Museum of Science and Industry

Ahh, who doesn’t love the smell of old books? Well, maybe a lot of people. Old books smell a little funky because they are made of paper and other organic materials – and organic things rot! Preserving or appropriately storing a treasured book can take finding out the composition of its paper – a process which traditionally requires burning it. In order to not have to destroy the very...

Fresh fruit is so delicious, especially when the piece is perfectly ripe! So how can you tell when something is ready to eat? Do you squish or sniff, searching for a subtle change in coloring? What if the fruit is trapped in a box, waiting to be put out onto grocery store shelves? An MIT professor and his students are developing inexpensive ethylene sensors to help monitor the freshness of produce!

Ethy...

I absolutely love learning about cool things. MSI is full of exhibits where you can discover different things that real scientists, inventors or engineers get to work on! As you go through the Museum, you might notice that most of the featured scientists happen to be adults. But being a scientist is definitely not...

Pop quiz! Name things that you can shake. Okay, I hear "Polaroid pictures," a few mischievous "cans of soda," and I think we even have a couple of rump shakers here! But did anyone say an entire building? Engineers at the University of California...

In Washington D.C., at the Folger Shakespeare Library, there is a book bearing a faded and obscured handwritten name that scholars have struggled to decipher: the signature of a (if not the) “Wm Shakespeare.” As part of the Lazarus Project, a group from the University of Mississippi recently spent their spring break using modern imaging techniques to