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A New World on the Outside of a Raleigh Museum

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


In Raleigh, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has been building its Nature Research Center, a brand new extension to the museum focusing not just on science but on how science is done. It's all awesome, and it opens today, April 20. You could talk all day about it -- and, full disclosure, as a member of the board of the Friends of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, I seriously could.

But as a board member I'm still a science writer first, and so whatever's going on INSIDE the museum, what's charged me, especially in my role here as Plugged In's unofficial "unplugged" correspondent, is the outside. Most especially, the outside of the three-story globe that is the museum's signature. Called the Daily Planet, it's filled with interactive high-tech video and sound. But outside it's a globe -- possibly the world's largest truly representational globe, even though, pierced by a walkway and a building, part of the globe is missing.

As a science writer and producer, I've followed around Todd and Bill Ulrich of Worldfx Inc., the guys who have put the skin on the globe. They've been up and down on lifts, laying on their backs beneath the gigantic thing, and in general shaking a serious tail feather to make this enormously detailed satellite mosaic take shape on this enormous globe. The new globe joins a wonderful and complicated ecosystem of the giant globes we have known, including the Unisphere from the 1964-1965 World's Fair; Eartha, the DeLorme globe in Maine; and the unforgettable Mapparium, the enormous inside-out stained glass globe at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston.


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It's been a treat to watch the creation of the Daily Planet globe, and so I started documenting it. More than that, as people began passing by and noticing the continents taking shape, it became clear how, long before the museum opened, the Daily Planet, simply as a globe -- a gigantic scientific instrument -- was already teaching people science. I collected some video, some sound, some images, some context, and came up with this. A new globe -- a new world.

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

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