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Science
Theater of Relief
Medical procedures used to be a scream-filled endurance test until doctors at this Boston institution learned to tame the pain of patients
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Avoiding These Three Vascular Health Risk Factors in Midlife Can Help You Delay Dementia for About 13 Years, Study Suggests
High blood pressure, diabetes and smoking are three major modifiable risk factors of dementia. New research tracked more than 12,000 participants to quantify how many years of healthy cognitive function you can gain by evading some or all of them during middle age
Smart News
Do Monkeys Keep Pets? Study Finds Widespread Primate Interactions With Other Animal Species, From Mice to Deer
This Newly Approved Narcolepsy Drug Is the First to Target the Sleep Disorder’s Root Cause Rather Than Its Symptoms
Inside the Fight to Save a 300-Year-Old Tree That Survived a Revolutionary War Battle
Stolen Masterpieces Worth $10 Million Discovered in a Cardboard Box, Months After Thieves Snuck Into a Museum and Whisked Them Away Into the Night
These Coral Reefs Off West Africa Were Long Presumed Dead. Scientists Just Found Them Alive and Teeming With Life
Latest Features
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Travel
Rediscovering America’s Original Grand Tour
Follow along as we retrace the route one journalist laid out in “The Fashionable Tour,” from New York City to Niagara Falls, when memories of the fight for independence were still fresh
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History
How to Build a Character
Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said
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Most Popular
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Special Report
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America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark
A Smithsonian magazine special issue in celebration of the nation's 250th
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Photo of the Day
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Coyote Siblings
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Podcast
Smithsonian Podcast: There’s More to That
Smithsonian magazine covers history, science and culture in the way only it can — through a lens on the world that is insightful and grounded in richly reported stories. In There’s More to That, meet the magazine’s journalists and hear how they discover the forces behind the biggest issues of our time.
Latest Episodes
The Remarkable, Amazing Stories of Route 66 Reflect the Twists and Turns of 100 Years of Americana
April 23, 2026 | 34 minutes
History
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This Connecticut Teenager Spied on the British During the American Revolution, Succeeding Where Nathan Hale Failed
Newly uncovered documents reveal the story of David Maltbie, who relayed intelligence to the patriots in 1776, narrowly avoiding execution as a spy
Science
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Earth’s Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too?
The idea that universes evolve like organisms sat on the fringes of theoretical physics for decades. Then, a Substack post and a 2022 find by the James Webb Space Telescope boosted the concept
Innovation
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The First At-Home Test for Infected Ticks Could Improve Lyme Disease Diagnosis
LymeAlert will hit the market in August. The latest tool against the tick-borne illness could become a medicine cabinet staple
Travel
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A New Generation of Chefs Reimagines Indonesian Cuisine in the Netherlands to Tell the Stories of Its Origins
The shift reflects a larger cultural moment, with chefs asking whether the cuisine should remain tied to colonial nostalgia or evolve into a reflection of modern Indonesian identity
Arts & Culture
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The History of the Beach Read, From 19th-Century ‘Moral Debasement’ to BookTok
The still-popular genre got its start 150 years ago, when publishers profited off the rise of travel in the United States during an otherwise slow publishing season
At the Smithsonian
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These Shark Look-Alikes Have Long Confounded Fishers and Scientists on the East Coast. Tracking Where They Migrate Could Help Clear the Confusion
Researchers are tagging and tracking spinner sharks to map out their geographic distribution, because they’ve seen that the range of the very similar blacktip shark has shifted