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Showing posts from 2012

21 days in the life of the museum

We had a strange request come through our internal email a few months back. The poster wanted to know if any museum staff were willing to spend 21 days filming 4 second clips of their lives, and the lives of the museum. Given my long standing dedication to dadaism in the workplace and ever-so-slightly worrying attachment to my iPhone, you can probably accurately predict my response. Yup. Hand up in the air, stepping forward to volunteer, any excuse at all to take more footage of things with the phone... The project is the brainchild of the artist Tony Harris ( tonyharris.org ) for the Campsite event hosted during half-term. If you didn't catch the Campsite at Natural History Museum, it was actually pretty amusing (more here ). Arctic explorer tents, people in outlandish field kit wandering around the museum... and of course, our little video installation (screened in a tent, no less!). For 21 days friends, colleagues, volunteers, and anonymous members of the public were subjec

Science Uncovered! Adventures in Outreach, aka #SU2012

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Ok, so I might have taken some time to catch my breath after the massive annual outreach event that is Science Uncovered , the Natural History Museum London's contribution to the EU-wide Researcher's Night event. About 6,000 people wandered around the museum on a Friday night, enjoying (I think that's the word I want) the bars, virtual autopsy tables, live animals, satellite links to antarctica, and our researchers dragged up from their basements and behind-the-scenes labs to talk Science (and redeem our free drink tokens). The Human Origins Group decided to go pretty big -- we had several volunteers as well as the usual suspects manning the tables. There was a lot of discussion about human evolution by C. Stringer, M. Skinner, L. Buck and L. Humphrey. Heck, I even acted out Taung child being carried off by an eagle a few times (with sound effects, natch). L. Humphrey and L. Buck here demonstrate human evolution for the crowd... But it wasn't all fossils

...and the techie side of the fossil skull augmented reality app., with ARToolkit

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I've finally branched out and tried a bit more sophisticated augmented reality tools. Yes, you,  ARToolkit . This particular project was in honour of Science Uncoverd, our mahoooosive annual public outreach event. At the end of the day, the rather painstaking efforts to tweak little bits of script hither and thither were a bit more intense than I had anticipated; if I hadn't wanted to do a multiple object app I would have probably just retreated back to my standard free-and-easy pipeline using ARMedia plugin for Google SketchUp (see my earlier post for the how-to). But it came off all right in the end, and I have a sneaking suspicion that most of my issues were down to the sharp learning curve in using Xcode, which I was new to. However, I did manage to get the whole shebang off the ground eventually, and that's probably primarily due to these lovely instructional videos made by Gimpneek on  how to install the OpenVRML  libraries you'll need and then a quick walk

ESHE 12 Field Trip to Abri Pataud: photos

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So, here are a few snaps taken from the European Society for Human Evolution 's post-meeting outing to the caves and rock shelters of the Dordogne. I took the trip to the Upper Palaeolithic rock shelter site of Abri Pataud ... it's right down the road from the charming Cro-Magnon hotel, and a few paces away from the impressive Musée National de Préhistoire . The site is very impressive... level after level of rocks, rocks, and archaeology hidden amongst the rocks! I think I see now why I never wanted to dig a seriously early site--you have to be very exacting, I think. Just check out this set-up: No doubt worth it when you find something like this lovely 'venus' carved into the rock: The tour was followed by a drinks reception in the Museum, and the chance to wander around looking at the excellent collection of sharp pointy things and old dead things they have accumulated. Every so often, you come around a corner and see a pretty bit of shell bead or so

#ESHE12 2nd Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution Sep 21-23, Bordeaux

So, here we have it: the epic Storify of collected tweets and retweets from #ESHE12. It was a great conference, looking forward to Vienna next year! Thanks everyone for following along, commenting, and generally being amusing during the longer lithics papers :) [ View the story "Eshe 2012" on Storify ]

In which I am allowed into an Art Exhibit

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Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) will be aware that generally, I talk about teeth. I post videos of teeth, I wonder what teeth might be telling us about Neolithic children, and otherwise tend towards the dental. Recently however, I was asked to do something a bit out of the ordinary -- the lovely organisers of the BONE exhibit at the Florence Nightingale Museum  ( @florencemuseum )asked me to come and be a 'live respondent' in their installation. How much fun, right? Art! But me, a scientist? However could it work??? It's like oil and water, right? Cats and dogs, chalk and cheese, Ikea furniture that requires an allen wrench and Ikea furniture shipped with an allen wrench. Which is to say, things that don't always come together. But Simon and Rhiannon, the organisers, were determined to bring a 'scientist' ( moi ) in to their thoughtful display. So how did that work? Actually, pretty well. The exhibit focuses on 'bone', but by focus, I mean

How to make a replica of 10,000 year old teeth? Wonder no more!

Occasionally, people wonder what it is a dental anthropologist does. Not often, mind. And if they do make the mistake of asking, generally eyes glaze over before you can say 'hydroxyapatite'. So as you can imagine, I get a bit overexcited when people seem to actually want to know how one goes about the business of being the Tooth Fairy.  I've just come back from Turkey, where I've been studying human remains from the beautiful early Neolithic site of Asıklı Höyük , home to the first farmers and earliest settlement of the Anatolian plateau. My mission was to take casts of the teeth, to address questions about childhood health and growth. One of the first queries I got from my fellow archaeologists however, was what, exactly, I actually do -- so I made this little instructional video for the benefit of the lab, and hopefully future students in the biological anthropology program at Hacateppe University. Dental Impressions from Brenna Hassett on Vimeo .

Live dispatches from the Tooth Fairy

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#update! day of archaeology site is having some problems, so the links have been temporarily removed... originally posted by   Brennawalks     on   JUNE 29, 2012   as part of the  This is reposted from here at Day of Archaeology 2012 - bigger and badder than last year! #dayofarch So, now you know. The Tooth Fairy is an archaeologist. Archaeologists get everywhere. Like sand. This also applies to  jobs, so it’s not totally impossible that someone who specialises in the minute structures of teeth (see my  previous post from DayofArch 2011 ) would end up in the overwhelmingly awesome  Human Origins Research Group  at the  Natural History Museum, London . For starters, this is an awesome place to work. Yesterday I found out that during WWII, the collections were evacuated to stately homes across the country to escape the Blitz… complete with associated researchers. And there’s a basement here that’s really a bomb shelter which was used by Churchill as a telephone exchange – p

Job-switch blogging hiatus...

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#update! day of archaeology site is having some problems, so the links have been temporarily removed... So, as some of you might have guessed, I sort of ran out of time to keep up with the blogging and whatnot. There's been a series of cross-continent moves (nothin' but love, Aix. nothin' but love) followed by a new position with rather dense stipulations on social media use. So while I negotiate the social media policy document, obtaining creative commons licences for pictures of replica dinosaurs, and the other trials and tribulations of working for what has to be the most awesome museum in the whole of London (unless there is one about cheese I don't know about...?)--well, suffice to say, I won't be saying much.  Hope to be with you in time for Day of Archaeology 2012 though! Until then... enjoy...the sound of silence...