facility:natural history museum

The #Opioid Timebomb: The #Sackler family and how their painkiller fortune helps bankroll London arts | London Evening Standard
▻https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/the-opioid-timebomb-the-sackler-family-and-how-their-painkiller-fortune-

We sent all 33 non-profits the same key questions including: will they rename their public space (as some organisations have done when issues arose regarding former benefactors)? And will they accept future Sackler philanthropy?

About half the respondents, including the Royal Opera House and the National Gallery, where Dame Theresa Sackler is respectively an honorary director and a patron, declined to answer either question.

Of the rest, none said it planned to erase the Sackler name from its public space. The organisations’ positions were more guarded on future donations.

Only the V&A, Oxford University, the Royal Court Theatre and the National Maritime Museum said outright that they were open to future Sackler grants.

The V&A said: “The Sackler family continue to be a valuable donor to the V&A and we are grateful for their ongoing support.”

Millions for London: Where Sackler money has gone
MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

Serpentine Galleries

Grants received/pledged: £5,500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Tate

Grants received/pledged: £4,650,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Gallery, Sackler Escalators, Sackler Octagon
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Dulwich Picture Gallery

Grants received/pledged: £3,491,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Centre for Arts Education
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

V&A Museum

Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Courtyard
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

The Design Museum

Grants received/pledged: £1,500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Library and Archive
Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

Natural History Museum

Grants received/pledged: £1,255,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Biodiversity Imaging Laboratory
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

National Gallery

Grants received/pledged: £1,050,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Room (Room 34)
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

National Portrait Gallery

Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): Pledged grant still being vetted
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Being vetted. Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

The Garden Museum

Grants received/pledged: £850,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Garden
Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

National Maritime Museum

Grants received/pledged: £230,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Research Fellowships
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

Museum of London

Grants received/pledged: Refused to disclose grants received
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Hall
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

Royal Academy of Arts

Grants received/pledged: Refused to disclose grants received
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Wing, Sackler Sculpture Gallery
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

THE PERFORMING ARTS

Old Vic

Grants received/pledged: £2,817,000
Used to fund (among other things): Productions and projects
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Royal Opera House

Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

National Theatre

Grants received/pledged: £2,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Pavilion
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Shakespeare’s Globe

Grants received/pledged: £1,660,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Studios
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Royal Court Theatre

Grants received/pledged: £360,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Trust Trainee Scheme
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

UNIVERSITIES/RESEARCH

University of Oxford

Grants received/pledged: £11,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): Bodleian Sackler Library, Keeper of Antiquities
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Yes

University of Sussex

Grants received/pledged: £8,400,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

King’s College, London

Grants received/pledged: £6,950,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Institute for Translational Neurodevelopment
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

The Francis Crick Institute

Grants received/pledged: £5,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): One-off funds raised via CRUK to help build the Crick
Will you accept future Sackler grants? N/A

UCL

Grants received/pledged: £2,654,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Institute for Musculo-Skeletal Research
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

Royal College of Art

Grants received/pledged: £2,500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Building
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Grants received/pledged: £1,170,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Research Fellowship, Sackler Lecture Series
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Royal Ballet School

Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Imperial College London

Grants received/pledged: £618,000
Used to fund (among other things): Knee research
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

Old Royal Naval College

Grants received/pledged: £500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Gallery
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

OTHER

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Grants received/pledged: £3,100,000
Used to fund (among other things): Sackler Crossing footbridge
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

Moorfields Eye Hospital

Grants received/pledged: £3,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): New eye centre (pledged only)
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

The London Library

Grants received/pledged: £1,000,000
Used to fund (among other things): The Sackler Study
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

The Prince’s Trust

Grants received/pledged: £775,000
Used to fund (among other things): Programmes for disadvantaged youth
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Subject to vetting that typically takes into account “reputational risk” and “all relevant new information about the donor in the public domain”

Westminster Abbey

Grants received/pledged: £500,000
Used to fund (among other things): Restoration of Henry VII Chapel
Will you accept future Sackler grants? Won’t say

Royal Hospital for Neurodisability

Grants received/pledged: £350,000
Used to fund (among other things): Won’t say
Will you accept future Sackler grants? No reply

cc @hlc

Dear Natural History Museum, What Is That Infernal Squawk Out My Window? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/dear-natural-history-museum-what-is-that-infernal-squawk-out-my-window

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The subject line of the email was simply, “Bird?” It’s not unusual for researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to receive requests like this. Local residents aren’t shy about asking for help to identify critters they encounter on hikes or even in their backyards. But what was unusual about this email, sent in August of 2012, was its timestamp: 1:48 a.m. Megan was losing sleep. A very loud, very nocturnal bird had taken up residence in her backyard. For several weeks, the critter would begin shrieking every 30 minutes or so, starting after sunset and continuing throughout the night. In her frustration, she fired an email to Kimball Garrett, an ornithologist at the museum, asking to help her pin down “the culprit that has been causing havoc.” The noise was such a nuisance (...)

How cats conquered the world (and a few Viking ships) : Nature News & Comment
▻http://www.nature.com/news/how-cats-conquered-the-world-and-a-few-viking-ships-1.20643

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.39233.1474364511!/image/C0101823-Egyptian_mummified_cat-SPL_WEB.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_630/C0101823-Egyptian_mummified_cat-SPL_WEB.jpg

Thousands of years before cats came to dominate Internet culture, they swept through ancient Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings, finds the first large-scale look at ancient-cat DNA.

The study, presented at a conference on 15 September, sequenced DNA from more than 200 cats that lived between about 15,000 years ago and the eighteenth century ad.
[…]
Cat populations seem to have grown in two waves, the authors found. Middle Eastern wild cats with a particular mitochondrial lineage expanded with early farming communities to the eastern Mediterranean. Geigl suggests that grain stockpiles associated with these early farming communities attracted rodents, which in turn drew wild cats. After seeing the benefit of having cats around, humans might have begun to tame these cats.

Thousands of years later, cats descended from those in Egypt spread rapidly around Eurasia and Africa. A mitochondrial lineage common in Egyptian cat mummies from the end of the fourth century bc to the fourth century ad was also carried by cats in Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time. Sea-faring people probably kept cats to keep rodents in check, says Geigl, whose team also found cat remains with this maternal DNA lineage at a Viking site dating to between the eighth and eleventh century ad in northern Germany.

“There are so many interesting observations” in the study, says Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “I didn’t even know there were Viking cats.”

Red-Eyed Magpies, White-Speckled Ravens & Other Birds of Unusual Feathers - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/red_eyed-magpies-white_speckled-ravens--other-birds-of-unusual-feathers

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“This here is my favorite cabinet,” Hein van Grouw tells me as we walk around the back rooms of the Natural History Museum at Tring, 30 miles northwest of London as the crow flies. He pulls the steel double-doors open, revealing a menagerie of stuffed birds. On the top shelves there are snipes, rails, and pigeons. Below them are thrushes and blackbirds. And filling the bottom, sliding shelves with smaller passerine birds: finches, starlings, and warblers.Mostly collected by Walter Rothschild in the 19th century, all these birds share one thing in common: They have each inherited a genetic mutation—or mutations—that give them abnormal plumage. Their strange colorings make it difficult for me to identify even the most familiar of garden birds. One that is an odd mosaic of dark brown and (...)

A Desert Spider With Astonishing Moves - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/science/a-desert-spider-with-astonishing-moves.html?ref=world
▻http://nyti.ms/1ncgXEP

A spider newly discovered in the Moroccan Sahara can do powerful, acrobatic flips through the air.

Like a gymnast, it runs for a short time, then stretches out its front legs, spinning into the air and returning to touch the ground with its hind legs. Peter Jäger, a taxonomist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, who identified the spider, has nicknamed it the flic-flac for the maneuver its leap resembles.

The move doubles the spider’s speed, to 6.6 feet per second from 3.3. But since it uses so much energy, the maneuver is a last resort, called on only to escape predators.

“I can’t see any other reason,” Dr. Jäger said, adding: “It is a costly move. If it performs this five to 10 times within one day, then it dies.”

The spider lives in a tubelike structure it weaves in the sand, staying hidden under a sandy lid and emerging at night in search of food.
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At first Dr. Jäger mistook the spider for a sister species that lives in Tunisia and Algeria, but was able to distinguish the two through a close comparison of their copulatory organs. He describes the new spider in the journal Zootaxa.....

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Clash of the Tiny—One Pushy Squirrel & the Turf War for LA - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/clash-of-the-tinyone-pushy-squirrel--the-turf-war-for-la

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A resourceful eastern fox squirrel eating pizzaCourtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles CountyIn West Los Angeles, just across the 405 freeway from UCLA, sits a hospital that’s been serving veterans for more than 100 years. Back in 1904, it housed veterans from the Civil and Spanish-American Wars and was called the “Sawtelle Veterans Home.” Many of the Civil War vets came from the American South, from places like Tennessee and Kentucky. At that time, Los Angeles was far less developed than it is now. Most of the city was still quite rural, mainly consisting of citrus orchards and walnut groves. That much we know is true. What follows is perhaps at best described as legend, though it comes to me from a good source: Jim Dines, curator of mammalogy at the Natural History Museum (...)