Event 2 - Natural History Museum

Last weekend I visited the Natural History Museum. It was my first time at the museum, so I went in not knowing quite what to expect. I was initially greeted by well, natural history. Dinosaur skeletons and animal exhibits made up the first part of the day. Nothing too technology-related there!

No tech here, unless you count the smartphone used to take this photo of me and a triceratops skeleton.

It wasn’t until I hit the Dino Lab that I got to really see technology and history come together. I got to see scientists working to preserve and restore fossils. Temperature control, vacuum sealing techniques and a whole amalgam of preservations techniques that I couldn’t understand were on display here. Getting to see modern technology used to keep the past intact and potentially increase our understanding of the creatures that lived on Earth millions of years ago was something I found incredibly neat. I even see 3-D printing being a potential way of restoring skeleton models when the original article becomes too fragile to handle. Apparently as of only four days ago, a skeleton of King Richard III was 3D printed- surely dinosaurs can’t be too far off, right?

Bone science!

The exhibit that fascinated me the most easily had to have been the Becoming LA feature, a full-blown chunk of the museum dedicated to the history of Los Angeles. I got to take a look at how technology evolved over the course of hundreds of years, and the various landmarks that came to Los Angeles as a result. I thought that one of the most thought-provoking attributes of the exhibit was the lighting of the room. The hall grew gradually brighter and more illuminated as “time” passed in the exhibit, which according to The Los Angeles Daily News, represented time sweeping into bright new technology away from metaphorically darker ages. Seeing wooden buggies be replaced by sleek sedans and even looking at the initial build plan for UCLA was a trip to say the least, and really offered a new perspective on how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. Dinosaurs may have been stomping about over a hundred million years ago, but we only installed running water in the US two hundred years ago, and now we have electric cars and phones that tell us where to drive them. That’s kind of bananas if you ask me.

A new degree of "vintage cars"
Works Cited

Barrera, Sandra. "Natural History Museum's New Exhibit Tells Story of a City Still 'Becoming Los Angeles'" Los Angeles Daily News. Los Angeles Daily News, 11 July 2013. Web. 30 July 2014.

Ferguson, Dana. "'Becoming Los Angeles' Explains L.A.'s 240-year Journey." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.

Krassenstein, Brian. "King Richard III’s Entire 3D Printed Skeleton Unveiled For Museum Opening." 3DPrint.com. 3DPrint.com, 25 July 2014. Web. 29 July 2014.

Landi, Ann. "'Becoming Los Angeles' at the Natural History Museum." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 20 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.

Lee, Elizabeth. "Los Angeles Natural History Museum Redefined." VOA Online. VOA News, 09 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.