conservation lab

Harvard's famed collection of Glass Flowers counts over 4,000 models—and one conservator is making sure their timeless beauty endures for another century to come.

Now comes the hard part: preserving 1,000-year-old gold and silver artifacts for centuries to come.

The story of one man’s adventure to rebuild the experimental orchestra conceived by Luigi Russolo, the 20th century’s first noise musician.

The Amber Room, a jewel worth hundreds of millions, vanished during World War II. Russia would spend two decades recreating it.

Style may be eternal, but your synthetic clothing? Not so much.

Look closely: The story of an object’s making is hidden in plain sight.

Before entering the Menil Collection in Houston, an installation of wood and soil gets quarantined in an oven and a zero-oxygen chamber.

The tiny city of Corning, New York is home to the world’s best glass conservators.

As conservators pick an object apart, what lies inside can be another gem all its own.

A chance discovery in an anthropologist’s archives uncovered native voices from a remote Alaskan island. Here's what happened next.

Medical imaging slices through mummies while leaving them unperturbed.

Watch conservators restore a vandalized Rothko, submerge a Dickens manuscript in water, and preserve Lonesome George—the iconic Galapagos tortoise—for generations to come.