Rebeca Rojas

  Who is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a pioneering architect whose works – alongside Le Corbusier’s and Walter Gropius’ – defined a separate strain of modern architecture known as International Style. He was a true modernist pioneer and an iconic figure of 20th-century architecture and design. Sustained by his famous trenchant statements like ‘less is more’ and ‘God is in the details’, the textures of his Barcelona Pavilion (1929/1986), the steel-and-glass aesthetic of the Seagram Building (1956-1958) and his paradigmatic examples of domestic architecture like the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois (1945-1951), have become some of the world’s most emblematic and widely-recognized architectural elements and structures built in the last century.   One of his characteristic works is Farnsworth House Designed 1945 and eventually completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is a bright, one-floor weekend house in what then was a rural setting by the ba...

  The Three Forms of Water Pure water is tasteless, odorless, and colorless. Water can occur in three states: solid (ice), liquid, or gas (vapor). Solid water—ice is frozen water. When water freezes, its molecules move farther apart, making ice less dense than water. This means that ice will be lighter than the same volume of water, and so ice will float in water. Water freezes at 0° Celsius, 32° Fahrenheit. Liquid water is wet and fluid. This is the form of water with which we are most familiar. We use liquid water in many ways, including washing and drinking. Water as a gas—vapor is always present in the air around us. You cannot see it. When you boil water, the water changes from a liquid to a gas or water vapor. As some of the water vapor cools, we see it as a small cloud called steam. This cloud of steam is a miniversion of the clouds we see in the sky. At sea level, steam is formed at 100° Celsius, 212° Fahrenheit. The water vapor attaches to small bits of dust in t...

 T he largest dinosaur that ever lived. The titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum is a big deal—literally, the biggest dinosaur that scientists have discovered to date. This long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur lived over 100 million years ago in what is now Patagonia, Argentina. Named Máximo, meaning “maximum” or “most” in Spanish, our titanosaur cast reaches 122 feet across Stanley Field Hall on our main floor and stands 28 feet tall at the head. Modeled from fossil bones excavated in Argentina, this cast conveys the sheer size of the biggest animal ever to live. (It’s longer than a blue whale!) Patagotitan weighed about 70 tons in life—that’s as much as 10 African elephants, like the two specimens on display next to Máximo.

Bumblebee bat is world’s smallest It’s a hummingbird… it’s a bumblebee… it’s Kitti’s hog-nosed bat. Yes, seriously, look at it: it’s a bat. A teensy, tiny, teeny, weeny bat. Kitti’s hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) is debatably the world’s smallest mammal and most definitely the world’s smallest bat. Informally known as the bumblebee bat, Kitti’s hog-nosed bat is about the size of a large bumblebee, weighing in at just two grams — about the weight of two Skittles. Again, seriously. It’s also just one of around 440 bat species found in Asia — a continent that houses more than one third of the world’s 1,200 bat species. “It is [an] incredibly tiny creature — even smaller than my thumb (though I have small hands already),” researcher Pipat Soisook told Mongabay.   A well-known bat expert (a chiropterologist), Soisook is the mammal curator at the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Natural History Museum in Thailand, one of only two countries where Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, o...

  What Is the Big Bang? In 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître had a big idea. He said that a very long time ago, the universe started as just a single point. He said the universe stretched and expanded to get as big as it is now, and that it could keep on stretching. The universe is a very big place, and it’s been around for a very long time. Thinking about how it all started is hard to imagine. Just two years later, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble noticed that other galaxies were moving away from us. And that’s not all. The farthest galaxies were moving faster than the ones close to us. Galaxies separating and saying goodbye to each other. This meant that the universe was still expanding, just like Lemaître thought. If things were moving apart, it meant that long ago, everything had been close together. Hubble looks into a big telescope and says wowza. Everything we can see in our universe today—stars, planets, comets, asteroids—they weren't there at the beg...

  What Are Lunar Phases? Our Moon doesn't shine, it reflects. Just like daytime here on Earth, sunlight illuminates the Moon. We just can't always see it. When sunlight hits off the Moon's far side — the side we can't see without from Earth the aid of a spacecraft — it is called a new Moon. When sunlight reflects off the near side, we call it a full Moon. The rest of the month we see parts of the daytime side of the Moon, or phases. These eight phases are, in order, new Moon, waxing crescent, first quarter, waxing gibbous, full Moon, waning gibbous, third quarter and waning crescent. The cycle repeats once a month (every 29.5 days).