Earth Science
Riled up About Geoengineering
One of the most contentious sessions at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting this past weekend in San Diego was on geoengineering, the study of ways to engineer the planet to manipulate climate. Intentional ways to do so, I should say—as many of the speakers pointed out, ...
February 23, 2010 |
By Laura Helmuth
Snowmageddon as Seen from Space
Is it spring yet?Those of us in the Washington, D.C., area are thoroughly sick of snow, having gone through two blizzards in less than a week. (And snow days are no fun when you're an adult and end up having to work from home because it's too treacherous to walk more than a few blocks.) But this im...
February 12, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Would You Pay for a Plastic Bag?
Would you pay for a plastic or paper bag to haul your groceries home? On January 1, residents of Washington, D.C., began paying five cents for every one of these bags when shopping at stores that sell food, including grocery stores and carry-out restaurants. The alternative: bring your own.Washingt...
February 03, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
An Eclipse in Your Pocket
When you think about it, American money is kind of boring. It's fairly drab in color, and rarely have people other than U.S. presidents been found on our dollars or coins. Other countries put more interesting people, like scientists, on their money, often using a rainbow of colors. Even more daring...
January 29, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Another Downside to Your Classic Green Lawn
We should all know by now that lawns of green grass aren't so "green" for the environment. Keeping turf from turning brown wastes water; people use too much pesticide and herbicide, toxic chemicals that can contaminate the fish we eat and water we drink. And keeping lawns at a reasonable height bu...
January 21, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Pollution and India’s Reptiles
Romulus Whitaker is a herpetologist and conservationist in India. In this video, from November's TEDIndia in Mysore, he talks about using two of India's iconic reptiles—the king cobra and the gharial—to convince people to save the country's polluted rivers. His research includes tracking individual...
January 13, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
NASA's New Lunar Rover
The Smithsonian Institution pitches in to help NASA prepare for its next lunar mission with a new "home on wheels"
January 2010 |
By Megan Gambino
Visualize More Sunshine
We're past the winter solstice (finally!) and, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, getting a bit more sunlight every day. It's hard to see a difference yet—in Washington, D.C., the days are lengthening by only about half a minute per day this week. (You can chart your local sunrise and sunset time...
December 28, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Why D.C. Got Pummeled With Snow
Those of you in the north may be laughing behind our backs (the D.C. region does tend to overreact in cold and snowy weather), but 18+ inches of snow is almost unheard of here in the nation's capital. The Smithsonian Institution museums shut down this weekend, and the federal government closed on M...
December 22, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Science Books for Kids
For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids' books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young:Almost Ast...
December 21, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Eight Awful Movies for Science in the 2000s
Even a bad movie can be enjoyable under the right circumstances. Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn't bothered. Here are eight clunkers from the last decade: Erin Brockovich (2000): Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her work in this true-life story of a woman who fought against polluters in ...
December 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Ten Movies We Loved From the 2000s
The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we'll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed: A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work i...
December 16, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Volcano Red
This photo, of Montserrat's Soufriere Hills volcano in 1996, is one of 50,000 made freely available this week by the British Geological Survey via their new web service OpenGeoscience. The 1000 x 1000 pixel images, from the BGS's National Archive of Digital Photographs, are free to download for non...
December 11, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Musical Interlude
One more suggestion that I left off of Tuesday's holiday gift list: The band They Might Be Giants released their album "Here Comes Science" earlier this year. And here are videos from three of the songs, "Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)," "Meet the Elements" and "Sci...
December 10, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Underwater Antarctica
This time-lapse video, from the BBC/Discovery program Life, shows three-foot-long worms and carnivorous starfish as they chow down on a dead seal at the bottom of the ocean near Antarctica. Kind of gross, but beautiful at the same time, don't you think?The 11-part series will air on the Discovery C...
December 07, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
From Close Up or Far Away, Amazing Volcano Photos
Geologist Bernhard Edmaier has been photographing the majestic beauty of active and dormant volcanoes for over 15 years
December 02, 2009 |
By Abby Callard
A Coral Reef's Mass Spawning
Understanding how corals reproduce is critical to their survival; Smithsonian's Nancy Knowlton investigates the annual event
December 2009 |
By Megan Gambino
The Waldseemüller Map: Charting the New World
Two obscure 16th-century German scholars named the American continent and changed the way people thought about the world
December 2009 |
By Toby Lester
Picture of the Week—Portuguese Man o'War
What is it? A beaded necklace? Red blood cells? No, it's the Portuguese Man o'War (Physalia physalis), magnified 30 times. Though it resembles a jellyfish, the Portuguese Man o'War is a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that work together. The sting of the venom in the tentacles' nematocysysts is...
November 20, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Watching Coral Sex
My colleague Megan Gambino visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute earlier this year to watch coral spawn. A report appears in the December issue of the magazine, and she also blogged about the experience over at Around the Mall. We asked her if anything interesting got left out of her ...
November 19, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
