SCIENCE MUSEUM: New Wing Opens With 24 Hour Extravaganza In Raleigh

By The Raleigh Telegram

RALEIGH – In a major event in the museum’s history, the giant new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences will be opening this weekend with a 24 hour extravaganza that features astronauts, Governor Beverly Perdue, Jane Goodall, and a giant globe.

Joined to the original museum location on Jones Street by a skyway, the new 80,000 square foot wing called the Nature Research Center (NRC), with a 24-hour grand opening beginning at 5 p.m. on Friday, April 20 and will be going on for 24 hours through 5pm on Saturday.

“This celebration is expected to attract 50,000 visitors and capture global imagination, national recognition and local attention, while maintaining a commitment to environmental sustainability,” said the museum in a statement to the press.

One of the major features of the new wing is the giant globe that can be seen from outside of the museum on Jones Street.  Called the “Daily Planet,” the globe is already a new landmark in downtown Raleigh since work began on the unique piece of the new wing.

The museum has stated that the new wing will feature plenty of high tech interactive exhibits include being able to predict the weather and take a simulated submarine ride 2000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

The museum will have plenty of amazing speakers, exhibits, performances, and other attractions during the 24 hour extravaganza this weekend.  The list below has been provided by the museum.

4 p.m. Pre-show and Procession

Friday, April 20

Visitors can listen to the smooth sounds of the Shaw University Jazz Band directed by Charles Brown beginning at 4 p.m. At 4:30 p.m., a procession from the Governor’s mansion begins with dancers from the African-American Dance Ensemble, the Paperhand Puppets and International Focus of Raleigh, 25 local international groups dressed in native costumes, led by Sir Walter Raleigh.

5 p.m. Opening Ceremony

Actor Ira David Wood III and Chuck Davis, founder of the African-American Dance Ensemble, will officiate the opening ceremony. Waters collected from rivers, oceans and lakes around the world will be brought to the stage to symbolize the global nature of the Nature Research Center and acknowledge the life-giving waters of planet Earth. Specially commissioned vessels created by Seagrove clay artists and a single large pottery font created by Mark Hewitt will be used to connect culture with nature during the ceremony.  

At the conclusion of the ceremony, the doors of the Nature Research Center will open with the cutting of a native plant and flower bower across the doors of the new wing. Following the opening ceremony the Nature Research Center will be open for tours around the clock. Walk-throughs will continue through the evening, overnight hours and into the next day until 4 pm on Saturday, April 21. The entrance will be through the main doors on Jones Street with visitors exiting over the skyway bridge that crosses Salisbury Street into the main Museum building. Exhibit areas will be open and staffed to provide an interactive experience and an array of activities to enjoy.

The 24-hour celebration concludes at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 21 with a citizen science charge led by Dr. “Canopy” Meg Lowman, Director of the Nature Research Center inviting visitors to personally engage with science by connecting to one of a myriad of citizen science opportunities.

NRC Highlights

SECU Daily Planet

The SECU Daily Planet is a three-story multimedia program area that employs unique audio and visual technologies. Visitors can view images of the natural world from 40 by 40 foot screen from all three stories. They can also listen to presentations from researchers as they talk about their current research.

Exploring the Deep Sea

Visitors can get inside a model submersible and take a virtual tour 2,000 feet below the ocean’s surface and hear about scientists talk about their research on deep-water corals.

Window on Animal Health

Visitors can watch and interact with scientists, veterinarians and pre-veterinary students conducting animal handling, animal checkups and minor surgeries. There will be an audio and visual component to this lab which gives the public opportunities to ask questions, meet the veterinary services staff and learn about veterinary medicine. An example of this is a recent exploratory surgery to remove a mass from a Gecko.

Investigate Labs

There will be three Investigate Labs (Biodiversity, Science Modeling, Micro-world) where visitors can work alongside scientists in hands-on research.

Meet the Scientist

Visitors will also have the opportunity to talk to researchers in special areas around the NRC as these scientists conduct research on climate change, population movements around the globe, meteorites or looking into deep space.

Citizen Science Center

Visitors can learn how to become a citizen scientist on a number of very interesting projects like bird-banding, observing chimpanzee behavior, or the “School of Ants” project that identifies thousands of unknown ant species in and around North Carolina.

Daily Planet Café

Visitors can eat, relax and engage in conversation at the NRC’s street-side café and talk to scientists in an informal setting about their area of research. In many ways this café will be like a sports bar for science.

WRAL Researching Weather Platform

This exhibit uses real artifacts, instruments and data to research and predict weather. An interactive area will let visitors see how rockets, weather balloons, thermometers and wind/water gauges to provide a glimpse of what real-time weather is like in several different locations throughout the western hemisphere as well as access to these locations via a webcam.

WRAL Storm Central

Visitors can track a hurricane or predict tomorrow’s weather and compare their prediction to WRAL Meteorologist, Greg Fishel’s based on information from the National Weather Service, maps, and Doppler radar technology. They can even determine how cloudy it will be, if the wind will be blowing, or whether there will be any precipitation.

Prairie Ridge

There will be activities at the Museum’s field station, Prairie Ridge Ecostation, during the 24-hour grand opening of the NRC. Family-friendly outdoor citizen science projects will be held on the hour on Friday, April 20 from 8 to 11 p.m. (frog calls and moths) and on Saturday, April 21 from 7 to 10 a.m. (bird banding) and noon to 3 p.m. (reptiles & amphibians and bird nests). Prairie Ridge Ecostation is located at 4301 Reedy Creek Road in Raleigh.

Partners

Burt’s Bees—April 20 is also Earth Day, so once again, the Museum has partnered with Burt’s Bees to present Planet Earth Celebration in conjunction with our 24-hour opening. This is the fourth year that the Museum has joined forces with Burt’s Bees to put on this earth-friendly celebration and provide awareness and education to the public about more sustainable living. The Burt’s Bees Tent sale will also be on site at the 24-hour opening providing 70 percent off many of their all natural health and beauty products.

NASA—Visitors can hear from retired astronaut, Dr. John Grunsfeld at the opening ceremony. Grunsfeld logged over 58 days in space on five shuttle missions, including 58 hours and 30 minutes of spacewalk time. He also visited Hubble three times, performing a total of eight spacewalks to service and upgrade the observatory. Currently, Dr. Grunsfeld is the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. He now oversees all planetary missions as well as the Hubble and (future) Webb telescopes. The Museum is pleased to pleased to partner with NASA for the 24-hour grand opening continuing a more than decade long relationship. 

North Carolina Science Festival—The grand opening of the Nature Research Center is a signature event of the North Carolina Science Festival. The annual Triangle Science and Engineering Expo features hands-on activities and demonstrations for the science enthusiast. On April 20 from 4 to 11 p.m. at the new wing’s grand opening, you can celebrate science with more than 30 Expo exhibitors, including Triangle STEM organizations, universities and local scientists. To find more events near you, visit www.ncsciencefestival.org.  ::

Article Posted: Friday, April 20th, 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RELATED ARTICLE: The Drama Behind NC’s Acro Dinosaur Fossil

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By Ross Andersen

Apr 19 2012, 1:26 PM ET

This isn't your grandfather's stargazing: The amount of data we have on our universe is doubling every year thanks to big telescopes and better light detectors.

 

Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images---like the one above---taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that's not all: in the next year that number is going to double, and the year after that it will double again, and so on and so on. 

 

There are two reasons that astronomy is experiencing this accelerating explosion of data. First, we are getting very good at building telescopes that can image enormous portions of the sky. Second, the sensitivity of our detectors is subject to the exponential force of Moore's Law. That means that these enormous images are increasingly dense with pixels, and they're growing fast---the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, scheduled to become operational in 2015, has a three-billion-pixel digital camera. So far, our data storage capabilities have kept pace with the massive output of these electronic stargazers. The real struggle has been figuring out how to search and synthesize that output. 

 

Alberto Conti is the Innovation Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that is due to launch in 2018. Before transitioning to the Webb, Conti was the Archive Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the Hubble. For almost ten years, he has been trying to make telescope data accessible to astronomers and to the public at large. What follows is my conversation with Conti about the future of, and the relationship between, big telescopes and big data. 

Last year I was researching the Hubble Deep Field (pictured below) and I interviewed Bob Williams, the former head of STScI who originally conceived of and executed the deep field image. He told me that the deep field, in addition to its extraordinary scientific value, had changed the way that data is distributed in astronomy. Can you explain how?

 

Conti: It's interesting, one of the very first papers I wrote as a graduate student in astronomy was on the Hubble Deep Field. I was a graduate student in 1995 when it came out, and of course there was this "wow" factor---the fact that this was one of the deepest images ever taken, the fact that you have thousands of galaxies in this tiny patch of sky---you would take out your calculator and try to calculate how many galaxies there are in the universe and you would come up with a hundred billion, and it was mind-boggling. It still is. 

 

But it also changed the data regime. Before the Hubble Deep Field, data (raw images) would be deposited in some archive and you would just tell astronomers to "go get the images." Astronomers would then have to download the images and run software on them in order to find all of the objects using certain parameters, and then they'd have to assess the quality of the data, for instance whether an object that was thought to be a star was actually a star. So you had to do a lot of analysis before you could really get into your research. 

 

Bob decided that this data was so overwhelmingly powerful, in terms of what it was telling us about the universe, that it was worth it for the community to be able to get their hands on the data immediately. And so the original deep field team processed the data, found the objects in it, and then catalogued each of them, so that every object in the deep field had a description in terms of size, distance, color, brightness and so forth. And that catalogue was available to researchers from the very start---it started a whole new model, where the archive does all the work. 

 

I can tell you firsthand how incredible it was at the time, because as a graduate student studying quasars, I was able to identify all of the quasars within the data in just a few minutes. What Bob did, which I thought was brilliant, was enable us to do the science much quicker. If you take a look at what's happening with these massive archives now, it's being done in the exact same way; people realized that you aren't going to be able to download and process a terabyte of images yourself. It's a huge waste of time. The other thing Bob did was he released the data to the world almost immediately; I remember it took forever to download, not because the data set was especially large, but because there were so many people accessing the archive at the same time. That was one of astronomy's first open source exercises, in the sense that we use that term today.

 

Has data always been an issue for astronomy? Did Galileo ever run out of log books? I remember reading about William Herschel's sister Caroline, an accomplished astronomer in her own right, spending these long, cold nights underneath their wooden telescope, listening for her brother, who would scream these numbers for her to write down in a notebook. How have data challenges changed since then?

 

Conti: That's a good question. Astronomy has changed quite a bit since Galileo and Herschel. Galileo, for instance, had plenty of paper on which to record his observations, but he was limited in his capacity for observation and so was Herschel to some extent. Today we don't have those same observational limits.

 

There are two issues driving the current data challenges facing astronomy. First, we are in a vastly different data regime in astronomy than we were even ten or fifteen years ago. Over the past 25 to 30 years, we have been able to build telescopes that are 30 times larger than what we used to be able to build, and at the same time our detectors are 3,000 times more powerful in terms of pixels. The explosion in sensitivity you see in these detectors is a product of Moore's Law---they can collect up to a hundred times more data than was possible even just a few years ago. This exponential increase means that the collective data of astronomy doubles every year or so, and that can be very tough to capture and analyze.

 

You spent part of your career working with GALEX, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. How did that experience change the way you saw data and astronomy?

 

Conti: GALEX was a big deal because it was one of the first whole sky ultraviolet missions. I want to stress "whole sky" here, because taking measurements of ultraviolet sources all over the sky is a lot more data-intensive than zooming in on a single source. Whole sky ultraviolet measurements had been done before, but never at the depth and resolution made possible by GALEX. This had tremendous implications for data archives at the time. When I started working on GALEX nine years ago, the amount of data it produced was gigantic compared with anything that we had in-house at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and that includes the Hubble Space Telescope, which of course doesn't take whole sky images. 

"Whole sky ultraviolet measurements had been done before, but never at the depth and resolution made possible by GALEX."

 

What we were able to do was create a catalog of objects that were detected in these whole sky images, and the number was quite large---GALEX had detected something close to three hundred million ultraviolet sources in the sky. That forced the archive to completely revisit the way it allowed users to access these very large catalogs. There were large databases in astronomy ten years ago, but databases that would allow you to search large collections of objects were not common. GALEX helped to pave the way with this new searchable archive. I can remember when we first introduced the data, we had people all over the world trying to download all of the data, because they thought that was the only way they could access it. They were thinking that to use the data you had to have it locally, which was the old way of thinking. The big leap was that we created an interface that allowed you to get to your data, to a level where you're one step away from analysis, and we were able to do that without you having to download it. We did it by creating interfaces that allowed you to mine all three hundred million sources of ultraviolet light in just a few seconds. You could ask the interface to show you all of the objects that had a particular color, or all of the sources from a certain position in the sky, and then you could download only what you needed. That was a big shift in how astronomers do research. 

 

How much data are we talking about?

 

Conti: Well, GALEX as a whole produced 20 terabytes of data, and that's actually not that large today---in fact it's tiny compared to the instruments that are coming, which are going to make these interfaces even more important. We have telescopes coming that are going to produce petabytes (a thousand terabytes) of data. Already, it's difficult to download a terabyte; a petabyte would be, not impossible, but certainly an enormous waste of bandwidth and time. It's like me telling you to download part of the Internet and search it yourself, instead of just using Google. 

 

Would something like the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope have been possible with the data mining and data storage capacities of twenty years ago?

 

Conti: Well, Kepler is an extraordinary mission for many reasons. Technologically, it would not have been possible even just a few years ago. Kepler measures the light of 170,000 stars very precisely at regular intervals looking for these dips in light that indicate a planet is present. The area that they sample is not very large---it's a small patch of sky---but they're sampling all of those stars every thirty minutes. So that's already a huge breakthrough, and it creates a lot of data, but it's still not as much as a whole sky mission like GALEX. 

 

What's different about Kepler, from a data perspective, is that it's opening up the time domain. With a mission like GALEX, we collect data and store it in the database, but it's relatively static. It sits there and it doesn't really change, unless we get a new dump of data that helps us refine it, and that may only happen once a year. With Kepler you have these very short intervals for data collection, where you have new images every thirty minutes. That really opens up the time domain. We're working hard to figure out how to efficiently analyze time domain data. And of course the results are spectacular: a few years ago we had less than twenty exoplanets, and now we have thousands. 

 

 

Is there a new generation of telescopes coming that will make use of these time domain techniques? 

 

Conti: Oh yes. With Kepler we've developed this ability to make close observations of objects in the sky over time, but if you add millions or even billions of objects, then you get into the new regime of telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) which we expect to come online at the end of this decade. These telescopes are going to take images of the whole sky every three days or so; with that kind of data you can actually make movies of the whole sky. You can point to a place in the sky and say "there was nothing there the other day, but today there's a supernova." You couple that kind of big data, whole sky data, with the time domain and you're talking about collecting terabytes every night. And we don't have to wait that long; ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array is going to have its first data release very soon and its raw data is something like forty terabytes a day. Then in 2025, we're going to have the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the most sensitive radio instrument ever built, and we expect it will produce more data than we have on the entire Internet now---and that's in a single year. This is all being driven by the effect that Moore's Law has on these detectors; these systematic advances let us keep packing in more and more pixels. 

 

In my view, we've reached the point where storage is no longer the issue. You can buy disk, you can buy storage, and I think that at some point we may even have a cloud for astronomy that can host a lot of this data. The problem is how long it's going to take me to get a search answer out of these massive data sets. How long will I have to wait for it? 

"We expect it will produce more data than we have on the entire Internet now---and that's in a single year."

Has citizen science played a meaningful role in helping astronomy tackle all of this data?

 

Conti: I think so. I'm part of a group that has done a lot of work on citizen science, especially with the folks over at Galaxy Zoo and CosmoQuest on an in-house project called Hubble Zoo. The original Galaxy Zoo was a galaxy classification project, where volunteers could log on to the server and help to classify galaxies by shape. Galaxy shapes give you a lot of information about their formation history; for instance, round galaxies are much more likely to have cannibalized other galaxies in a merger, and on average they're a little older. Spiral galaxies are structures that need time to evolve; generally, they're a little younger than round galaxies. And so when you have thousands of ordinary, non-scientists classifying these galaxies you can get some great statistics in a short period of time. You can get the percentage of round galaxies, elliptical galaxies, spiral galaxies, irregular galaxies and so forth; you can get some really interesting information back. What's great about citizen science is that you can feed images to citizens that have only been fed through machines---no human eyes have ever looked at them. 

 

There's another citizen science project that I'm trying to get started in order to to make use of all the old GALEX data. With GALEX we took these whole sky images in ultraviolet, and we did it at certain intervals, so there is a time domain at work, even if it's not as rapid as the Kepler. But as I said before, we have over three hundred million sources of UV light in these images. There was a professor who had a graduate student looking at this data at different intervals with the naked eye, and they were able to find four hundred stars that seemed to be pulsating over time. When I saw the data, I said "this is interesting, but it should be an algorithm." So we made an algorithm to detect these pulsating stars, and we ran it inside the entire database of 300 million sources, and we found 2.1 million pulsating star candidates. And of course, this is just the first pass at this; who knows how many of those candidates will convert. But it's an illustrative case---the idea is to feed these kinds of projects to the next generation of citizen scientists, and to have them to do what that graduate student did, and then in some cases they'll be able to find something remarkable, something that otherwise might never have been found.

Can we talk about image-processing? What percentage of Hubble images are given the kind of treatment that you see with really iconic shots like the Sombrero Galaxy or the Pillars of Creation? 

 

Conti: It depends. There's an image coming out for the 22nd anniversary (of the Hubble) here in a few days, and as you'll be able to see, it's a very beautiful image. I'm a little biased in the sense that I tend to think that every image from the Hubble is iconic, but they aren't all treated equally. There's a group of people here in the office of public outreach at STScI that think a lot about how images are released. But if you go back to the Hubble Deep Field, or even earlier, you can see that the imaging team really does put a lot of care into every Hubble image. And that's not because each one of those images is iconic; rather it's because we have this instrument that is so unbelievable and each piece of data it produces is precious, and so a lot of work goes into communicating that. 

 

And now, with the Hubble Legacy Archive, people can produce their own Hubble images, with new colors, and they can do it on the fly. 

 

Like Instagram filters?

 

Conti: Kind of, yeah. As you know, all data in astronomy is monochrome data---it's black and white---and then the processing team combines it into layers of red, green and blue, and so forth. Zolt Levay, the head of the imaging team, takes these colored layers and combines them and tries to make them as accurate as possible in terms of how they would look to the human eye, or to a slightly more sensitive eye. This program lets you take three monochrome images, which you can then make any color you like, and it let's you make them into a single beautiful image. There's actually a contest being held by the office of public outreach to see who can upload the most beautiful new image. 

New Art /

Biographical DNA art by Michael Mapes

April 19, 2012 | New Art | by  Denimu|

I showed with Michael Mapes last year. His boxes house thousands of individual specimens consisting of dissected photographs and biographical DNA in the form of such things as hair, finger nails, scent, eye-lashes, fingerprints, food, botanical elements, fabric swatches, makeup, dirt, handwriting samples and breath. The works are absorbing and the material list just as charming.

Tagged: boxes, DNA, Michael Mapes, Photographs

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