Excursion Report of the National Museum of Natural History:
Event time and place: National Museum of Natural History on December 2nd, 2023
They use informative posters, virtual screens, and exhibits with physical objects as presentation techniques to explain their information. Regarding the most effective technique, I think that has go to be the exhibits with objects as models. This was because they had visuals to go along with text, thus making it easier to understand for all people. The least effective was definitely the virtual screens. I feel like the virtual screens took too long to get to the information and sometimes went off topic. Lastly, the informative posters were good at giving information but lacked in keeping attention.The exhibit shows the materials used to create different parts of the phone. For example, sand and alimunium oxide are used to make the phone screen glass, indium combined with tin oxide is used for the touchscreen, and gold, lead sulfide, nickeline, and lepidolite are used for the phone camera. The exhibits tell that the creation of cellphones through manufacturing and mining of cellphone materials negatively affects the enivornment because of the harmful chemicals that are released from machines and factories. They also tell that the disposal of cellphones also has a negative impact on the environment because if not disposed properly, the hazardous materials in the phone can lead to environmental contaimination. It tells these stories through informative displays on the walls. Technology was technological innovation because servers and data centers speed up society. They conveyed this through the exhibit with the model server. Two social impacts of phones are anxiety and it causes you to spend too much time on it. They showed these using the comics on the wall.
One topic is food technology. Humans created innovations such as grain storehouses, iron plow, grist mills, and then sliced bread. Another topic is unintended disease such as the flu, malaria, tuberculosis, and the cholera pandemic. Another topic is animal domestication. Humans have bred cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats. They grew to over a billion population in only 40 years, with chickens and turkey growing in 12 billion. Designs used to show these changes are tall columns with listed facts about changes that humans have caused. On the back of these columns are models relating to the topic such as a sickle and stone blades for the food topic, a bunch of miniature livestock figurines stuffed together for animal domestication, and models of viruses. I disagree with this statement because the hall talks about the survival challenge of the warmer temperatures due to increased carbon dioxide generated by human activities. They give examples of these activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. There's even a graph that shows the correlation and causation between temperature and carbon levels.
Deep dive greatest hits: Shows life at the bottom of the ocean studied by NOAA. Everything on the seafloor gets recycled, nothing goes to waste. They see rare species such as the giant squid, also found extensive corals. Cause a sea change: save sharks. Overfishing causes a decline and extinction of many species. Sharks keep prey populations in check. I do consider this data to be understandable to a general visitor of the museum because the information didn’t have complex wording and they got points across that were virtually well known such as sharks are declining or that theres rare species still at the bottom of the ocean. Subjects it discusses are how Earth became how it is today and phytoplankton, pangea. Information it provides are that Earth was a fireball but then cooled down, phytoplankton are the big reason for life on earth, the shifting of tectonic plates chnaged the planets geography but also triggers natural disasters. The way the spherical video portrayed this information was that images and videos would play on the globe while informative text is heard and captioned on a smaller screen below the sphere.
One of these pylons shows mammoths and horses 125,000 years ago. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was ⅔ what it is today, global temperature was about the same as today, and global sea level was up to 29 ft higher than today. Another pylon shows mammoths, buffalo, wolves, and rabbits 22,000 years ago. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about half of what it is today, global temperature was 9 degrees F lower than today, and global sea levels were 410 ft lower than today. I do think these exhibits are effective because they capture a scene from the specified time period that encapsulates the behavior of wildlife. The pylons also give details that effectively show the difference between then and present times. One of the exhibits showed that 56 million years ago, global temperatures spiked 11 degrees and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled in just a few thousand years. Fossils and sediments were used to figure this out because they show us how climate and ecosystems have changed in the past. I don’t think these exhibits effectively explain how fossils and geological information can inform us about current or future climate change because they didn’t go into specific detail about how the fossils were anaylzed to show change or how we can use them to look into our own climate change.