Tonight the museum (and by that I mean the Denver Museum of Nature and Science) had a sort of "welcome new members" event, where they opened up after hours and had special presentations and other cool things. I love the museum, and my boyfriend recently got us a membership, so we went, and it was awesome.
First things first, we got there just in time to hear one of the resident space scientists talk about Mars, and the latest mission to Mars, which will be landing there (with the newest, biggest, shiniest Mars rover yet!) on August 5. They're going to have an event at the museum that night, and I am pretty sure I have to go. SO COOL. (A word about me: remember how excited I was about the LASERS? Well, I like SPACE even more.) It's nuclear powered! He talked about the evidence of liquid water on Mars in the past, and research being done about it.
Then we wandered about in Space Odessy, the museum's space exhibit, for a while. We were going to see the planetarium show, but the line was ridiculous and it is a regular show we can go see some other time-- not for free, but we can. So we checked out the meteorite cart, and of course I had to show off the spectroscopy cart-- spectroscopy is NEAT and I will blog about it another time-- and while we were doing so, we are visited by... Galileo!
Galileo is, of course, a museum staff member dressed in a silly hat with a platic telescope, and they have this whole skit where a volunteer thinks Galileo is just a disruptive visitor (he's making quite a scene) but the crowd cheers for Galileo to do his experiment-- what he calls the "leaning tower of pizza" experiment, with a big ball and a baby ball, to see which one falls faster. This is all very much for kids, and also awesome. The volunteer says "hang on, this isn't an experiment, we need a hypothesis!" and gets the kids to guess which will hit first. He then talks about how he is a SCIENTIST so he cannot merely THINK through a problem, he has to TEST it. Bravo! And so he drags out a ladder, and a kiddie pool, and it is revealed that his "big ball and baby ball" are in fact water balloons. He gets two people to help him-- he just calls them Kid and Other Kid-- and the volunteer stops him again: they need safety equipment! So the kids put on raincoats and goggles and shower caps, and Galileo takes off his glasses, and then he climbs the ladder and-- what do you know, they hit at the same time! The whole thing was hilarious and awesome.
Then we go to where they've got the backroom of the zoology collection open-- somewhat-- to the public. We get to see some of their invertebrates, and the attack beaver, and bats of every size, and a black rhino skull, and then we went into the room with the bugs and spiders and I had to move on a bit quickly because the brown recluse looked disturbingly like a spider I saw in my apartment last year and that creeped me out... but the giant bird eating tarantulas were neat, and the camel spiders are in fact really freaky looking. After those were the flesh eating beetle colonies. Turns out this is how they clean the specimens-- they skin them, and the skin gets put in the collection elsewhere, and then they throw them in a big box with flesh eating beetles, which clean them down to the bones, without damaging the skeletons. They even have a little taster tank-- if they suspect a specimen might poison the beetles, they throw it in there, first, to see if it kills the few they keep separate. So cool.
At that point we realized we were running out of time-- with me being all about SPACE and my boyfriend studying biology and zoology specifically, it's no wonder we got very distracted by those. We dropped in and saw a little of everything, picking up some swag along the way-- buy one get one free coupons for the IMAX shows, dinosaur posters, "slothtastic" stickers (which I can only assume are about the Snowmass dig, another cool thing I'll get around to talking about later), one of which has attached itself to my phone. We got to see a little more behind the scenes, where we chatted with a guy who works in the collection, and lots of other neat things that I will have to go back and see when we have more time.
All in all, a fantastic night at the museum.
First things first, we got there just in time to hear one of the resident space scientists talk about Mars, and the latest mission to Mars, which will be landing there (with the newest, biggest, shiniest Mars rover yet!) on August 5. They're going to have an event at the museum that night, and I am pretty sure I have to go. SO COOL. (A word about me: remember how excited I was about the LASERS? Well, I like SPACE even more.) It's nuclear powered! He talked about the evidence of liquid water on Mars in the past, and research being done about it.
Then we wandered about in Space Odessy, the museum's space exhibit, for a while. We were going to see the planetarium show, but the line was ridiculous and it is a regular show we can go see some other time-- not for free, but we can. So we checked out the meteorite cart, and of course I had to show off the spectroscopy cart-- spectroscopy is NEAT and I will blog about it another time-- and while we were doing so, we are visited by... Galileo!
Galileo is, of course, a museum staff member dressed in a silly hat with a platic telescope, and they have this whole skit where a volunteer thinks Galileo is just a disruptive visitor (he's making quite a scene) but the crowd cheers for Galileo to do his experiment-- what he calls the "leaning tower of pizza" experiment, with a big ball and a baby ball, to see which one falls faster. This is all very much for kids, and also awesome. The volunteer says "hang on, this isn't an experiment, we need a hypothesis!" and gets the kids to guess which will hit first. He then talks about how he is a SCIENTIST so he cannot merely THINK through a problem, he has to TEST it. Bravo! And so he drags out a ladder, and a kiddie pool, and it is revealed that his "big ball and baby ball" are in fact water balloons. He gets two people to help him-- he just calls them Kid and Other Kid-- and the volunteer stops him again: they need safety equipment! So the kids put on raincoats and goggles and shower caps, and Galileo takes off his glasses, and then he climbs the ladder and-- what do you know, they hit at the same time! The whole thing was hilarious and awesome.
Then we go to where they've got the backroom of the zoology collection open-- somewhat-- to the public. We get to see some of their invertebrates, and the attack beaver, and bats of every size, and a black rhino skull, and then we went into the room with the bugs and spiders and I had to move on a bit quickly because the brown recluse looked disturbingly like a spider I saw in my apartment last year and that creeped me out... but the giant bird eating tarantulas were neat, and the camel spiders are in fact really freaky looking. After those were the flesh eating beetle colonies. Turns out this is how they clean the specimens-- they skin them, and the skin gets put in the collection elsewhere, and then they throw them in a big box with flesh eating beetles, which clean them down to the bones, without damaging the skeletons. They even have a little taster tank-- if they suspect a specimen might poison the beetles, they throw it in there, first, to see if it kills the few they keep separate. So cool.
At that point we realized we were running out of time-- with me being all about SPACE and my boyfriend studying biology and zoology specifically, it's no wonder we got very distracted by those. We dropped in and saw a little of everything, picking up some swag along the way-- buy one get one free coupons for the IMAX shows, dinosaur posters, "slothtastic" stickers (which I can only assume are about the Snowmass dig, another cool thing I'll get around to talking about later), one of which has attached itself to my phone. We got to see a little more behind the scenes, where we chatted with a guy who works in the collection, and lots of other neat things that I will have to go back and see when we have more time.
All in all, a fantastic night at the museum.
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