Author: Eva Amsen

Great Barrier Reef

IMG_8468Are there places where science tourists shouldn’t go? Sometimes, visiting a destination also affects that destination. In a forest, it’s easy to minimize the damage: stay on the paths, pick up garbage, don’t scare the animals. But what if the place you want to visit is delicate, and has no paths to stay on – like a coral reef?

The Great Barrier Reef runs along the coast of Queensland and is the largest “superorganism” on earth (It can be seen from space, but, honestly, what can’t be seen from space these days). Even though it’s quite a distance from shore, it’s visited yearly by more than a million tourists and brings in several billion dollars each year. Continue reading “Great Barrier Reef”

Wellcome Collection

C0017129 Medicine Man Exhibition displaysThe Wellcome Collection bills itself as a “destination for the incurably curious”, and indeed, the last time I was there I spent a good few minutes opening the drawers of a large cabinet, one by one, to reveal strange old medical prints inside.

Henry Wellcome founded Burroughs Wellcome & Company in the late 19th century. The company later merged into what is now Glaxo Smith-Kline. When he died, he left his share of the company to trustees, to spend on health projects. The Wellcome Trust is currently one of the main funders of biomedical research in the UK.

The Wellcome Collection, however, is the result of Wellcome’s hobby, not of his work. Henry Wellcome collected medical artefacts from all over the world. Continue reading “Wellcome Collection”

The MIT Museum

I was in Boston a few months ago and managed a visit to the MIT Museum. I found the museum among the geeky travel destinations in the Geek Atlas – very much like my series here, but with more actual science. The Miracle of Science Bar + Grill, which lists its menu on a periodic table behind the bar, is only a few steps away from the MIT Museum, but it wasn’t open when I walked by.

Kismet!
Kismet!

The museum wasn’t open when I got there either. Apparently, getting places early is a thing I do. It was spring break. So, I waited with groups of school kids and their adults. When the doors opened, the groups had to wait to go in. I was able to walk past and immediately went upstairs, where it was still quiet. Upstairs is where you want to go to see the main exhibit. It’s very small, but there are lots of neat things to see. Like Kismet, the robot! (In fact, I just discovered that I saw Kismet on his tenth anniversary of being in the museum!). Continue reading “The MIT Museum”

La Brea Tar Pits

Help!A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) found a mammoth in their parking garage. It was dead, of course. The mammoth was one of hundreds of fossil specimens recovered in the expansion of the museum’s underground parking garage.

They were expecting this.

LACMA is built directly next to the La Brea Tar Pits, an area where oil has been bubbling up to the surface of the earth for thousands of years. In that time, many animals got stuck in the tar, causing a very local high density of fossils. Continue reading “La Brea Tar Pits”

GeoGuessr

GEoGuessrCropI’ve traveled all over the world the past week, without leaving my house. Like many travel geeks I’ve been playing GeoGuessr – the game where you have to guess the location from a streetview image, and get as many points as possible in five rounds.

Everyone plays it differently, but my rules are as follows: you can move around in the area to look for clues, but you can’t use Google to find locations. So even if you find out the name of the town you’re in, you still have to find it on the map. Continue reading “GeoGuessr”