New Education Lab Called Q?rious Now At Museum of Natural History

DC's Smithsonian museums (there are 17 of them here in the city) are among America's most treasured and visited places. But the Smithsonian also publishes a series of some of the most interesting, fact-filled blogs appearing anywhere on the internet. Each Sunday, The Prices Do DC re-posts an entry that initially appeared in one of those highly-readable blogs. Hope you enjoy and maybe we'll see you soon at the Smithsonian.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity."  And just as Lewis Carroll took license with the word, making Alice's wonderland world "curiouser and curiouser," the National Museum of Natural History, has coined a new version— Q?rius.

"It's like a highly secure password," says Shari Werb, the museum's assistant director for education and outreach. "It's a word that makes you stop, and try to decode. By then, you're curious."

The name marks a new 10,000-square-foot education space that is packed with stuff that kids (and adults, too) can pick-up, smell, squeeze, and otherwise analyze. Some 6,000 specimens—fossils and plants and minerals and even human bones—from the collections are housed in a setting that the museum is calling "part lab, part collections vault, part DIY garage and part hangout."

To continue reading this post, which first appeared in Smithsonian.com, click here.