Smithsonian.com

Museum Day is Saturday, September 26

One of the best things about living in (or visiting) Washington, D.C. is the wealth of free museums and other cultural experiences. There are the Smithsonian museums, including of course the National Zoo, but also the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives and the National Arboretum, to name a few. But outside of the capital, going to the museum can mean spending a decent chunk of money.

This Saturday, though, more than 1,200 museums throughout the United States are offering free admission through the Smithsonian magazine Museum Day program. (Visit the program’s web site to download a Museum Day admission card to receive free general admission for you and a guest at participating Museum Day locations.)

Being partial to science, I was going to go through the list of participants and pick out the science museums for you. That was before I realized that the program had gotten so big. When it began a few years ago, there were only 100 museums participating. But you can search through the listings by state or plug in your address and find your closest participating museums.

If you’re near Philadelphia, I recommend The Franklin Institute, which I visited just last month (to see the now-closed Galileo exhibit). It’s a very hands-on science museum, and my friend and I had as much, if not more, fun than the kids there. Walking through a huge model of a human heart, I realized that the path blood takes through it is not really efficient (but then, the heart was never designed, was it?). And I’m sure I had a dopey grin on my face the whole time we played with the physics experiments in Sir Isaac’s Loft.

Which museum will you visit?

Edvard Munch’s Starry Night, 1893 (credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

Forensic astronomer Don Olson solves puzzles. He looks at pieces of art, passages of literature and stories from history and uses science to answer questions like: Why is the sky red in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream? (Gas and ash from the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa produced colored skies worldwide.)

When I spoke to Olson last year (see “Celestial Sleuth” from the April issue), he said he was delving into the details behind three more Munch paintings and would soon be going to Norway. The results of his studies now appear in the August issue of the Griffith Observer.

The three paintings—Starry Night, The Storm and Sunrise in Åsgårdstrand—were created in 1893, according to detailed Munch chronologies. However, just when Munch visited to Norwegian coastal town of Åsgårdstrand during that year was unknown, and some biographers questioned whether he had visited the town at all in 1893. Astronomical details in the three paintings could provide some clarity in the matter.

Olson consulted personal accounts of Munch acquaintances, contemporary newspaper articles and historical photographs. He and his colleagues visited Åsgårdstrand to make a topographical survey of the town and to check out the views from various buildings. And they created computer simulations of the sky and parts of the town during Munch’s supposed time there.

“In one of the most moving moments of our trip, we realized we were standing on the same floorboards by the same window where the artist himself had looked out to watch the rising sun, more than a century before,” Olson writes.

Munch viewed the image he painted in Starry Night (which hangs in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles) from the center of the upper floor of Åsgårdstrand’s Grand Hotel, Olson and his colleagues determined. The group of linden trees on the right side of the painting still stands today. The white line in the trees, which some had speculated was the glitter path of the moon, was a flagpole with a round ball at the top. The pole is gone, but there is a depression in the grass that marks its former base. The stars in the upper left corner of the image include the planet Jupiter and the Pleiades. And based on the position of Jupiter and local weather reports, the painting likely shows the evening twilight of August 16 or 23, 1893.

The Storm (which can be seen on the Museum of Modern Art web site) depicts a woman in white in front of a building as a storm approaches. A single star can be seen in the upper right corner. An eyewitness wrote of Munch’s creating the image the day after a sudden change in the weather during August 1893. An Oslo newspaper wrote of the strong thunderstorm, which occurred on August 19. The building is the Grand Hotel, Olson’s group found, and the star is Arcturus, which would have appeared in that spot around 9:15 P.M. on the day of the storm.

Sunrise in Åsgårdstrand (which unfortunately sits in a private collection and cannot be seen online) shows a house with a view of the fjord beyond. A rising sun casts a glitter path on the water to the left of the house. A small building below this path is a boathouse. Olson discovered that almost this exact scene could be seen from the upper floor of Soelberggården, a house near the one depicted in the painting and which was once owned by one of Munch’s friends. The trees in the image are now taller, and the house has had a dormer added, but historical photographs helped to match up the view. The sun would have appeared in the spot where Munch painted it only during the first week of April 1893, when he is known to have been in Germany, and the first five days of September. The only day when the weather matched the September dates, though, was September 3, and the sun shone at that spot in the sky at 5:30 A.M.

Munch, therefore, must have visited the coastal town for at least a three-week period in 1853, between mid-August and early September.

When my daughter was small, I used to take her to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, I would explain why the dinosaurs disappeared and how mankind evolved from our primitive forebears. She seemed rapt. But a few weeks ago, after hearing me on the radio discuss a new book about Charles Darwin, my daughter, now 25, suggested that we reverse roles—she’d take me to the museum. She said my understanding of Darwinism needed some fine-tuning.

Thus begins Joe Queenan’s excellent Last Page essay, Darwin for Dads, in Smithsonian magazine’s August issue, now online. It’s another month packed with science. Here are the highlights:

August 2009 Smithsonian

River of Riches: The Cahaba, an unsung Alabama waterway, turns out to be one of the most biologically diverse places in the nation

Finding Herod’s Tomb: Archaeologists and treasure hunters had long scoured a mountain outside Jerusalem for the biblical king’s resting place. Ehud Netzer is certain he has found it—mere steps from where he stood decades before

Mad About Shells: For centuries, scientists, collectors and thieves risked life, limb and fortune to gather the rarest specimens. Now interest is turning to the medical potential of the animals within

Galileo’s Vision: Four hundred years ago, the Italian scientist looked into space and changed our view of the universe. A new exhibit brings one of his telescopes to the U.S. for the first time

Blue Sky Thinking: How an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives hammered out the strategy known as cap-and-trade

Evolution’s Big Bang: A storied trove of fossils from Canada’s Burgess Shale is yielding new clues to an explosion of life on earth

Cracking the Code: Smithsonian scientists barcode every plant on a small island near Washington, D.C.

Wild Things: Snakes, Siberian jays, laughing apes, guilty-looking dogs and a new plant structure—snow roots

Last week, we announced the winners of Smithsonian magazine’s 6th Annual Photo Contest. This photo, A starfish greets the sun after a hurricane, by Brandon Pendred of Spartanburg, South Carolina, won the Natural World Category.

Walking the beach after a strong storm struck Kiawah Island, S.C., Pendred found a starfish washed ashore, its arm gently uplifted. “In my mind,” he recalls, “I thought that was a cry for help, or maybe it was just trying to say, ‘Hello, please try not to step on me.’ I took a few photos and then picked him up and laid him back in the water.”

Have you taken an amazing photograph? Entries are now being taken in our 7th Annual Photo Contest.

Zeynel Bey Mausoleum, Hasankeyf (courtesy of flickr user birasuegi)

I don’t know how archaeologists keep from going stark staring mad. Not from the long, hot hours digging in the dirt, or the difficulty of using pot sherds, post holes and bits of bone to recreate an ancient culture. What’s got to be the most frustrating thing about being an archaeologist is watching precious traces of history be lost to the elements, poachers or (ahem) progress.

But there’s good news this week for archaeology fans: the dam that would submerge the 10,000-year-old city of Hasankeyf in Turkey just lost its funding. The Environmental News Service has the story, which was picked up by Brendan Borrell (who has written about chili peppers and big scary cassowaries for us) at Scientific American.

Hasankeyf, on the banks of the Tigris River, was home to a Roman fortress, a Byzantine bishopric, the Turkish Artukids, the Kurdish Ayyubids, the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire and now modern Turkey. The government proposed moving some of the city’s monuments to higher ground, as the Egyptians did with Abu Simbel and other temples when the Aswan Dam was built. But protests from archaeologists and environmentalists (the proposed Ilisu Dam would disrupt downstream ecosystems) seem to have swayed public opinion against the dam. Its main funders, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, are apparently backing out of the project.

Smithsonian magazine’s story about Hasankeyf was part of a package about 15 must-see endangered cultural sites. We’ll keep you updated about the status of the others—and please let us know if you hear anything about them. There are so many things for an archaeology fan to worry about: a Peruvian adobe city that is in danger of being dissolved by rain, Inuit relics lost to sea level rise, a fort in India shaken by earthquakes and an Irish archaeological site that could be intersected by a new toll road. But it’s great to know that Hasankeyf is high and dry for now.

That’s Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.” The sulfur-crested cockatoo has our web staff hooked, and they’re not even angry about the earworm I unintentionally planted in their brains. Snowball is featured on our Wild Things page in the July issue, which just went online last week. We’ve also got video of some odd dancing algae on that same page.

July 2009 Smithsonian

But Wild Things is just the start of a science-rich July Smithsonian. There’s a special Frontiers of Science section, which has stories about robot babies, wave energy and a new kind of RNA. I was already looking forward to the exhibit of China’s terracotta warriors, which will come to D.C. at the end of the year, but now that I’ve seen our photos, I’m really excited. The 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is coming up, and our story reminds me that I’ll need to write about it here, too (don’t worry, I’ve got something good planned for you). “The World’s Largest Fossil Wilderness” tells of an incredible fossil find deep in an Illinois coal mine. And Food and Think blogger Amanda profiles “Ant Man” Mark Moffett (check out his Web site Doctor Bugs–if you search, you can find video of his 2008 marriage to Melissa Wells atop an Easter Island volcano, which Amanda mentions in the article).

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My colleague Abigail Tucker, who wrote a story on narwhal biologist Kristin Laidre, “In Search of the Mysterious Narwhal” for the May issue of Smithsonian, just got the most hilarious gift—The Avenging Narwhal Play Set.

The set is complete with a plastic narwhal; four interchangeable tusks, each with special powers (crystal: mind control, hypnosis, global communication; onyx: instant paralysis; ruby: drains the blood of its victims; and ice: freezes water, creates icebergs, chills beverages) and three representatives of the narwhal’s enemy species (penguin, snow seal and koala).

The avenging Narwhal has speared a snow seal on its magical ruby tusk.

The narwhal’s “true” story appears on the back of the box:

For centuries, the Narwhal was the great mystery of the sea. With the body of a whale and the horn of a Unicorn, many people believed that these fascinating creatures were harmless inhabitants of the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean. Recent studies, however, have exposed the secret agenda of these mysterious mammals and the true purposed of their extraordinarily long pointy tusks.

The studies revealed that millions of years ago, penguins, snow seals and koalas ruled the earth. For sustenance, they feasted upon whales, dolphins and other sea mammals to the point of near extinction. But the Narwhal went into hiding beneath the ice of the North Pole, biding their time, planning their revenge and sharpening their tusks. Finally, they reemerged, tusks gleaming with newfound magical power, and fought back against the adorable creatures that threatened their existence. The battle was long, and many Narwhal were lost, but their strong will and sharp tusks were enough to stave off the cute ones temporarily.

Now, once a year, in a continuous effort to keep their enemies at bay, the Narwhal leave their homes to embark on a treacherous migration to Antarctica in the hunt for baby penguins and seal pups. Many will not return…. Along their journey, they will spend time in Australia, swimming upstream to the inland habitat of the koalas, where they will actually leap out of the water to spear the deadly koalas from their perches high in the Eucalyptus trees.

We’re left to wonder whether the avenging Narwhal will turn on humans, perhaps in retribution for anthropogenic climate change—the Arctic could be ice-free in the summer within 30 years, according to a study published earlier this month.

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For the truth on real-life narwhals, though, read our story and watch the video that goes along with it. And if you’re curious what narwhal tastes like, check out this post on Food and Think.

The Last Page column (our funny page) in Smithsonian’s May issue is dedicated to people who missed the cut for Macarthur “Genius” Grants. An example:

STAN LINDBERG — EXPERIMENTAL CHEMIST
Forging new frontiers in chemistry as he seeks to be the first man to consume every single element of the periodic table. In addition to holding the North American record for mercury poisoning, his gonzo account of a three-week ytterbium bender in the December 2001 issue of Science (“Fear and Loathing in the Lanthanides”) has become a minor classic.

This got me wondering: Just what is ytterbium anyway?

Ytterbium (chemical symbol Yb, atomic number 70) is a soft, silvery white metal found in minerals such as gadolinite, monazite and xenotime. It is a rare earth element and as the Science article indicates, a member of the lanthanides on the periodic table.

The element is one of three (three!) named after the Swedish town of Ytterby, which the guys from the Periodic Table of Videos visited in their recently updated video about ytterbium: