10 STEAMy Instagram Accounts To Tantalize Your Brain

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In honor of Instagram launching a feature that I’m deeply ambivalent about at best, here’s a list of Instagram accounts that post some prime STEAMy content that I am not deeply ambivalent about. Make that brain grow three sizes up.

American Museum of Natural History

https://www.instagram.com/p/BJBInvwhPoG/?taken-by=amnh

Bringing it real close to home for me. This AMNH is amazing and their Instagram is too! If you’re in the neighborhood, be sure to see the Titanosaur. One of its thigh bones is the size of my entire person.

Emily Graslie

https://www.instagram.com/p/BFRMQW1lmk9/?taken-by=egraslie

Meet Emily Graslie, Chief Curiosity Correspondent for The Field Museum and host of The Brainscoop on YouTube. I’ll be going for the first time next week and I’m SUPER PSYCHED about it.

NASA

https://www.instagram.com/p/BI2vqa7Ay0y/?taken-by=nasa

I tried to write a little blurb about NASA’s Instagram, but all I could write down was SPACE. SPAAAACE. SPACE SPACE SPACE. Also what does this look like to you?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BItCdSVAcmc/?taken-by=nasa

Mars Curiosity

https://www.instagram.com/p/BBPGTyTE3_j/?taken-by=marscuriosity

What’s cool about the Mars Curiosity account is that the only retouch and editing done is resizing. This is BASICALLY like following a martian robot, so. Also the above is a selfie. The martian robot took a selfie WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE.

National Geographic

https://www.instagram.com/p/BI_yjFljG-l/?taken-by=natgeo

Who better to follow on Insta than National Geographic, a publication literally known for its photography? Also what we really learned here today is that I will never not post a photo of Aurora Borealis.

Yellow Eleanor

https://www.instagram.com/p/BI_flz1hzDg/?taken-by=yellowelanor

This one is Laneia’s pick, and you can tell because Yellow Eleanor is a whole account about mushrooms and fungi freak me out. I would never follow this without a good nudge from Laneia, and I’m glad I did, because everything looks like a fairy lives there AND ALSO SCIENCE. For plants that are not fungi, try—

New York Botanical Garden

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIiPCvDg-OH/?taken-by=nybg&hl=en

Remember how everyone was talking about the corpse flower last month? Well this is that flower at NYBG.

San Diego Zoo

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIlcCSyhhjV/?taken-by=sandiegozoo

I was actually between San Diego Zoo and Smithsonian Zoo for the position of zoo Insta on this list. But San Diego posted a photo of an Orangutan and Orangutans are my favorite animal and that is how we got here this day so may there be a baby animal upon your house.

City Museum

https://www.instagram.com/p/BHVDtgwjac4/?taken-by=citymuseum&hl=en

I don’t know that I can explain to you exactly what the St. Louis City Museum is, but I can tell you how much I’ve always wanted to go there. It’s part playground, part…design? Architecture? Some kind of design situation. I dunno, here’s a photo of their climbable roof wire tunnels, please feel free to tell me in the comments if you’ve gone here or, if you haven’t, how much you now want to go.

Powerhouse Museum

https://www.instagram.com/p/BIvz9vGj4hn/?taken-by=maasmuseum

Never been, but the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, recently posted this great collider exhibit photo and it is #sciencegoals. Oh, and CERN has one too.

What STEAMy Instas are you following? Or are you running one? Let’s compile a list together!

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A.E. Osworth

A.E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit), is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing (April 2021) and is available for pre-order now. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle (where they used to be the Geekery Editor), Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.

A.E. has written 542 articles for us.

11 Comments

  1. I don’t have Instagram, but I am following the tumblr page of lost/rarely seen National Geographic photos, and it’s fairly amazing.

  2. The City Museum is one of my favorite places on the planet. It’s super joyful. It’s pretty much a playground for adults (though there are actual children there too) – when I was in college we came up with a lot of excuses to go (like swing dancing monthly in this giant bank-vault room. that was awesome).

  6. These are great picks! I think if my instagram was filled with this type of content instead of pictures of all my straight friends’ kids I would use it more often. I love Pond Life (@pondlife_pondlife) for awesome videos of protozoas and other tiny water critters and the Dept of the Interior (@usinterior) for stunning nature photography.

    • “pictures of all my straight friends’ kids” god i relate so hard. i just want all the gay on my timeline, y’know?!

  7. My pretty much all time favorite insta is Lisa Winter’s (@titanium_teeth) She’s a builder on battle bots and posts a lot of cool robot building related stuff.

  9. I have been to the City Museum, the brainchild of a local sculptor. I have even been climbing around in the wire cages three stories off the ground – admittedly after a beer. It’s a must-see for people going through St. Louis – you get the Arch experience by admiring it from the ground, but if I had to recommend one unique experience in town, it’s the City Museum.

  10. These are great! Can I suggest one more? The Monterey Bay Aquarium (@montereybayaquarium) also has an excellent IG feed.

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