Brilliant winter stars shift towards the southwest during March. Dazzling Orion is almost due south at dusk. His three-starred belt is halfway between reddish Betelgeuse and bluish Rigel. Orion’s belt points up to Aldebaran in Taurus the Bull. To Orion’s upper left are the twin stars Castor and Pollux, marking the heads of Gemini, […]
Imagine a primeval world, a swamp, but not like any swamp you see today. A canopy of fern-like leaves towers fifty to a hundred feet above you, blotting out the sun like a blackish-green, moth eaten blanket. Remarkably thin, spindly trunks support the structure precariously. These trunks have a scaley texture, like the skin […]
Registration For HMNS X plorations Summer Camp Is Now! Questions? Contact xplorations@hmns.org or call 713-639-4652. Don’t forget you can Refer a Friend when registering for Summer Camp, and you’ll both receive a discount! More information on that can be found here. Parent’s Guide to Xplorations Summer Camp is the basics of what you need to know! […]
By Tim McSweeny and Dan Brooks, Ph.D. Last year Houston was devastated by Hurricane Harvey, with flooding covering streets, bayous and communities throughout Houston after the storm deposited about three feet of rain. One of the many parts of the city affected by the storm was the colony of Free-tailed bats living under the […]
Every aspect of our world is ultimately controlled by geologic forces far beneath our feet. Under the influence of mantle convection, mountain ranges rise, great rifts open in the earth, oceans form and then disappear. This is no exaggeration. We all learned about plate tectonics in high school; how the crust of the earth […]
Lecture – Hearth, Heart, Home: Skara Brae’s Early Stone Age Dwellings by Martin Carruthers What was it about an ancient windswept place in the remote Orkney Islands that caused people to invest so much effort in creating one of the earliest examples of permanent homes? Skara Brae, a Stone Age village and UNESCO World […]
This sand from Flagler Beach, Florida, contains both mineral grains and shells. The mineral grains are clear quartz, and the brown, tan, and orange grains are shells that give the beach an orange hue. Blocks of coquina (roughly 130,000 -100,000 years old and known as the Anastasia Formation) are found offshore much of eastern Florida […]
Every year on Valentine’s Day, we in the Cockrell Butterfly Center like to think about all our favorite insects and the methods they use to find mates. From special pheromones to elaborate mating rituals, every insect has a way to find a mate (or more often, multiple mates)! It’s the smell that counts […]
Cultural Feast – A Renaissance Condottieri Banquet…A Knight to Remember Art, warfare, intrigue, and cuisine often melded during the Italian Renaissance. Places such as Milan and northern Italy were important centers for the manufacture of the exquisite armor worn by kings and nobles throughout Europe during battles. Artists including Leonardo da Vinci often designed fortifications […]
Was it inevitable that mammals would rule the world after the dinosaurs went extinct? The rise of mammals is often depicted as a pretty smooth transition, but in reality things were a little more complicated. In the wake of the end Cretaceous extinction birds, reptiles and mammals all began to split and diversify to exploit ecological […]
