Science Foundation-funded internship that offers college students the opportunity to work side by side with Museum scientists on research projects in the biological or physical sciences. Nearly 80% of interns from the first 10 years of the REU program in biology have gone on to graduate school and, within this group, 31% are now working in academia and 25% hold non-faculty research positions.

“This program is very important, not only because these undergraduates are generating cutting-edge research, but also for me, because it’s how I got started as a professor,” said Museum Curator Mark Siddall of the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, who has overseen the REU biology program since 2001, during opening remarks at the symposium.

This summer’s eight REU projects in biology spanned species, continents, and methodologies.

Isabella Akker, a student at Stanford University who worked with Joel Cracraft, curator-in-charge of the Museum’s Department of Ornithology, spent the summer sequencing and analyzing the DNA of the Blue-Crowned Manakin—a species of bird found in the Amazonian rainforest—that had been sampled from different geographic locations in South America.

Another REU intern, Berenice Villegas of Columbia University, looked into a phenomenon closer to home. Villegas worked with George Amato, director of the Sackler Institute of Comparative Genomics, to conduct a study that examined the mislabeling of endangered species—including turtle, alligator, and fish meat—sold illegally in New York City markets. Using a tool known as DNA barcoding—or analyzing a fragment of a gene to identify a particular species—Villegas found many cases of mislabeling as well as instances of threatened or near-threatened species for sale.

Villegas, an environmental biology major, said that conducting research with Museum scientists was an invaluable experience. “It was one of the best summers I’ve ever had,” she said of participating in the REU program.

Museum scientists were equally enthusiastic about working with young researchers. John Flynn, dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History, emphasized the value of the REU program in unscheduled remarks at the symposium’s conclusion.

“I was incredibly struck by the tenor of conversation and questioning—a testament to your excellent work as an integral part of creating a new generation of scientists,” said Flynn.

For more information about Research Experiences for Undergraduates at the Museum, please visit the Fellowships and Opportunities section on the Richard Gilder Graduate Schoolwebsite.

Dig Up More Dinosaur Stories with Museum App

Thursday, August 12 11:28 am

Dinosaurs: American Museum of Natural History Collections — the Museum’s first app for the iPhone and iPod touch — has added illustrated stories documenting the discovery of two more fossils, the herbivorous Psittacosaurus and its three-horned cousin, the Triceratops. The app, which debuted in February, features more than 800 photographs, models, and illustrations from the Museum Library archives as well as fascinating stories behind the fossils on display in the fourth-floor David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

In addition to highlighting two new fossils, the updated app also includes new images in its striking interactive mosaic of the Tyrannosaurus rex. Users can zoom in to the mosaic to scan individual photographs, each of which includes a caption with additional information, comment on an image, or share it with a friend via email. The app is geared towards paleontologists of all ages, whether they’re looking to enhance their Museum visit or to dig up information on the Museum’s dinosaur fossils from anywhere in the world.

“The app is an expansion of what you can see in the halls, a way to provide a broader context for how specimens are discovered, mounted, and put up,” says Lowell Dingus, a research associate in the Museum’s Division of Paleontology who contributed to the app.

When it was first released, Dinosaurs was the most downloaded free education app on iTunes for three weeks. So far, it’s been downloaded more than 397,400 times.

Last month, the Museum launched the AMNH Explorer, a groundbreaking free app that’s part navigation system and part personal tour guide. Using the Museum’s new public WiFi system, Explorer pinpoints a user’s location and offers turn-by-turn directions to exhibits, cafés, restrooms as well as information about more than 140 objects and specimens, special tours, and a way to share the experience via Facebook and Twitter. (Read early reviews of Explorer.)

To download Dinosaurs: American Museum of Natural Collections or Explorer, click here.

Fishing in the Heart of Darkness

Wednesday, August 11 3:01 pm

Melanie Stiassny (J. Black) and a tiger fish from the Congo River (J. Lowenstein).

Now readers of The New York Times can travel with Melanie Stiassny, the Axelrod Research Curator in the Department of Ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, to the world’s second largest river basin. Stiassny is blogging for The New York Times’s “Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field“ while surveying the fishes in remote tributaries of the Congo River. But first she had to get there, and the journey is not an easy one.

“Plans are shaping up well,” Stiassny writes in the first posting, dated August 10. “With any luck we will be leaving early tomorrow morning, hitching a ride on WWF’s speedboat, which is making a two-day journey upriver to the small settlement of Tshumbiri on the main channel of the middle Congo River. From there we will travel some 30 miles by “road” to the WWF’s Malebo field station. I say “road” because the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of western Europe, only has a few hundred kilometers of paved roads outside the cities. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Stiassny has spent the last four years surveying the Lower Congo River as part of The Congo Project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation. This stretch of river has extremely complex hydrology that can wall off populations of fish into what amount to islands in the water, and Stiassny’s morphological and genetic research of these fish show that this stretch of river is one of the most diverse, in terms of fish, in the world, home to more than 300 species.

On this trip, Stiassny is heading upriver with colleagues to look for the source of the diversity downriver. She and her team will be searching the Malebo area for the fish in two different tributary systems of the Congo River, one that drains directly into the main channel and another that drains into the Kasai River. In short, Stiassny is looking for the populations that seeded the diversity in the Lower Congo, searching for answers in an area that has never been surveyed scientifically.

“Apparently, despite a regular appearance in stewing pots all over the region, the fishes of these waters have never been explored ichthyologically,” writes Stiassny in the blog. “Time to change that.”

For additional information, see Stiassny in the Lower Congo in the video “Evolution in Action” from the Museum’s Science Bulletins.

Last Chance! Traveling the Silk Road Closes Sunday, August 15

Monday, August 09 12:50 pm

Long before airplanes or computers, this network of trails, sea routes, oases, and marketplaces connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. The Silk Road linked empires, giving many people, including Greeks, Indians, Persians, Arabs, and Han Chinese, their first contact with distant civilizations. At inns called caravanserai, travelers mingled and traded all kinds of raw materials and finished products, from furs and feathers to ceramics and gems and, of course, silk.

Much more than tangible goods traveled along the Silk Road. So did technology and culture, both objects and ideas. As trade brought people into contact with one another, they borrowed and adapted each other’s ideas and skills. For example, as goods traveled, so did the ways they were made. Key among these technologies was silk-making, or sericulture, which had already been practiced in China for thousands of years and was a zealously guarded secret. Other technologies included glassmaking, an art developed in the Mediterranean; papermaking, a Chinese invention that spread the written word; and metalworking, which originated in the central Middle East. Many contemporary inventions, like grape winemaking and paper money, are still in use today.

Artifacts found along the Silk Road show that as they did business, travelers also exchanged music, cuisines, and beliefs. Pilgrims and merchants carried their religions (including Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism) to distant lands. Scientific knowledge of subjects such as astronomy and mathematics also made its way along trade routes, as did visual styles and motifs.

These exchanges profoundly affected many of the civilizations that came into contact with each other. Crossing rugged mountains and scorching deserts, braving hunger, sandstorms and robbers, the camel caravans of the Silk Road were the harbingers of globalization. The first international highway, the Silk Road helped lay foundations for the modern world.

A version of this story originally appeared in the summer issue of Rotunda, the magazine for Museum Members.

The penultimate section of Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathway to the Modern World highlights a shift to maritime trade routes and features a scale model of an Arab seagoing dhow, a gift from the Government of the Sultanate of Oman through the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center in Washington, D.C. © AMNH/R. Mickens