Museum Blog

Number of Articles: 270

Largest Bird Ever!: Zoology Object of the Week (April 18, 2011)

Posted 04/17/2011 by John Demboski | Comments
Shown next to a ruby-throated hummingbird nest with eggs, is an intact elephant bird egg. The flightless elephant bird (Aepyornis sp.), endemic to Madagascar, was the largest bird ever known clocking in at 500-1000 pounds and reaching about 10 feet high. The egg above is about 12 …
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Why Are Humans So Different

Posted 04/15/2011 by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh | Comments
Diversity is a fundamental question for anthropology--that goes to the heart of our common past and also our common future. In this way, anthropology has much to contribute to natural history museums, which study and celebrate the concept of diversity. How Can We Explain Human Diversity? …
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Unsmiling Indians

Posted 04/15/2011 by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh | Comments
Is there anything Google can't teach us? Even about stereotypes, for example. A casual Culture Lab experiment began a few days ago, after I heard about a YouTube video called "Smiling Indians." The idea behind this short film is that Native Americans are almost always shown in historic phot…
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AChemS 2011 Day 3 Chemesthesis

Posted 04/15/2011 by Nicole Garneau | Comments
New Frontiers in Chemesthesis: pronounced keem-E-thesis, think perception of pain, temperature, and touch (can be used in all sensory organs)- in the mouth it includes pain from capsaicin in hot peppers, menthol cooling sensation, and the signals are sent to the brain through cranial nerve V- …
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AChemS 2011 Day 2 Recap

Posted 04/14/2011 by Nicole Garneau | Comments
Day 2 Recap I woke up to the sounds of "Bell Tower" through my phone's alarm clock, and could not for the life of me understand why my husband hasn't hadn't hit snooze already, "but wait!" I realized groggily, "I'm in Florida, not in Denver, that must be the alarm I set last night." In…
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AChemS 2011 Optogenetics Craze

Posted 04/14/2011 by Nicole Garneau | Comments
Optogenetics is not the newest craze (dates back to 2002), but it has huge potential and momentum (one peer reviewed article in 2006, exponential growth predicts 280 scientitsts will publish using this method in 2012). Optogenetics allows scientitsts to selectively express a gene in neurons…
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Bed Bug Bite

Posted 04/14/2011 by Frank Krell | Comments
Bed Bugs are surging in the United States. Denver is one of the cities most affected by recent outbreaks of these blood-sucking insects. DMNS has produced a short video about the problem, the first Science Bite this year. Some more information about the problem can be found in the June/July nu…
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AChemS 2011 Day 1

Posted 04/13/2011 by Nicole Garneau | Comments
Made it to FL in one piece, no holes in the plane. Here's Meghan carrying our two posters we will present to the scientists and meeting attendees. Today was registration, an awards banquet and a cool key note address by Dr. Karel Svoboda on how mice use whiskers to identify objects -- scientis…
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Mission Impossible: Conservation-style

Posted 04/07/2011 by Meghan McFarlane | Comments
Have you always wanted to be a secret agent & a conservator? If so, check out this great interactive website from National Museums Liverpool where you can review real science related to museum artifacts and guess the culprit behind the damage you see: Agents of Deteriora…
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A Tale of Two Shoes

Posted 04/06/2011 by Meghan McFarlane | Comments
DMNS aims to preserve excellent examples of our natural and cultural world. What you may not know, however, is that we also preserve artifacts pertaining to our museum's history. Among the artifacts in our Archives Department are the original mailbox for the Colorado Museum of…
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