Author: Eva Amsen

Finding Nemo isn’t difficult. The science and technology museum has a prominent spot in Amsterdam, over the tunnel underneath the IJ*, the main water in the North of the city. The architect, Renzo Piano, built the structure to be an inversion of the tunnel below, but thanks to the green copper siding the structure also resembles a large cargo ship. In summer, you can sit on the upper deck (ie the roof) of Nemo and get a great view of the city.

Even though I’ve been on the roof/deck, and I’ve been inside once for an award ceremony, I’ve never properly been to Nemo. Not in this shipshape building, anyway. Continue reading “Nemo – Amsterdam’s science center”

I’ve never been to Yellowstone National Park, but it’s on my list of places I want to visit, not only for the beautiful scenery and spectacular hot springs and geysers, but also because it’s the site of origin of one of the most famous molecules in molecular biology.

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Thomas Brock is a retired biologist who started his career in the early 1950s, as a microbiologist. He preferred the outdoors over the lab, so he started looking for opportunities to do more ecological studies, and in 1963 he launched a program focused on the study of  microbes living in geysers and hot springs. These pools were considered to be naturally occurring steady-state ecosystems. Sort of like a controlled lab setting, but outdoors. Brock hoped that organisms the hot water pools would allow him to better understand the physiological limits of photosynthesis, but he soon made a much more interesting discovery. Continue reading “Yellowstone National Park – birthplace of Taq”

Happy New Year!

My first year here on The Finch and Pea has been a busy one. You can see all my science travel posts to date (and some posts by others – see further down this post) on the map below. However, as I alluded to last year, I’ve run out of science travel destinations that I’ve been to, so this year is going to be a little different.

First of all, as usual, if you would like to write a science-related travel guest post, get in touch! Ironically, I sometimes don’t have time for my weekly travel post because I travel too much, so any help to cover those weeks is very welcome.

Second, I’m going to be focusing on places I have NOT been, so if you have suggestions, throw them my way. They can be destinations that are themselves of scientific interest but possibly hard to get to (Mariana Trench, the moon), great science or natural history museums that we haven’t yet covered, destinations with an interesting scientific history (VLA, Galapagos), or combinations of the above. As you can see I’ve come up with some myself, but my imagination has limits.

Finally, we’re adding some destinations to the Have Science Will Travel Map: Destinations that may not have been covered on The Finch and Pea, but that appeared on other blogs.

Over the break I added these five posts/locations to the map:

Stuck in Antarctica’s Icy Grasp – One of Alok Jha’s updates from his time on the Akademik Shokalskiy while it was stuck in the ice. Actually, I believe that as of this time, the ship is still stuck, but Alok and others have been rescued by helicopter in the mean time.

Another one from Antarctica, but this one from a staff member at Palmer Station. “May you live in interesting times”.

Monarch Butterflies at the Ellwood Butterfly Grove in Goleta, California. This is a post from travel blog The Intrepid Tourist, and from the same blog I also added Akumal, Mexico, place of the sea turtles.

Last but not least, I added a post from the travel blog that my friend and former lab mate Roberta kept during the year she took a sabbatical from her work as a science teacher to literally travel around the world. One of her stops was Tanzania, where she volunteered with a group of teenagers to make them more aware of local wildlife conservation efforts. In All Good Things Must Come to an End she describes what they did in the programme, and how the kids went to the nature reserve for the very first time to finally see the wildlife they had been studying.

Know of any other science travel posts? Send them our way and we’ll consider them for the map. I’ll do some regular updates after we’ve added a few new ones.

In the 17th century, it was pretty difficult to figure out where you were when on a ship at sea. Navigation by stars was the most accurate way, but it was usually just used as a guideline for which direction you were going. The ultimate goal was to know the exact latitude and longitude of your location. Latitude – how far North or South you are – could be measured by looking at the position of the sun or (other) stars over the horizon, but longitude was much harder.

To solve the problem of longitude, King Charles II ordered the construction of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and hired an Astronomer Royal, to “find the so much desired longitude of places for the perfecting of the art of navigation”.

In the end, it wasn’t the Astronomer Royal, but a Yorkshire clockmaker who worked out how to determine longitude at sea using a very accurate clock.

Today, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich is most famous not just for celestial-based navigation, but for the Greenwich Meridian. Unlike the lines of latitude, determined by the poles and equator, the lines of longitude are arbitrary. Greenwich was officially declared to be longitude 0° at a conference in 1884, and the line is marked by a metal strip and a long line of tourists in the courtyard of the observatory.

Inside the Observatory buildings are exhibits about astronomy, navigation and time. I thought it would be a fitting destination to mark my last science travel post of 2013, because it’s not just about science travel, but also about the science of travel – and time!

In 2014 I’ll start writing about science travel destinations that I haven’t visited yet, but would like to visit. Latitudes and longitudes still to be determined.

And don’t forget to check out our Have Science Will Travel map: