Darwin's Manuscripts, Now Online

Friday, February 10 4:58 pm

A page from Darwin’s manuscript On the Origin of Species, the foundation text of evolutionary biology. (Cambridge University Library, DAR 185.109.f6r)

What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday than by reading the famed naturalist’s scientific works in his own handwriting? You can do just that on Sunday, February, 12—also known as “Darwin Day”—and every day after on the Darwin Manuscripts Project website.

Free and available to all online, the Darwin Manuscripts Project is the most comprehensive catalogue of Darwin’s scientific manuscripts ever compiled. The project is based at the American Museum of Natural History and developed in close collaboration with Cambridge University Library, whose physical collection is the foundation of the new database, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library—represented by the Natural History Museum in London. This new tool will also include holdings from all other library—based Darwin collections globally.

The database at the project’s core—DARBASE (Darwin Union Manuscripts Catalogue)—includes some 45,000 Darwin documents, including writing from Darwin’s time aboard the HMS Beagle, early drafts of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, as well as his notebooks and botanical books. Read more »

Behind the Scenes of Creatures of Light

4:44 pm

Curator John Sparks will be blogging about the upcoming exhibition Creatures of Light. Photo courtesy of John Sparks

Curator John Sparks will be blogging weekly about the upcoming exhibition, Creatures of Light, which opens on Saturday, March 31.

In just a little over a month, on March 31, the American Museum of Natural History will open our latest exhibition, Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, which focuses on the amazing diversity of organisms that produce light across every conceivable habitat. Every exhibition we produce is a collaboration between the Museum’s research scientists and the exhibition team, which includes writers, designers, artists, and media specialists. I’m the curator for this exhibition, which means that I oversee the scientific content and bring expertise from my research—in this case, on the evolution of bioluminescent signaling systems in marine fishes. We’re hard at work on the show this month, and I’ll be writing weekly posts from behind the scenes to offer some glimpses of what goes into producing a major exhibition. Here’s my first dispatch:

Getting the Light Right

Scientific accuracy is our top priority. Although it may seem trivial, getting the color (or wavelength) of the emitted light just right for this exhibition’s many models of bioluminescent creatures—fireflies, glowworms, siphonophores, and ponyfishes—is fundamental to accurately reproducing the diversity of natural light that organisms use for a variety of functions. Read more »

Science Writer Carl Zimmer on Blogs, Books, and Tattoos

Wednesday, February 08 8:59 am

Carl Zimmer's new book evolved from a question he posed on his blog.

When science writer Carl Zimmer noticed some scientists sporting serious tattoos, he wondered how many others enjoyed highbrow body art. After posing the question on his blog, Zimmer received a flood of responses and photos, many of which he recently compiled in his book Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed. On Thursday, February 16, Zimmer will be one of four panelists at the Museum’s Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication Through Social Media, part of Social Media Week NYC. Zimmer recently answered a few questions about how new media are shaping his writing.

What could you do with a blog about science tattoos that you couldn’t do in a book, and vice versa?

Carl Zimmer: Blogs and books are different media, with different strengths and weaknesses. With a blog, you can spontaneously add things and make corrections. And people can make comments. Sometimes, people would point out that the equation in someone’s tattoo had a plus sign instead of a minus, which was probably pretty embarrassing. But since the blog was happening in real time, it was more disorganized. For the book, I was able to create miniature essays for various tattoos and arrange the tattoos in a logical progression from math to physics to chemistry and so on. Read more »

Digital Dossier

Monday, February 06 8:53 am

Curator James Carpenter uses a technique called photomontage to bring selected areas of insects, such as this German wasp, into focus. © AMNH/J. Carpenter. Click to enlarge.

Each of the 41 intriguing images in Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies tells a fascinating story about research or conservation projects. Here’s the last in a series of four snapshots.

New imaging technologies have revolutionized the age-old scientific tasks of observation and classification. And for James Carpenter, a curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology, they’ve opened up a new way of seeing.

Dr. Carpenter is tracing the ancestry of various wasps, which he does by examining the insects’ physical features to identify them and place them in their evolutionary context. His lab’s current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, is to reconstruct the phylogeny, or evolutionary history, of Vespinae, a subfamily of wasps consisting of hornets and yellowjackets. Read more »

Picturing Science: Capturing Coral’s Glow

Wednesday, February 01 2:44 pm

These staghorn corals contain fluorescent molecules, which absorb light and then emit it at a different wavelength. © AMNH/D. Gruber

Stony corals are living animals that are only two cell layers thick, but over time, their calcium carbonate skeletons can form massive limestone islands. Some contain fluorescent molecules, proteins in their tissue that absorb light from an external source and emit light back at different wavelengths. Marine biologist David Gruber uses a painstaking method of underwater photography to get striking images of fluorescent  corals, including images of moon coral and staghorn coral currently on display in the exhibition Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies.

“You shine a specific wavelength of light to stimulate the protein—usually blue or green—and the corals emit back in otherworldly greens and reds,” explains Gruber, a research associate in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, “You have to photograph underwater in the dark at night with specially-filtered strobes because you’re only interested in the light emitted by the corals and other reef-dwelling organisms.”

Gruber photographed these corals in the northern Red Sea in Eilat, Israel, in May 2010, as part of his research into the patterns and functions of fluorescent proteins. Fluorescent proteins have been found to be useful tools in studying AIDS, Altzheimer’s, cancer, and other diseases, as well as in basic biological research.

Tagging subject proteins with fluorescent proteins allows researchers to track cell processes as never before. In 2007, for example, a team at Harvard injected red, green, and blue fluorescent proteins into a mouse brain to differentiate neurons, resulting in an explosion of color they dubbed a “Brainbow.” The significance of this technique was underscored by the 2008 award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three scientists for their work on the green fluorescent protein, known as GFP, which is found in the Aequeoria victoria jellyfish—one of the fascinating organisms featured in the Museum’s upcoming exhibition Creatures of Light: Nature’s Bioluminescence, which opens on Saturday, March 31. Read more »