Hours

Monday – Thursday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Friday: 10:00 am – 8:00 pm

Saturday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

Sunday: 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

    Closed on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

    The Museum Shop is open during regular museum hours.

The Museum Library

Monday –Friday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm

The Skyliner Restaurant

Monday - Saturday: during regular museum hours

Sunday: 11:30 am – 5:00 pm

Admission

Adults:$7.00

The aged and students with ID: $6.00

    Wonderful Museum offers a 50% discount to groups of 20 or more.

    20 years ago, a couple of ecologists, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, convinced Del Oro, a large orange juice producer, to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dump (倾倒) massive amounts of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of land within the national park, at no cost. Dealing with tons of waste peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

    A year after the contract was signed, Del Oro dumped around 12,000 tons of sticky orange waste in the land. However, another juice company and rival of Del Oro challenged the deal in court, arguing that their competitor was “polluting the national park”. They ended up winning, and the deal between Del Oro and the national park fell through. The 3-hectare piece of land virtually covered with fruit waste was completely forgotten.

    Then, in 2013, Timothy Treuer, a scientist at Princeton University visited that piece of land 15 years earlier. What he found shocked him. “It was completely overgrown with trees and vines,” Timothy Treuer recently said, “the difference between fertilized and unfertilized areas was visually surprised us a lot! We needed to come up with some really good standards to evaluate exactly what was happening there.”

    To confirm that the fruit waste was responsible for the revival of plant life, Treuer and his team spent months picking up samples, analyzing and comparing them. They found “dramatic differences between the areas covered in orange peels and those that were not. The area fertilized by orange waste had richer soil, greater tree-species richness and greater forest coverage. In a sense, it's not just a win-win between the company and the local park—it's a win for everyone.”

    The effect the orange peels had on the land is probably not that surprising to people familiar with composting (堆肥), but what is shocking is that a judge actually called this particular example polluting the national park and stopped it from going forward. Now that Timothy Treuer's study has received worldwide attention, this type of polluting is being seriously considered as a way of bringing tropical forests back to life.

    Let us begin by saying what causes our dreams. Our dreams do not come from another world. They are not messages from some outside source. They are not a look into the future, either.

    All our dreams have something to do with our feelings, fears, longings, wishes, needs and memories. If a person is hungry, or tired, or cold, his dreams may include a feeling of this kind. If the covers on your body, such as a quilt or a blanket, have slipped off your bed, you may dream that you are sleeping on ice or in snow. The material for the dream you will have tonight is likely to come from the experience you have today.

    So the subject of your dream usually comes from something that has effect on you while you are sleeping（feeling of cold, a noise, a discomfort, etc. ）and it may also use your past experiences and the wishes and the interests you have now. This is why children are likely to dream of fairies, older children of school examinations, hungry people of food, homesick soldiers of their families and prisoners of freedom.

    To show you how this is happening while you are asleep and how your needs and wishes can all be joined together in a dream, here is the story of the experiment. A man was asleep and the back of his hand was rubbed with a piece of absorbed cotton. He would dream he was in hospital and his charming girlfriend was visiting him, sitting on the bed and feeling his hand gently!

    There are some scientists who have made a special study of why we dream, what we dream and what those dreams mean. Their explanation of dreams, though a bit reasonable, is not accepted by everyone but it offers an interesting approach to the problem. They believe that dreams are mostly expressions of wishes that did not come true. In other words dreaming is a way of having your wishes carried out.

    My family lives in Texas. I was born and brought up in Texas and I am a graduate of the University of Texas. However, around my second year in law school, I wanted to make a great change, which was almost unheard of for Texans: I wanted to leave!

    I realized this after completing my first year­year internship(实习期) I knew I wanted something different and my chance came during the 2011 Super Bowl in Dallas. A snowstorm blanketed the entire city in snow and thousands of people were gathered. I overheard that StubHub, a big company from a great city, San Francisco, was throwing a party next door to my hotel. I thought if l could get an internship, I could leave for the summer and at least see what it was like. Yes, it was a huge leap. I told myself I was ready.

    There was just one problem: I wasn't invited to the StubHub party. But you know I'm the type of person who goes for something she wants. Needless to say, I crashed the party and found my way to the president. I kindly introduced myself and then asked if they had a legal internship program. Guess what? They accepted my request to be a legal intern, even though no such program existed.

    Although the legal department didn't have a permanent position for me, the experience has shaped my life. Working for a great company in San Francisco, I'm incredibly happy for making my decision to leave Texas.

    By leaving Texas, I learned that it is so much more rewarding to try the unfamiliar than to stay in the comfortable. Exploring the unfamiliar is how you'll understand what fits your life. I say, dive in head first.

    When it comes to learning a foreign language, many people wonder if they will be able to memorize enough vocabulary. But this question never happens about their mother tongue, and yet, it was a foreign language once. However, among all the questions that new parents ask, no doctor has ever heard: "Will my baby be able to learn my language?" Be honest, do you know all the words of your mother tongue? The answer is: "no".

    New words, and new ways of using old words, appear every day. Twenty years ago, who could have been able to understand a sentence like this: "Click here to download your digital book."? Nobody. You never stop learning new vocabulary and you never know how long you will need it.

    Sometimes, you have the word on the tip of your tongue...and it sticks there! But you do know this phenomenon(现象) and don't think that it is because of a bad memory. You should not give this phenomenon more importance in the language you are learning than in your mother tongue.

    You need to learn only 2000 or so basic words to be able to create any phrase you need. You can't avoid some work in order to learn these necessary words and all the more if you want to learn quickly. And before you consider buying into any method, be sure it is right for you. It is not wise to depend on any method based upon mnemonics(记忆群). The first few words seem very easy to learn, so you buy the course, but then you discover quickly, though too late, that a dozen words later, it is all the more difficult to learn a new word when you have also to learn the trick to memorize it.

    In a room at Texas Children Cancer Center in Houston, eight-year-old Simran Jatar lay in bed with a drip(点滴)above her to fight her bone cancer. Over her bald(秃的)head, she wore a pink hat that matched her clothes. But the third grader's cheery dressing didn't mask her pain and weary eyes.

    Then a visitor showed up. "Do you want to write a song?" asked Anita Kruse, 49, rolling a cart equipped with an electronic keyboard, a microphone and speakers. Simran stared. "Have you ever written a poem?" Anita Kruse continued. "Well, yes," Simran said.

    Within minutes, Simran was reading her poem into the microphone. "Some bird soaring through the sky," she said softly. "Imagination in its head…" Anita Kruse added piano music, a few warbling (鸣,唱)birds, and finally the girl's voice. Thirty minutes later, she presented Simran with a CD of her first recorded song.

    That was the beginning of Anita Kruse's project, Purple Songs Can Fly, one that has helped more than 125 young patients write and record songs. As a composer and pianist who had performed at the hospital, Kruse said that the idea of how she could help "came in one flash".

    The effect on the kids has been great. One teenage girl, curling(蜷缩)in pain in her wheelchair, stood unaided to dance to a hip-hop song she had written. A 12-year-old boy with Hodgkin's disease who rarely spoke surprised his doctors with a song he called I Can Make It.

    "My time with the kids is heartbreaking because of the severity of their illnesses," says Anita Kruse. "But they also make you happy, when the children are smiling, excited to share their CD with their families."

    Simran is now an active sixth grader and cancer-free. From time to time, she and her mother listen to her song, Always Remembering, and they always remember the "really sweet and nice and loving" lady who gave them a shining moment in the dark hour.