Scholars
Leading intellectuals in the fields of history, philosophy and science
What Does an Eclipse Look Like from Space?
If you have no knowledge of how the Earth and Sun and Moon move, an eclipse is a scary thing. With no warning, the Sun goes black and your world turns dark. An eclipse, however, is really just the shadow of the Moon passing over the Earth, as seen in the above photo (a NASA image taken by an astron...
May 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
American Wines With Native Vines?
First it was pet turtles and now it’s wine grapes—I just can’t stop thinking about what it means to be native. The United States ferments 700 million gallons of wine each year, most of it from the sugary mash of Vitis vinifera, a grape species imported from the Old World. Yet North America boasts a...
May 20, 2010 |
By Brendan Borrell
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
There are at least two stories behind every dinosaur skeleton you see at a museum. There is the story of the animal itself, its life and evolution, but there is also the story of its discovery, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City many of the fossils on display attest to t...
May 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Dwarf Dinosaurs of Haţeg Island
For hundreds of years, people have been finding the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Romania's Haţeg basin. The Cretaceous-age deposits are remnants of prehistoric islands that sported their own unique faunas, but in the days before fossils were recognized as being the remain...
May 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Bone-Hunter Biographies
Finding, excavating, preparing, studying and mounting dinosaur skeletons is hard work. We marvel at the articulated bones of these creatures in museums, and while each skeleton tells the story of the creature it once belonged to, there is also the story of its discovery. These stories are often jus...
May 04, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Q and A with Barron Hall, Veterinary Dentist
Root canals on cheetahs, lions and gorillas is just another day at the office for veterinary dentist Barron Hall
May 2010 |
By Megan Gambino
Lost Soviet Reflector Found on the Moon
In "Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe" from the April issue of Smithsonian, writer Richard Panek describes an experiment that measures the distance between the Earth and the Moon:Twenty times a second, a laser high in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico aims a pulse of light at t...
April 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Tyrannosaurus rex, the "Prize Fighter of Antiquity"
It has now been 105 years since the famous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex was described by the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, and just about every major dinosaur museum has at least one skeleton of the terrifying predator in their paleontology exhibits. Thanks to the discovery of numerous indiv...
April 27, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
UPDATED: The World's Worst Oil Spills
I've been thinking a lot lately about oil spills. At the beginning of the month, a Chinese freighter ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, grinding a couple miles coral into dust and leaking oil along the way. A couple of weeks ago came news of a new study showing that o...
April 27, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Dryptosaurus Got Its Name
In 1866, back when the scientific study of dinosaurs was only just beginning in North America, the naturalist E.D. Cope received word that workers at the West Jersey Marl Company in Gloucester County, New Jersey, had discovered the gigantic bones of an unknown fossil animal. As Cope did much of his...
April 19, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Little Ice Age Art
One of the most iconic images people conjure up when they think of the Netherlands of the past has to be ice skaters on canals. This painting, Ice Skating near a Village, appears in an exhibition (which closes July 5) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C of work by Dutch artist Hendric...
April 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Dinosaur Casualties of World War I
On December 6, 1916, two years into "the war to end all wars," a German naval crew destroyed a set of 75-million-year-old dinosaur skeletons
April 13, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Accepting the Idea of Extinction
Some scientists say that we are living in a new epoch of geological time—one they call the Anthropocene—that is marked by what may be the sixth mass extinction in the history of our planet. A scary number of creatures have gone extinct in recent human memory, some of them even in my lifetime. No on...
March 31, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Who Was Ada Lovelace?
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when people around the web will write about their favorite women in science and technology. But who was Ada Lovelace?Ada was born Augusta Ada Byron on December 10, 1815, the daughter of Anne Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship and Anne ...
March 24, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Level Playing Field for Science
I suppose, in a way, I should thank the woman who tried to compliment me when I was in high school by saying that I was too pretty for science. What she was really saying was that girls don't belong in science, and that got me so riled up I'm still ticked off nearly two decades later. But at least ...
March 23, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
An avowed paganist in a time of religious strife, Hypatia was also one of the first women to study math, astronomy and philosophy
March 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Chilean Earthquake Moved City Ten Feet
The February 27 magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile moved the city of Concepción, located 65 miles south of the epicenter, at least 10 feet to the west, according to a new analysis.Just think about it: There was enough power in that earthquake to move an entire city—people, buildings and all the land...
March 09, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Can Buzz Aldrin Dance?
He walked on the Moon and now he'll strut across the dance floor.ABC has announced that astronaut Buzz Aldrin will join the cast of the next season of "Dancing with the Stars." At age 80, he'll be the second-oldest contestant ever to compete for the mirror-ball trophy, which he could then display w...
March 03, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Darwin Versus Lincoln: Who Won?
A little more than a year ago we asked: Who Was More Important? Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin? It seems like an odd question, but since they were both born on the same day—February 12, 1809—we thought we'd give the thought experiment a try. Two Smithsonian editors argued for Lincoln and two oth...
February 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
"Fair" Use of our Cells
I've been telling everyone I know that they should read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. (If you haven't read my interview with the book's author, journalist Rebecca Skloot, please do.) This fascinating book details Skloot's search for the source of a laboratory cell line called "HeLa." The c...
February 02, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
