Monthly Archives for September 2015

NatSCA Digital Digest

(Image by Ton Rulkens, in public domain)

(Image by Ton Rulkens, public domain)

 

Your weekly round-up of news and events happening in the world of natural sciences

News

The BBC just posted a down to earth (or sea) article called The man who swims with sharks, by Melissa Hogenboom, feature writer for BBC Earth. Combined with beautiful images, it talks about swimming with and photographing sharks and summarises some very interesting facts about these majestic animals.

Exhibitions

If you haven’t seen the Natural History Museums’ exhibition Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea, you should definitely go this weekend. If you have seen the Natural History Museums’ exhibition Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea, you should definitely go this weekend. It will be your last opportunity to see (or re-see) the exhibition as it closes on the 13th September. There are fantastic specimens, cool interactive games and a video of the only coral spawning ever to have occurred in captivity. I personally recommend it to you.

Opened just last week is the new exhibition In the Footsteps of Elephants. This two and a half week exhibition is only open from the 3rd to the 20th September, so if it’s up your street you need to get a wriggle on. The exhibition is being held at the Nature in Art Museum and Gallery in Gloucestershire, which looks really worth too.

Jobs

If you are looking to move, or move into a, role in natural sciences the Naturejobs Career Expo in London on Friday 18th September should be a great place to meet others in the field, attend workshops and conference talks, schmooze with potential employers, and even get your CV looked at.

If Brachiopods are your thing, then the Natural History Museum in London is currently looking for a curatorial assistant to join them in the Earth Sciences Department. The contract is for a year, and the deadline is the 14th September. Sounds like a shell of a good opportunity (!)

As ever, if you would like to write a blog for NatSCA on anything natural sciences related, give us an online shout blog@natsca.org.

NatSCA Digital Digest

Chameleon

Events

  • The iDigBio 4-part webinar series, The Value of Digitizing Vertebrate Collections, starts on Tuesday 8th September. The first session is on mammal collections (delivered by Cody Thompson, University of Michigan), and will be held at 3 – 4pm EDT (that’s 8 – 9pm in the UK!). You can access it here: https://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/vertdigitization. The following three sessions will be at the same time each Tuesday (at the same link):

September 15: The Value of Digitizing Fish Collections, Andy Bentley, University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and President of SPNCH
September 22: The Value of Digitizing Herpetology Collections, Chris Phillips, Illinois Natural History Survey, University of Illinois
September 29: The Value of Digitizing Bird Collections, Carla Cicero, UC Berkeley and Lead PI for Vertnet.

Around the Web

What to do when someone gives you a giant squid.

A technological revolution in museums? 3D printing and virtual reality.

A visit to Microbia, the world’s first microbe museum!

CT scan reveals fossils within fossils.

19th century Ecuadorian snail specimen is a new species.

Exciting new natural science workshops and a new book

Time is racing away, and in just a few days we will be at the NatSCA Bone Collections day in Cambridge (8th September 2015). The talks and posters promise to be really varied, interesting, and hugely informative. There is also the added bonus of a practical session to get your hands on some skeletal material, and, under the expert guidance of Bethany Palumbo, learn all about the basics of bone conservation.

Just a month later (15th October 2015), Paolo Viscardi will be leading a workshop on the identification of natural materials, a free course run by NatSCA and held at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter (now sold out).

There is still more good news in that NatSCA, the Horniman Museum and Gardens, and Icon have published a book containing the full papers given at the Conservation of Hair conference held in June 2014. The book is published by Archetype books.

Conservation of Hair Publication

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