Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Sci Street


 Needless to say, I like science. And I like seeing people getting excited in science. So when I caught wind of an event going on last weekend, I decided to be a science nerd rather than the culture and history nerd that most of NYC encourages.

Of course, that meant being continuously run over and around by little kids half my size. But it also meant a lot of really interesting topics that were slightly outside of my field.

OK, very much outside of my field.

A couple of the demos were for the kids to understand the basic laws of physics, such as every action having an equal and opposite reaction, and a bus with a bunch of microscopes- including a scanning electron microscope like the ones that I've had the opportunity to use for research at home. There was a compute program using a dandelion to model wind, giant dominoes, a 'dragon 3-d simulator,' balloons that blew up due only to a basic chemical reaction, and a challenge to beat a record with this giant tesselation (a special kind of pattern.)

If you wanted something a little more to chew on, there was a lot of information about the bending of space-time and all objects actually having a small amount of gravitational pull of their own.

There were some pretty advanced physics concepts, and for once they actually made some kind of sense to me. For example, within the past year a study came out about two colliding black holes that, when sensed by some of our instruments on earth, actually gave some much needed evidence towards gravity. We knew it was keeping us from floating into space, but this helped us understand more about how it works.

There was also  information about studies done in Antartica to detect photons by scanning with instruments embedded in the ice. These can sense different fluctuations in these and learn about different events going on in space. It's aptly named; the instrument is called "IceCube."

This is way over simplified, but it actually was very well explained there. It has me and my suite mate wanting to visit the Museum of Math, which we didn't actually even know existed until this event. I'm excited to see what else they have in store.

To satisfy anyone who thinks I need to be doing the tourist thing, I took pictures of the Washington Arch and made my way down to the 9/11 memorial. My inner history nerd is satisfied, as is the patriotic child that remembers that day almost 15 years ago. The entire theme of the memorial though, was to both remember and to rebuild. And interesting folks in science is going to be a part of that.


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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.