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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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Why Has History Forgotten World War II’s Largest Prison Break, Which Claimed the Lives of More Than 200 Japanese POWs?
During the 1944 Cowra breakout, over 900 prisoners attempted to escape from an Allied camp in Australia. The uprising resulted in the deaths of 234 Japanese men and 5 Australians
Smart News
A.I. Went to the Opera, Creating Images for an Anniversary Production of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ at the Theater Where He First Staged the Masterpiece
Neptune May Have Once Witnessed a Lunar Massacre That Turned Its Original Moons ‘Inside Out’
A Serpentine Sculpture Inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s ‘Join, or Die’ Call for Unity Is Taking Shape—Segment by Segment—in Philadelphia
Flesh-Eating ‘Superworms’ Could Become a New Skeleton-Cleaning Crew for Museum and Research Specimens
This American Pilot Downed 40 Enemy Aircraft During World War II. Researchers Discovered the Wreck of His Plane in a Pacific Jungle and Brought a Wing Back to His Home State
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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Malagasy Life
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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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Australia’s Most Notorious Shipwreck Tells a Story of Murder, Slavery, Mutiny—and, Now, ‘Surprisingly Sophisticated’ Trade in the 17th Century
When the Dutch East India Company’s flagship “Batavia” sank in 1629, it went down with large, carved sandstone blocks in its hold. The stones are now shedding light on trade at the dawn of global capitalism
Science
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A New Study Points to Two Origins of Life on Earth by Tracing Early Chemical Reactions in Single-Celled Organisms
The work challenges the assumption that all life descended from one free-living cell. Instead, it suggests that two microbial lineages, the bacteria and archaea, evolved independently from a primordial, nonliving ancestor
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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Rembrandt Began a Biblical Painting. Another Artist Finished It ‘Rather Crudely.’ Now, Restorations Have Revealed the Long-Lost Original
An art dealer stumbled across “Let the Little Children Come Unto Me” at a German auction house in 2014. Experts have now carefully removed layers of overpaint from the forgotten masterpiece
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