In this week’s featured article, the Association of Art Museum Curators has moved it’s May conference to Detroit in a show of support for the DIA. Since they city’s bankruptcy, the DIA’s iconic collection has been under threat. If you haven’t seen the DIA, you …
by Cira Brown “Look closer”, “dig deeper”… if you’re doing that, you’re the type of museum visitor that we love. But how do we foster that level of engagement? “Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Every Day Things”, currently on view at the MIT Museum, aspires to …
by columnist Kacie Rice
This weekend, after a busy and stressful few weeks of moving apartments and starting classes, I decided to go old-school and explore the original science museum: the nature reservation! I put on my boots and went to unwind in nature with a hike in our very own forest, the Middlesex Fells Reservation in Medford. I often find that short day hikes allow me to take on the role of John Falk’s “spiritual pilgrim,” though on this occasion, I found myself more of an “explorer” as I found new trails to discover. The Friends of the Fells, a nonprofit preservation group, maintains a website with various trail maps, where I found a map and PDF guide for the Spot Pond Brook Archaeological District Self-Guided Tour, a 0.8 mile loop that passes through former mill settlements in the Virginia Wood forest. Interested hikers can download the guide, which gives background information on eleven different sites marked with numbered posts along the trail.
by columnist Madeline Karp About this time last year, I attended a NEMA conference session entitled “Spectacle or Motivator? Violent Content in Exhibitions.” Amy Weisser, Director of Exhibit Development at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum, spent a good deal of time talking about …
This week’s featured article, a fascinating math museum that makes learning look so much fun I want to try it. In other news:
by Catherine Sigmond
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening in Fukushima, Japan, recently, let me summarize the current situation: after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered a triple meltdown- the only incident other than the Chernobyl disaster to earn the highest rating of 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Since then, the constant pumping of cold water to cool the reactors has contained the meltdown. However, this process generates hundreds of tons of radioactive wastewater each day. There’s increasingly less space to store this contaminated water, and last month it was discovered that around 300 tons of it had leaked into the ground. The crisis, which in recent months had been bumped down from its initial rating of 7 to 1, was just increased to 3. In other words, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what to do, and the situation is nowhere near being resolved.
Continue reading Science in Museums: Fukushima’s Fallout for Science Museums