A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months. The locals liked it so much, they elected to rebuild it in a more permanent manner. It now also hosts the city of Nashville’s art museum.
After that, we hit the Frist Center for the Visual Arts to catch their exhibit featuring Monet to Dali (on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art). The other exhibit featured some of the work of Angelo Filomeno, who does really interesting (if a bit disturbing) embroidery work on large silk panels. From the Frist website, his works feature “embroidered images of fanged skulls, exploded peacocks, and hovering insects.” Strangely enough, that was about all they had. I have to admit we were a bit disappointed overall. We figured there’d be a more substantial art museum in a city the size of Nashville, but we arguably had a better time at the Huntsville art museum (especially given the difference in the price of admission).
Finally, we hit the Lane Motor Museum before heading home. By far the best stop of the day, especially since admission’s only $5 for an adult. I don’t know what Mr. Lane does for a living, but apparently he must do pretty well for him to have accumulated such an impressive selection of unusual autos predominantly from Europe and Japan. The collection includes everything from cars to trikes to motorcycles to a massive US Army LARC and other oddities like the Helicron. All sorts of cool stuff. Go check it out!
Medical researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered a new use for scorpion venom — cancer medication. Each year, some 9,000 Americans are diagnosed with malignant glioma, a form of brain cancer that kills about half its victims within a year of diagnosis.
Glioma cells work a lot like cockroach muscle cells. And while that fact is pretty disgusting, it also got UAB researchers thinking about the giant Israeli scorpion, whose venom is harmless to humans but deadly to its cockroach prey.
Doctors found that when they injected a drug derived from the venom of giant Israeli scorpions into cancer-infected human brains, the poison destroyed the glioma cells and left surrounding, healthy cells alone. The treatment is still in the early stages of development, but researchers remain optimistic.
See the rest of the article on deadly animals that might save your life at Mental Floss.
Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.
The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…
On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.
