Museum Launches Groundbreaking Explorer App to Rave Reviews

07.29.10

The American Museum of Natural History’s Explorer, a groundbreaking free app for iPhone and iPod touch that is part navigation system, part personal tour guide, is already garnering rave reviews.

Explorer is “nothing less than state-of-the art,” writes Gizmodo’s Kyle VanHemert. “I roamed around the fourth floor of the museum this morning with the Explorer as my guide…. it was an excellent adventure.”

Using the Museum’s new public WiFi system, Explorer pinpoints a user’s location and offers turn-by-turn directions to exhibits, cafés, restrooms, and other facilities as well as information about more than 140 objects and specimens, custom tours, and a dinosaur treasure hunt. Visitors can create their own tours on the spot, share their adventures by posting to Facebook and Twitter, and bookmark favorite objects to receive links with more information to explore from home.

The app can be downloaded for free to iPhone or iPod touch devices, and visitors can also borrow one of more than 350 devices from the Museum at no charge.

“While many museums have released apps in the past few years—including the Louvre, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Graphic Design Museum in Breda, The Netherlands—this is by far the most robust we’ve seen,” writes Lauren Indvik on Mashable, a news site for social and digital media, technology, and web culture. “We’re especially impressed that the Museum is ensuring that the technology is available to everyone by offering both devices and tech support to visitors.”

Explorer, which was also recently featured on NY1, is the latest mobile app from the AmericanMuseum of Natural History. Earlier this year, the Museum launched Dinosaurs: The American Museum of Natural History Collections app, which showcases the Museum’s world-class fossil collection.

For more on the Explorer, check out the how-to video below.

Eleanor Sterling Blogs for The New York Times from Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge

07.29.10

Eleanor Sterling, director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, began blogging this week for The New York Times from the pristine Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific, where she and six Museum colleagues are studying the green and hawksbill sea turtles. This is the conservation biologist’s second stint with the new feature“Scientist At Work: Notes from the Field,” which was inaugurated in April by Christopher Raxworthy, curator in the Museum’s Department of Herpetology, with vivid accounts of his search for chameleons, frogs, and lizards in Madagascar. Sterling previously reported from the rainforests of Vietnam where she was part of a team surveying one of the last remaining populations of the gray-shanked douc langurs in the wild.

The Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge is a unique environment relatively free from human influence. “We are smack in the middle of nowhere, just above the equator in the Pacific — about a thousand miles south of Hawaii,” Sterling wrote in her post to set the scene. “The total human population on the atoll varies month to month because it consists entirely of refuge managers, researchers and the research station crew. This two-week period we have 17 on the atoll.”

Sterling and her team are trying to understand the importance of the remote, uninhabited atoll as a foraging, as opposed to a nesting, site for turtles migrating across the Pacific Ocean. Now readers can peek over the scientists’ shoulders for the next few weeks.

Credit: F. Arengo

New Research Offers Hope for A Rapidly Disappearing Plant

07.27.10

Cycads — plants with a 300-million-year-old evolutionary history — have suffered staggering declines in recent years.  One species, Cycas micronesica, which is endemic to Guam and other islands, has lost over 90 percent of its population within the a period of four years due to invasive species and habitat loss. But new research from a team that includes Museum scientists recently found that genetic diversity among these cycads offers hope for future conservation efforts.

The team, which includes Museum researcher Angélica Cibrían-Jaramillo, sampled this species on Guam and analyzed their genetic relationships. The results showed that local populations have some genetic diversity and moderate genetic variation with some inbreeding, which is what would be expected in longer-lived plants with similar patterns of seed dispersal.

The research also shows that cycads in the south, where smaller Cycas micronesica seeds float long distances along rivers unhampered by dense forests, are more genetically diverse than cycad populations in the north.

Researchers expect that these findings will provide tools for conservation efforts.

“We hope these results from the plant perspective will fit into the management of invasive insects in general, which is one of the most important drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide and very costly economically,” says Museum Curator Rob DeSalle, who conducts research in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.

Cibrián-Jaramillo, who is also a researcher at The New York Botanical Garden, and DeSalle collaborated with Thomas Marley of the University of Guam, Aidan Daley of the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, and Eric Brenner of New York University.

For more information, see the Museum’s press release.

Marking Franz Boas’s Birthday

07.23.10

This month marks the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, a prominent Museum curator who is often called the father of American anthropology. During his 10-year tenure at the Museum and later as the first professor of anthropology at Columbia University, Boas established anthropology as a recognized branch of scientific inquiry and debunked prevailing beliefs about the superiority of Western civilization.

Supported by several museums, Boas led research expeditions along the North Pacific Coast of North America and trained a new generation of anthropologists, including future Museum Curator Margaret Mead.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Boas’s birth in 2008, Museum Curator Peter Whiteley – who studies the cultures and histories of Native North America from the 17th century to the present — commemorated this bold pioneer in apaper presented at a colloquium on Engaged and Public Anthropology at the Museum.

Check out a few excerpts below.

On Boas’s early interest in anthropology

“Boas’s attraction to what was to become “anthropology” emerged from a coalescence of interests in physics, mathematics and physical geography, as well
as a deep-rooted family background in social justice… In consequence, Boas’s take on the interpretation of culture was both rigorously
empirical, and assiduously attentive to the discourses and practices of his Native American interlocutors.”

On how Boas transformed anthropology

“Although a few scholars had used the term “culture” in the plural before, it was Boas who truly transformed scientific and, in time, popular understanding by his insistence on individual cultures as opposed to a great, monolithic plod of social evolution from lower to higher forms of culture.”

On Boas’s legacy

“…A paradigm shift in the understanding of human cultures that over time has transformed all global thought on the subject…an explicitly collaborative record of Native American cultural and linguistic forms that in its range and depth is almost incredible…a bottom line commitment to human rights enacted in his own life and practice…[and] a fierce defense of the sanctity of academic freedom to inquire and to speak out as a public intellectual…

Boas’s anthropology, as that of many of his students, notably Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, went against the grain of conventional wisdom and conventional practice, to produce a truly liberating discourse celebrating the varieties of the human condition that has now spread to all corners of the globe and multiple forms of social discourse.”

Bone By Bone: The Delicate Art of Fossil Preparation

07.23.10

Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. (c) AMNH/D. Finnin

Two decades ago, a chunk of sand containing a nearly perfect 80-million-year-old lizard fossil — just pulled loose from the red desert floor and resting on the hood of a Jeep — exploded into dust when touched by a member of the Museum’s annual summer expedition to the Gobi desert. A preparator knows why: paleontology depends on glue.

“Some of the fossils from Ukhaa Tolgod, this massive dinosaur graveyard found in 1993, survive only because they are so tightly packed in sand,” says Amy Davidson, one of the Museum’s senior fossil preparators, who happened to be on that expedition. In a cavernous room perched over several stories of meticulously labeled fossils, she darts to a beautifully fragile and nearly complete dinosaur skull.

“This fossil was also turning into crumbs,” she continues. “We need to know our adhesives. I stabilized the porous bone and sandy matrix (any material in which fossils are embedded) with just the right strength and solubility to be able to sculpt out the fossil, just like a magician pulls a tablecloth from under the table setting.” Last year, this delicate carnivorous cousin toTyrannosaurus rex was described and named Alioramus altai.

Fossil preparation requires an uncommon degree of adaptability and patience. Museum preparators bring to the task diverse sets of skills from such backgrounds as art, paleontology, and archaeology. They generally learn their craft on the job, drawing from related fields such as object conservation to adapt modern glues, solvents, and other archival materials to stabilize fragile areas or repair damage.
But the basic approach remains the same. Davidson, for example, removes her frameless glasses to face a fossil through her microscope, resting her wrists on a black velvet sandbag, securing a fine needle between her thumb and index finger, and using her third and fourth fingers to lightly touch the specimen. She moves almost imperceptibly, for minutes on end, carefully excavating a jaw from the soft sand. At the ready, laid out on a cutting board, are her preferred tools of the trade: brushes and droppers for dispensing glue, needles of different sizes and shapes for excavating, an air pedal for removing scraps of matrix, and glass jars of carefully labeled adhesives. Read more »