After amassing a colorful and creative collection of decorated pumpkins, we have determined a winner for the Sciences Library’s Great Pumpkin Halloween display. The winning pumpkin featured a spider’s web with glittery spiders and was decorated by Maddie! As a prize she received a giftcard to Dunkin’ Donuts. Thank you to all who voted and to all who entered pumpkins into the contest. Congratulations, Maddie!
Are you waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive? Check out the new Great Pumpkin exhibit at the Sciences Library. The Sciences Library staff and student workers have been hard at work decorating pumpkins. You will find spiders, zombies, unicorns, and more in this spooky and sparkly collection! Vote for your favorite pumpkin, and the winner will receive a prize! Voting is open through October 31, 2022. Happy Halloween!
Congratulations to the Lord of the Rings Trivia Grand Prize Winner! We were pleased to present the book Middle-earth from Script to Screen: Building the World of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to Nick, an undergraduate student at the University of Iowa and enthusiastic Lord of the Rings fan. Nick was excited to receive and start reading the book, which contains over 1,000 images of scenes from the films and behind-the-scenes stories. Watch a video of Nick accepting the grand prize at the Sciences Library!
Visit the Sciences Library to see our display of Lord of the Rings movie replicas and enter our Trivia Contest. The display will be up through September. Get all 10 questions right in the Trivia Contest to win a small prize. Winners will be entered into a drawing for a larger prize. The contest is open to all through Fri, Aug 20, 2021. The Sciences Library is located at 120 Iowa Ave in Iowa City and open Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM.
Iowa City Darwin Day, a grand celebration of science, will be held February 21-22 featuring speakers Carin Bondar, John Novembre, and Anya Prince. There will also be a talk by Elizabeth Yale “Illustrated Natural History in Victorian Britain: How Darwin and his contemporaries shared knowledge in books,” a free teacher workshop “Playing with Fire? How we perpetuate biological beliefs about race in the classroom and how we can avoid it,” a free workshop open to all “The Groundwater Approach: Building a practical understanding of structural racism,” and a screening of The Fly at FilmScene on the Ped Mall. All Iowa City Darwin Day events are free and open to the public.
The Iowa City Darwin Day 2020 guide offers additional books and media to accompany this year’s celebration! Visit the Sciences Library to see our new Iowa City Darwin Day Exhibit! Chauncey is wearing his favorite Iowa City Darwin Day t-shirt and hanging out with the finches, coral, and iguana on display! In addition to books by and about Darwin, we have books authored by Carin Bondar. A biologist and science communicator from the University of the Fraser Valley, Bondar is host of several TV series including Worlds Oddest Animal Couples (Animal Planet, Netflix), Stephen Hawking’s Brave New World (Discovery World HD, National Geographic) and Outrageous Acts of Science (The Science Channel). Bondar’s talk “Evolution and the Modern Mom: The unique conundrum of Homo sapiens” will be at noon on Sat, Feb 22 in Macbride Auditorium, Macbride Hall. At 3 PM at Prairie Lights, she will read from her book Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom.
Many thanks to the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History and Earth and Environmental Sciences Special Collections for loaning us their specimens!
From pretzel siding to a peppermint walkway, you will love seeing the architectural features of our new Gingerbread House exhibit at the Sciences Library! All of our houses were created by Sciences Library staff and friends. Now it’s time for you to vote for your favorite Gingerbread House! The top two houses will receive prizes!
As the HaloSat satellite flies hundreds of miles above us orbiting the Earth, it’s a short trip to the Sciences Library to see a life-sized model of the HaloSat in our new exhibit! In addition to the 3D model of the HaloSat satellite, there are two gold boxes that have traveled into space and a prototype of the plasma wave instrument that operates on the Geotail mission!
After being released into orbit from the International Space Station, HaloSat takes measurements of the Milky Way’s halo that will help scientists find out if it contains the missing matter expected from observations of the early universe. The gold boxes on display actually flew on the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, and these flight sensors were the first objects to be moved around in space by a robotic arm. The plasma wave instrument that is based on the prototype shown in our exhibit traveled into space on Geotail in 1992 over 27 years ago and continues to send back valuable data from space to this day!
Thank you to the Physics and Astronomy Department for loaning us their models, prototypes, and flight hardware!
Learn more about space exploration, physics, and astronomy at the University of Iowa Libraries. We have numerous books, articles, videos, and even Manga comics! If you would like to find out more, contact Laurie Neuerburg (laurie-neuerburg@uiowa.edu or 319-467-0216) or Leo Clougherty (leo-clougherty@uiowa.edu or 319-335-3083) for help.
Colored bismuth crystals, bright copper, silicon circuits, and more shine in our new exhibit celebrating 2019: The International Year of the Periodic Table! One hundred and fifty years ago, Dmitri Mendeleev published a draft of the first Periodic Table. Mendeleev also wrote “Knowing how contented, free and joyful is life in the realms of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter their portals” in his text Principles of Chemistry. Enter the portal to the Sciences Library to test your knowledge of the elements present in household items, to view our humorous periodic tables, and to see several elements in their pure form! Thank you to Dr. Lou Messerle for loaning us his collection of element samples!
It’s fun to catch snowflakes on your tongue, cut out paper snowflakes, and shovel snowflakes—oops, no. Starting again—it’s fun to catch snowflakes on your tongue, cut out paper snowflakes, and we’re featuring scientist snowflakes in our new exhibit!
Can you find the following scientists hidden in the snowflakes?
If you would like to cut out your own scientist snowflakes, you can find the patterns from the Franklin Institute!
We have supplies on hand at the Sciences Library so you can add your own snowflake design to our service desk.
Brush up on snow ecology, building snow shelters, and the science of snow with Snow, Ice and Other Wonders of Water: A Tribute to the Hydrogen Bond & other books in our Snowflakes & Snow exhibit!
Swing by the Sciences Library to see our new exhibit, Beekeeping 101! It features a real honeycomb, wooden bee houses, smoker can, and protective suit. The exhibit includes resources for learning more about beekeeping as well as bee conservation. Thank you to Jim Davis and Jeremy Richardson for sharing their beekeeping supplies with us!
