‘SCI-CAFE’ RETURNS VIRTUALLY WITH PROGRAM ON SPIDER SILK, ‘FIELD TRIP: ASTEROIDS’ LIVE VIRTUAL FLIGHT WITH MUSEUM AND NASA SCIENTISTS, ROCKS VS. MINERALS PROGRAM, AND MORE!

While the American Museum of Natural History is closed during the COVID-19 outbreak, people can still enjoy the Museum’s exhibits and online offerings, from materials for families and teachers to virtual tours and field trips, videos, games, digital backgrounds, and more. 

You can find the highlights from the Museum this week below:

• Field Trip: Asteroids: On Tuesday, June 30 at 2 pm EDT, join a virtual live flight to the Asteroid Belt with Museum Curator Denton Ebel and two mission scientists from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, the first U.S. mission to collect material from an asteroid and bring it back to Earth for study. Find out how many asteroids there are, what they’re made of, whether they may have supplied ingredients for life on Earth, and more while exploring the Main Belt, Trojan, and Near-Earth asteroids. Museum Research Associate Harold Connolly, Jr., who serves as the OSIRIS-REx sample scientist, and Vicky Hamilton, who is the mission’s spectroscopy scientist, will be sharing more about the mission and answering questions live. Viewers can join the Watch Party here.
• SciCafe: Spider Silk:  On Wednesday, July 1, at 8 pm EDT, the Museum’s SciCafe series—a popular after-hours event that brings together inquisitive minds for an informal evening of conversation about cutting-edge science topics—returns with an online program about spider silk. Cheryl Hayashi, the Museum’s Leon Hess Director of Comparative Biology Research and director of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, studies spider silk and will share her work on silk gene DNA sequences to find out how spiders have developed such a large variety of silk types. Viewers can join the Watch Party here.
• Scientists at Home: Rocks vs. Minerals: On Thursday, July 2 at 2 pm EDT, join Museum geologists Saebyul Choe and Keiji Hammond, who will discuss rocks and minerals from Earth and from space and highlight specimens from the Museum’s Earth and Planetary Sciences collection. Viewers are encouraged to submit photos of their favorite found rock or mineral specimens to have them identified by the Museum’s scientists by emailing scientistsathome@amnh.org. Viewers can join the Watch Party here.
• New ‘OLogy’ Science App for Kids: The Museum recently launched an iPad version of OLogy, the award-winning science website for school-aged children who are curious about the natural world. Featuring games, videos, articles and other engaging resources, the OLogy iPad app is an easy-to-use, free interactive educational tool that invites children to explore the methods and practices of modern science and introduces them to the Museum’s research, collections, scientists, and exhibitions. Once downloaded, the app does not require an internet connection, making it ideal for on-the-go use. To download, visit the Apple App store here.