From Parking Deck to Adventure Halls – the Grand Lobby Experience

By: Ruth Terry, Manager of Ticketing

It is very difficult to convince a three year old that there are more fun things to see and do after being introduced to the flying, chiming, zooming, and leaping balls of Vulcan’s Dream Machine. The art piece is the first sight you see when you step from the elevators from the parking deck into the Grand Lobby. It is sometimes difficult to convince older children (and even adults) that more levels of exciting activities wait around the curve of the spacious lobby.

Once you are able to pull away from “The Ball Machine,” other distractions pull you farther into the center. High screens of constantly changing information about what the McWane Science Center offers may catch your eye with a robot talking about having a birthday party at the McWane Science Center. Or you might see information about the latest exhibit or an upcoming exhibit.

A few steps on are three larger screens, displaying a variety of information. You might see lightning streaking across a stage while an unseen audience screams with delight; or a balloon exploding in light, the audience gasping with excitement. “Where and when can I see THAT?” you want to know. The center board has a map of Level One and the times of the day’s programs listed. On the final screen are the IMAX® films with their current show times. If you miss the IMAX times on the information screens, they are posted behind the ticketing counter.
The screens at ticketing keep up the flow of information and excitement. The prices are listed and the robot is there too, piquing your children’s interest while you receive all the vital information about your visit from the ticketing representative. On one screen, the robot will let you know about birthday parties and membership at the McWane Science Center. On the other, your child will be watching for him to pop up, sneaking peeks over and around the prices. The robot, by the way, is MAC, McWane Science Center’s robot who will occasionally roll around Level One, greeting visitors and talking about what is happening at the McWane Science Center that day.

Past the ticketing counter are more interesting distractions before you step into the Adventure Halls. First there is the IMAX® Concession Stand, where the smell of fresh popcorn wafts, tempting you to grab a bag (please remember though, there is no food or drink allowed in the Adventure Halls.) Then there is the MAXFLIGHT 2000, where you are turned topsy-turvy in a simulated roller coaster ride, if you are at least 48 inches tall. Above MAXFLIGHT 2000 is a net. Why is there a net above our lobby? It’s under the High Cycle to catch falling objects, not falling people (no matter what a ten year old might tell his little sister.) And there is the vortex, the amazing gravity powered coin spin which is not only fun to do, but helps fund the fun!

If you can resist the pull of Really Cool Stuff, our gift store, you are finally in the Adventure Halls. Four levels of fun and educational exhibits. The long journey from Parking Deck to Adventure Halls is complete. Now you only have to decide what to do first!

Science Fiction to Science Reality

By: Ben Moon, Director of Space and Technology
Technology is like the brother of magic. At least it seems that way. Everyday humans are making scientific leaps and bounds, turning science fiction into science reality. It’s really quite fun to follow the progress. Let’s talk about some recent advancements shall we?

We can turn oily algae into fuel. We can grow plastics from plants. We can slow down a beam of light and stop it in its tracks. We can grow diamonds in a lab in just a few days. We can video chat with people on the other side of the world, for free.

While it’s interesting to talk about this stuff, it’s more fun to see it in action. So I will present to you some new technologies with video and pictures to showcase them.

First up: Touchable Holography. This technology utilizes a concave mirror to create holographic images, Wiimotes to track the user, and and “Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display” that allows you to actually feel the holographic images. Crazy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-P1zZAcPuw

Eyeborg. Rob Spence, a one-eyed Canadian filmmaker and Kosta Grammatis, his engineer friend have created an eyeball camera that fits into Spence’s empty eye socket. They’re making a movie from that perspective. Weird. http://eyeborgproject.com/home.php

Super computing (for real). Graphene is an extremely strong experimental material with extremely high conductivity. It's essentially a one-atom-thick honeycomb fabric of carbon. It’s better than silicone for computer chips and MIT researchers claim that it may be able to boost the clock speed of computer chips into the 500-GHz to 1,000-GHz range. You’re overclocked 8-GHz silicon chip in liquid nitrogen just shed a tear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbS-YyvCl4&feature=related

Electromagnetic Railgun. Current naval ship guns generate about 9 megajoules of muzzle energy. The electromagnetic railgun developed at Naval Surface Warfare Division in Dahlgren, Virginia is an 8-megajoule prototype, but the one to be used on Navy ships will generate a massive 64 megajoules. The top-secret gun the Navy used to destroy Devastator in Transfomers: Revenge of the Fallen was not science fiction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y54aLcC3G74 and http://www.nswc.navy.mil/ET/railgun/

DARPA is developing something their calling “Silent Talk” for soldiers. Using an EEG to read brain waves, they’re attempting to analyze "pre-speech" thoughts , map people's EEG patterns to his / her individual words, then see if those patterns are common to all people. If they are, then the team will move on to developing a way to transmitting those patterns to another person. It’s basically telepathy! http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push/#comments

The Sun…On Earth! There is a laser housed at the National Ignition Facility (or NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, that is the size of three football fields. It will aim to create a "star" on earth by focusing 192 beams at a pea-sized target, generating temperatures over 100 million degrees and pressure over 100 billion times the earth's atmosphere. The process will create nuclear fusion -- the reaction that powers the sun and the stars. Hot! http://www.physorg.com/news162827599.html and https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nif/about.php

Allow these things to mystify you until mid November when the Large Hadron Collider creates a mini-black hole that will swallow the Earth. Cheers!

Contributor Profile:
Ben Moon is the Manager of Space and Technology at McWane. He is a total geek and loves space, shiny things, technology, gadgets, video games, sci-fi and zombies. He is married and just had his first child! His favorite movie is The Rocketeer. He wishes he had telekinesis.

Birds of a Feather - Part 3

We have now arrived at a very interesting point where the discoveries of the past two decades have illustrated how difficult it is to define exactly where feathered theropod dinosaurs leave off and birds begin. Many of the features once thought to be unique to birds, like a wishbone, for example, have been identified in a variety of dinosaurs. Even teeth are still found in many otherwise normal-looking Late Cretaceous birds such as Ichthyornis from the chalk deposits of Alabama. At the moment, the acquisition of fully powered flight appears to be the dividing line between theropods and birds, although even that is tentative. At least one lineage of theropod dinosaurs, the alvarezsaurids, that includes the bizarre Mononychus and Shuvuuia, each sporting a single finger on each tiny but powerfully built arm, have the appearance of “vestigial” wings that belonged to a once flighted bird that has re-adapted the wing into a warped sort of arm. This implies that flight may have evolved more than once within the theropods because the alvarezsaurids are not closely related to the lineage of theropods that share the most features with birds. Essentially, you should think of birds as flighted theropods that survived the extinction event 65 million years ago (the K/T boundary extinctions). After the K/T boundary extinctions, birds had finally evolved to the point that they had a more bird-like appearance, having lost teeth, the long tail, and the hind foot sickle-claw.

But birds didn’t quit being scary with the disappearance of the rest of the dinosaurs. At least two groups of birds became top predators after the K/T extinctions in the absence of any competing large mammal carnivores. Diatryma (Gastornis) was a large, seven-foot-plus tall flightless bird that dominated North America and Europe for several million years after the K/T, eating the ancestors of horses and whatever other mammals they could catch. Later, the flightless phorusrhacids, otherwise known as the Terror Birds, ran the plains of South America between about 62 and 2 million years ago, eating llamas and pretty much whatever else they wanted. One phorusrhacid, the nine-foot-tall Titanis walleri, made it across Central America and its fossils have been found in Florida. As a personal note, this is one of my “paleo daydreams”. You can’t get from Central America to Florida without crossing through southern Alabama. Every time it rains, I get this mental image of a Titanis skeleton eroding out of the bank of some stream in south Alabama,…

We call the Cenozoic, the time period dating from the end of the dinosaur era 65 million years ago to the present, the “age of mammals”. And it’s true that the top predators in the terrestrial realm today are mostly mammals. But there are 10,000 species of living birds, and only 4600 species of mammals, so dinosaurs are still doing quite well (although a recently released report suggests that human activities may be accomplishing what the dinosaur-killing asteroid collision could not – namely driving many species to extinction). There’s even the chance that traditional-looking dinosaurs could make a comeback. Several times over the past 20 or 30 years various research groups have shown that some of the primitive characteristics of birds ancestors are still locked away in a birds DNA. Now there are people trying to use our increasing knowledge of genetics to “reverse engineer” a dinosaur, or at least a bird with some very dinosaur-like characteristics, from a bird. I’m going to refer to such a creature as a “dino-bird” in the following paragraphs.

For example, there is a mutation in chickens known as talpid, which has teeth and jaws, not a beak. There is also a stage in embryonic chicken development with a long tail containing 16 vertebrae, very dinosaur-like, very un-chicken-like. The genes that control these mutations can be identified and theoretically, if they can be “turned on” during the development of the embryo in such a manner that they do not kill the chick embryo by interfering with later developmental stages, one could get a chicken with teeth and a long tail. Then there’s the Hoatzin, an odd-looking relative of the cuckoos that nests in the seasonally flooded forests of the Amazon. Hoatzin chicks are born with 3 claws on their hands that project off the front edge of the wing that they use to climb up small trees to escape snakes. They later lose the claws, but obviously the genes for hand claws in birds are still locked away in their genetic code, it’s just that those genes have been repressed. Of course whether or not bioengineering such an animal is ethical is another story, but my prediction is that someone somewhere is going to do it. And this raises all sorts of questions of a profound nature that scientists and perhaps society at large should begin to ponder, and here I offer but a few:

What exactly will a dino-bird look like, will we call embryonic dino-birds “chicks” (somehow when I think of the fuzzy little yellow duck chick I got one Easter when I was about 5 years old, I can’t quite reconcile the two images), will we have to redo the old expression about something being “rare as hen’s teeth”, will they get along well with house cats (my prediction is no), could they be house-trained, and what would that be like (ever smelled a chicken house?), how much will the vet charge to “declaw” your dino-bird?

Finally, a couple of closing thoughts; the next time you look at that bird on your feeder that you’ve let run out of food, or cast a disparaging glance at that scruffy-looking pigeon on the sidewalk, just remember – there’s a little of T. rex in them. Show some respect. And if we ever do invent a time machine and travel back to the age of dinosaurs I have one last prediction – dinosaurs will taste like chicken.

Contributor Profile:
James Lamb is a native Birminghamster with a nearly life-long interest in fossils. He collected his first fossil when he was 5 years old. Friends and family members assure him he has not matured much since then. James is curator of paleontology at McWane Science Center, and would like to one day see the absolute treasure trove of Alabama's fossil heritage revealed to the public. When not at work he wishes he were in the field digging up fossils. At home he enjoys reading, jogging, woodworking, and carving. He has been informed that he is in the habit of telling atrocious puns, but this comes as a surprise to him. James describes himself as a "science nerd".