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Out of Darwin’s Shadow
Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at the theory of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin and nearly outscooped Darwin’s The Origin of Species
January 22, 2009 |
By Lyn Garrity
Wild Goose Chase
How one man's obsession saved an "extinct" species
January 02, 2009 |
By Rob R. Dunn
The Year of Charles Darwin Ultimate Tour (Part 1)
In 2009, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (check out the magazine in February for Smithsonian’s take on the subject, including how his life relates to that of his birthday companion, Abraham Lincoln). With all of the events planned throughout the year to honor Darwi...
December 31, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—Jupiter and Ganymede
How far we have come from 1609, when Galileo Galilei first aimed his telescope towards the little twinkly dots in the sky and saw stars and planets. Turning his sights on Jupiter in 1610, he noticed that some stars near the planet disappeared over the following nights—he had discovered some of the ...
December 19, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Would YOU Do With a Fusion Bomb?
Smithsonian’s blogging chief Laura Helmuth has a question for the readers of this blog, inspired by Charles Seife’s latest book, Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.One of the people discussed in Sun in a Bottle is Edward Teller, best known for his wor...
December 17, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week--Diatoms or Modern Art?
Michael Stringer of Westcliff-on-Sea, England won the 2008 Nikon Small world Photomicrography Competition earlier this year with this image of marine diatoms (a type of algae) from the genus Pleurosigma.
This image was one of a series Mr. Stringer created to illustrate a talk to a camera club on “P...
December 05, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Body of Copernicus Is Identified
You remember Nicolaus Copernicus, right? He’s the 16th-century Polish astronomer who was the first to figure out that earth was not the center of the universe, that the earth and all the other planets orbited the sun. But he wasn’t always so well known. Copernicus worked as a church administrator s...
November 24, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
I Thought Darwin Studied Finches
While reading the Guardian (the UK newspaper) over the weekend, I came across a little article in which a British scientist was complaining about the absurdity of featuring a drawing of a hummingbird (below) on the 10-pound note that honors Charles Darwin (it’s the 200th anniversary of his birth ne...
November 20, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Bugs, Brains and Trivia
No detail is too small for students at the Linnaean games, an annual national insect trivia competition
November 17, 2008 |
By Abigail Tucker
Galileo, Reconsidered
The first biography of Galileo Galilei resurfaces and offers a new theory as to why the astronomer was put on trial
August 12, 2008 |
By Mike Price
Wallace Broecker Geochemist, Palisades, New York
How to stop global warming? CO2 "scrubbers," a new book says
June 2008 |
By Kenneth R. Fletcher
On the Origin of a Theory
Charles Darwin's bid for enduring fame was sparked 150 years ago by word of a rival's research
June 2008 |
By Richard Conniff
Patricia Zaradic, Conservation Ecologist, Pennsylvania
The trouble with "videophilia"
April 2008 |
By Megan Gambino
Wolf Tracker
Biologist Gudrun Pflueger talks about her encounter with a Canadian pack
March 11, 2008 |
By Megan Gambino
Q and A With the Rhino Man
Wildlife biologist Hemanta Mishra's efforts to save the endangered Indian rhinoceros
March 01, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Trials of a Primatologist
How did a renowned scientist who has done groundbreaking research in Brazil run afoul of authorities there?
February 2008 |
By Joshua Hammer
Symbolically Speaking
A Q&A with hieroglyphs expert Janice Kamrin
November 05, 2007 |
By Jess Blumberg
Midas Touch
To clean highly polluted groundwater, Michael Wong has developed a detergent based on gold
October 2007 |
By William Booth
Flu Fighter
With a possible pandemic in our future, immunologist John Wherry is racing to develop a once-a-lifetime vaccine
October 2007 |
By Arthur Allen
The Player
Luis von Ahn's secret for making computers smarter? Get thousands of people to take part in his cunning online games
October 2007 |
By Polly Shulman
