Articles

A coy Buttercup wearing his brand new foot.

Buttercup the One-Legged Duck No Longer Has to Hobble

Buttercup's adorable plight, which concluded on Sunday when engineers successfully outfitted the duck with a 3D printed duck foot

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Woman Builds a Prosthetic Leg Out of Legos

Vanity prosthetic legs aren't new - but this is probably the first one built out of LEGOS

A priestess of Osun in the Yoruba tradition shops at the Dance Africa Festival and Bazaar in New York City. Her natural hair is combined with synthetics to produce her style.

July 3: Today’s Events at the Folklife Festival

Check out today's events at the Folklife Festival, including African-inspired fashion, Bácska cuisine and folk-jazz with Dresch and Lukács

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The Amazing Public Art Deep in the Heart of Texas

Houston has a healthy allowance for beautifying its streets and parks. See how it spends it

The habitual use of antibiotics at industrial farming operations to promote growth can lead to the development of bacteria resistant to the drugs.

Factory Farms May Be Ground-Zero For Drug Resistant Staph Bacteria

Staph microbes with resistance to common treatments are much more common in industrial farms than antibiotic-free operations

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Virus Hunters Are Testing Bats, Camels, Goats And Cats to Find a Deadly Illness’ Origin

Bats have been pinpointed as the most likely culprits behind MERS, though camels are a close second

¡Así Kotama! is out July 2, on Smithsonian Folkways Records.

Listen to the Flutes of Ecuador, Then Catch Them Live

A new album on Smithsonian Folkways Records captures the effort to sustain a fading musical tradition

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These Contact Lenses Can Zoom In and Out, Give You Telescopic Vision

These contact lenses can switch your vision back and forth from regular sight to a 2.8x zoom

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Obama Tackles Illegal Wildlife Trade

Obama's plan will specifically address poaching of elephants and rhinos, though he has also reportedly begun conversations with China about curbing demand

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Yoga a “Distinctly American Cultural Phenomenon,” California Judge Decrees

Though its roots are in India, American yoga is a whole different thing

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The Past and Future of the Baseball Bat

The evolution of the baseball bat, and a few unusual mutations

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One Thousand Robots Face Off In a Soccer Tournament

The roboticists behind RoboCup want their team of bots to beat the World Cup champions on a level playing field by 2050

How do we resist when burgers and bacon beckon?

Can We Be Tricked into Not Eating So Much?

Just posting calorie counts isn't very effective. What may work, though, is framing overeating in terms everyone understands

Gwyneth Glyn, a Welsh singer who performs original and folk songs in her native tongue, will perform at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival this year as part of the “One World, Many Voices” program.

Can Musicians and Educators Bring Welsh Back?

The Welsh language is spoken by few, but people like Gwyneth Glyn, a Welsh folk musician, are helping to revitalize it and renew interest in the culture

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These Bright Webs Depict Flight Patterns Around Major Airports

Software engineer Alexey Papulovskiy has built Contrailz, a site that generates visuals of flight data over cities around the world

Happy 315th Birthday to the Steam Engine

Three hundred and fifteen years ago today James Savery's patented the steam engine

A Museum in New York City Is Exhibiting Fragments of a Melting Glacier

After the exhibition concludes, the ice will be relinquished to its original fate - a melted puddle

Torres del Paine National Park in Chile, which ranks as one of the countries with the highest amount of biodiversity but the least funding to protect it.

Funding Biases Affect Wildlife Protection in the Developing World

Forty countries that receive low levels of aid for environmental conservation contain about one-third of the world's threatened species

First Death During Cirque du Soleil Performance

For 29 years, Cirque du Soleil had defied death, never seeing a performer die on the job. Until this past weekend

Plant impressions found underneath a pair of ancient humans (at left) indicate they were buried atop a bed of flowers (as depicted at right).

Archaeologists Find Evidence of Flowers Buried in a 12,000-Year-Old Cemetery

Plant impressions found underneath a pair of ancient humans in Israel indicate they were buried ceremonially, atop a bed of flowers

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