Event name: Excursion to the National Museum of Natural History

Event time and place: 12/2/2023 at the National Museum of Natural History

  1. The exhibit uses things like comics, interactives, and videos to get their message across. I felt that the comics were effective, as they were an interesting way to display information in a way that appeals to the younger audiences that the exhibit is clearly targeting. The interactives were also engaging, allowing the audience the ability to immerse themselves in the activities by participating in them. I don’t think the video of what people were doing with phones for science was particularly engaging, it was kind of stuck in the corner with a very limited seating area and didn’t do anything particularly unique like some of the other video presentations in the museum.
  2. Cellphones are made with finite resources and often disposed of poorly, causing emissions and waste. The stories are told through graphs and looking at the people involved. Through graphs, we can see the stats and the very impactful, very large numbers of what cellphone manufacturing and disposal is doing to the environment. By telling the stories of people like Ibrahim Akarima involved in cellphone waste disposal, it lets us attach faces to these issues and persuades us to act with a more personal urgency.
  3. The exhibit shows us social movements starting online over social media and privacy issues caused by cellphones, shown through comics, a method of communication that will likely resonate with the younger social media users who the exhibit is trying to inform through the comics. Reading comics is very common among young people, and they will naturally be more attracted to those formats that they know, but rarely see in museums. Technology is spread and developed using data from cellphones. Researchers can get valuable data using the convenience, power, and ubiquity of cellphones that they use to develop things that will benefit the world. This is shown through a long series of videos showcasing lots of different technologies made or supported with cellphones.
  4. Co2 levels: The exhibit uses graphs to show how humans, through carbon emissions from things like burning fossil fuels, have skyrocketed the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in recent years. Disease spread: Because we have warmed the earth and have incredibly dense populations in cities, diseases like the flu, the bubonic plague, and cholera are able to spread and kill many people. This is shown through the timeline on the wall and of various factoids around the exhibit. Food production: The exhibit focuses a lot on food production. The timeline showcases when humans started to grow different crops. They have a bunch of plastic toy animals in a tube to show how much livestock is used by humans. The exhibit shows how humans have grown their own food, and as such, grown themselves.
  5. I definitely agree. The exhibit puts almost no focus on the negative impacts of humans on the environment. It mostly focuses on food production and disease. It’s not that that’s inherently an uninteresting topic, but I would expect an exhibit about humans changing the world to be about how humans change the world.
  6. In Hohonu moana, they explore the deep sea of Hawaii and look at different animals with the okeanos explorer. It’s pretty understandable, just lots of pictures of animals that are found in the deep sea of Hawaii. In Hurricane hunters, the video describes what you need for a hurricane, that being warm air and water. Warmer temperatures make for stronger hurricanes, which is one of the reasons why global warming is such an issue.
  7. It talks about the dangers of increased co2. Fossil fuels have been causing lots of increased co2 emissions, rapidly adding co2 into the atmosphere. The oceans are becoming more acidic, killing fish we rely on for survival. Temperatures are warming, destroying habitats of animals, spreading disease, and causing powerful storms. Our oceans are key to life, giving us water and oxygen and food. Tectonic plates move constantly very slowly, changing our earths formation to what it is today. Plate movement is causing volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and tsunamis. 3 layers of ocean currents move water from place to place, influencing our weather. The globe format is used to show off the global scale of the topics discussed and connections between all oceans. The format is useful, since it gives a clear way to see the changes going on on a global scale.
  8. During the Jurassic period in the seas, the Earth had high carbon dioxide levels with high temperatures and high sea levels. 34 million years ago on land and sea, the earth had decreased carbon dioxide and cold areas, with lower sea levels. These exhibits get the point across, but lack much detail about the conditions of the time period.
  9. Fossil records from plants and animals tell us about a heat wave 56 million years ago. Protein in plant leaves tells us that co2 levels increased, mammals got smaller, and species that preferred heat became more common. Sediment levels from lakes 2.6 million years old and what is found inside them show how the climate was. Diatoms show us lake chemistry, fungal spores tell us about the existence of large herbivores, charcoal tells us about fires. These exhibits do a good job of telling us about how scientists use these things to get information about the environments of the past.