Now in its fourteenth season at the Museum, The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter! draws thousands of visitors each year, transporting them to a tropical ecosystem lushwith vivid, live flowers and filled with hundreds of spectacular butterflies and moths. But whilethe flora and fauna are quite real, the conservatory is the product of careful planning and design bythe Museum’s Exhibition Department, which creates a “natural” garden using artificial lighting,precipitation, and climate control.
Manager of Living Exhibits Hazel Davies, who has been involved with the conservatory for more than a decade, and her team start from scratch each year by determining what species to include and where to get the plants and live specimens.
Choosing the plants is an art in itself. Following U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, the Museum prevents the butterflies from breeding by avoiding any plants that serve as their natural hosts; butterflies are particular about where they lay eggs because the host plant will also provide food to the caterpillars that hatch. Suitability to different light levels, variations in texture and structures, and other factors are also considered in plant selection. Read more »
Life as a 60-foot-long Mamenchisaurus was no small feat. Check out how an average human would size up next to one of these super-sized sauropods that once roamed the Earth and visit The World’s Largest Dinosaurs site for more details about the upcoming exhibition.
Nearly all animals have brains. Most communicate with each other. Still others use tools. And many build homes after a fashion. But only humans compose symphonies, write plays, paint masterpieces — not to mention design the concert halls, theaters, and museums in which to showcase them. It is, in fact, this ability to conceptualize, to plan ahead, convey ideas with symbols, that most sets us apart from other animals.
Who better to turn to than creative visual artists — for whom manipulating symbols is a way of life — to illustrate the complicated workings of the human brain in the Museum’s new exhibition Brain: The Inside Story, which opens November 20. Early in the planning stage, the Exhibition Department tapped two artists, Daniel Canogar of Madrid and Devorah Sperber of Manhattan and Woodstock, N.Y., to represent various brain functions in tangible works of art.
“Artists’ works appeal directly—and powerfully—to our senses, and stimulate our curiosity about our world and about ourselves,” says David Harvey, senior vice president for Exhibition.
Sperber’s installation, for example, harnesses the mechanics of human sight and something scientists call “neurobiological priming”—the tendency of the brain to recognize certain images through repetition. At first, viewers see a large panel, 68 inches by 47 inches, composed of colorful spools of thread strung on aluminum-ball chains, each spool acting like a chip of tile in an attractive, if amorphous, mosaic. Then, seen through a clear acrylic ball set on a pedestal 6 feet in front of the “canvas,” the abstract image is reduced in size and reversed, just as the brain inverts the upside-down images captured by the retina, and it becomes instantly recognizable as a familiar work of fine art. Read more »
Step into the amazing, changing brain! This November, take an unprecedented journey through the essential bundle of neurons that is the human brain, the control center for our thoughts, senses, and feelings.
Brain: The Inside Story, a major new exhibition opening on November 20, will feature original art installations, vivid brain-scan imaging, and thrilling interactive exhibits that will engage the entire family. Get a sneak preview behind the scenes of Brain: The Inside Story in this slideshow of artists at work.
This fascinating exhibition will explore how the brain–a product of millions of years of evolution–produces thoughts, senses, and emotions, how it continually changes throughout different stages of life, and how new understanding of the workings of the brain may help scientists repair declines in brain function. Along the way, you can challenge your brain with puzzles and games that probe neural connections and pathways.
Race to the End of the Earth, the major new exhibition now open at the American Museum of Natural History, recounts one of the most stirring tales of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration: the contest to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1911-1912.
The exhibition focuses on the challenges that the two leaders – Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and British Royal Navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott — faced as they undertook their 1,800-mile journeys from the shores of the Ross Sea to the Pole and back. Race to the End of the Earth also spotlights modern scientific exploration in the Antarctic and the latest research on this unique continent.
Photographs, paintings, videos, vivid dioramas, hands-on activities, and rare historical artifacts from this Heroic Age give visitors a feel for the remarkable story of Antarctic exploration and research during the past century.
