Wednesday, May 7, 2014

The Power of Poison




We're taking a little break from Crafty Thursdays to talk about poison, since I've been on the road the past two weeks and it's hard to craft in an airplane (although maybe we should make that a challenge.) Rest assured, we'll be back next week with more crafting mayhem. 

The American Museum of Natural History in New York has an exhibit on poison ranging from poisonous beasts, like the scary yellow frog below, to poisonous stories, to poisonous people. 



This yellow frog would be poisonous in the wild because of what he eats, but the nice people at the Natural History Museum don't feed him the poisonous bugs, so he's harmless. Still, I prefer him inside a glass cage...he looks mad (and who wouldn't if you lived your life the same color as a taxi). 




Alice in Wonderland's Mad Hatter was probably mad because of mercury poisoning. Mercury was used to make gentleman's hats and many milliners got very sick. It's the origin of the phrase, "Mad as a Hatter."




Of course, Sherlock Holmes' adventures and Agatha Christie's books couldn't be left out. 




Below is an interactive book that describes and shows pictures of plant poisons. Here it describes Monksblood. 



The exhibit took about an hour to go through and included a live performance of a "scientist" explaining how arsenic poisons and can be detected. It also had a pet detective section for kids to solve a poisoning crime. 

We thoroughly enjoyed the exhibit. If you're in New York and you'd like to learn more about poisons, I recommend it. While you're there, you might want to check out the dinosaur room as well. Turns out everything we studied about dinos as kids isn't true. T-Rex was related to birds and had brightly colored feathers according to the exhibit scientist there. 

The Power of Poisons Exhibit runs until August 10, 2014. 

3 comments:

  1. Always good to have some poison info in your pocket when you want to kill someone (in a book I mean).

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  2. What fun to solve "accidental" poisonings.

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