museums

The latest iPad and its "resolutionary" display have made ever-smaller pixels all the rage, but here's a sculpture that boldly and beautifully goes in the opposite direction.

"Patterned by Nature" (see video below) is made up of 3,600 tiles of LCD glass -- each roughly the size of a laptop screen -- and is 90 feet long and 10 feet wide. The giant sculpture hangs in the several-story atrium of the just-opened Nature Research Center in North Carolina, a new wing of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Each LCD can display various levels of blue-gray transparency, from clear all the way to opaque. And the matrix as a whole is used as a giant screen of sorts to show 20 different animations of different natural phenomena -- a flock of geese swooping through the atrium, say, or the pattern of rain splashing into a pond.… Read more

ALAMOGORDO, N.M.--A flat plaque in cement on the ground in front of the flagpoles at the New Mexico Museum of Space History marks the final resting place for Ham the Astrochimp. I've brought flowers to spruce the place up a little bit, but it still looks very plain. This isn't quite what I expected. I thought the grave of a space pioneer might have a little more flair.

Earning a real name Ham's name is an acronym for "Holloman Aeromedical," the lab where he and other space chimps were trained. He didn't earn a real name until he successfully returned from orbit. Before that, he was Chimp Number 65.… Read more

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--Standing in front of a row of rotary telephones, a volunteer at the Telephone Museum of New Mexico tells me most kids have no idea how to use them. Most have never even seen a rotary phone before.

I'm familiar with rotary phones from my childhood, but there are even older phones here I've only seen in old movies.

This museum is the place to go to see how we got to modern smartphones from Alexander Graham Bell's cone-shaped devices that carried the first sentence by telephone in 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." Bell's utterance to his assistant allegedly came as a result of spilling acid on his hand. All these years later, we still use our phones to summon help.

The Telephone Museum of New Mexico is one of those little specialty places that most people who live in Albuquerque have never heard about. It has four stories full of phones, switchboards, maintenance gear, and scale models of Telstar satellites. Be still, my geeky heart.… Read more

You can walk into any toy store and buy a robot these days. No big deal. Back in 1939, a robot was an incredible oddity. That's why crowds flocked to see Elektro, a robot built by Westinghouse Electric for the New York World's Fair.

The talking Elektro described himself as a "smart fellow" with a "fine brain" consisting of 48 electrical relays that worked like a telephone switchboard.

Elektro was a bit of a smarty-pants, making lame jokes, smoking cigarettes, and blowing up balloons. Elektro could walk (slowly), move his mouth, and turn his head. This was pretty advanced stuff for the day. The 7-foot-tall creation took voice commands via a telephone handset.

Elektro lies low Elektro disappeared into obscurity after touring the country and then passing time as a minor attraction at a California amusement park. Elektro's story could have ended there, but the big metal guy is now in line for a revival. Elektro's head turned up in a basement and his body in a barn. … Read more

Google has announced a major expansion of the Google Art Project, an initiative to bring works of art worldwide online.

The most notable addition to the expansion is 139 works of art from the White House. The first lady's office announced the partnership yesterday in a press release.

"The White House isn't simply a home to First Families or meeting space for world leaders, it's also known as 'The People's House,' a place that should be open to everyone. And that's why we've made it a priority to invite young people, military families, and Americans of all ages to join us here at the White House," first lady Michelle Obama said in a video announcing the White House's addition to the Google Art Project. … Read more

Google is seen by many as the de facto standard for Internet search. But the company may not always be king of the castle, says famed Internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

Speaking at the Life Online exhibition at the the National Media Museum in the United Kingdom, Cerf downplayed any potential danger in Google's Web dominance, according to blogging site Pocket-Lint. The father of the Internet, who's also a VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, pointed to healthy competition from Bing and other search engines.

But Cerf said that Google's role as top dog in the search … Read more

Everyone likes a good paper airplane. But how much do you love a 45-foot paper airplane?

The answer is clear: A lot.

And your love doesn't have to be unrequited, because the good folks at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Ariz., have not only built but also flown a 45-footer, achieving the feat earlier this week. (See video below.)

"It's not every day that a giant paper airplane is released high over the Arizona desert. In fact, it's never been done. But that's exactly what the Pima Air and Space Museum did,&… Read more

With just 2 percent of the Smithsonian's archive of 137 million items available to the public at any one time, an effort is under way at the world's largest museum and research institution to adopt 3D tools to expand its reach around the country.

CNET has learned that the Smithsonian has a new initiative to create a series of 3D-printed models, exhibits, and scientific replicas--as well as to generate a new digital archive of 3D models of many of the physical objects in its collection.

Representative of that effort, the museum is touting the 3D printed replica of … Read more

If there's one medium that you wouldn't expect to see get taken on by graffiti and other contemporary artists, it's military airplanes.

But thanks to the folks behind the Round Trip: Art from the Boneyard Project exhibition, now on display at the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Ariz., visitors can see just that.

Although only five full airplanes have been painted--out of dozens in the museum's full collection--the show also includes two cockpits and a large group of airplane sections, all reimagined with an artist's flair. The exhibition, which runs through May 31, &… Read more