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Articles

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Fabulous New Fossil of a Human Ancestor

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Frank Bruni on Being “Born Round”

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Dino Blog Carnival #12 - Disappearing Mayans, Academic Snubbing, Vacationing Paleontologists and Skeleton for Sale

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Celebrate Oktoberfest with Smithsonian Folkways!

Heading to Canada from as far away as Argentina, red knot sandpipers stop to feast on the eggs of horseshoe crabs at Delaware Bay.

Return of the Sandpiper

Thanks to the Delaware Bay’s horseshoe crabs, the tide may be turning for an imperiled shorebird

The robotic Cassini spacecraft which is now orbiting Saturn looked back toward the eclipsed Sun and saw a view unlike any other.

Fantastic Photos of our Solar System

In the past decade, extraordinary space missions have found water on Mars, magnetic storms on Mercury and volcanoes on the moons of Saturn

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Wild Things: Life as We Know It

Toucans, Orchids, Monkeys and more

Amy Herman at the Metropolitan Museum with Sargent's Madame X asks her class of cops, "How would you describe this woman in one sentence?"

Teaching Cops to See

At New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amy Herman schools police in the fine art of deductive observation

First baseman Frank Chance was known as "the Peerless Leader."

Portraits of Baseball’s Tinker, Evers and Chance

The famed Chicago Cubs infielders were immortalized in verse—as well as through Paul Thompson’s lens

Did artist Verrocchio delegate two figures in his Beheading of St. John the Baptist to his prize pupil Leonardo da Vinci?

Looking for Leonardo

Are figures in a Florentine altar panel attributed to Italian artist Andrea del Verrocchio actually by Leonardo da Vinci?

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Letters

Readers Respond to the July and August Issues

Artist Mark Newport replaces the flashy capes and skin-tight garments of comic book superheroes with soft, hand-knit costumes.

Q and A: Mark Newport

Costume designer Mark Newport talks about knitting outfits for superheroes, both famous (Batman) and unknown (Sweaterman)

The Grateful Dead's Hart: Still thinking about the cosmos.

From the Castle

Mind-Meld

After Xiangmei Gu takes off the backing, she saves the brittle fragments in her record books, which date back two decades and line the shelves in her office.

Restoring Artwork to its Former Glory

With a steady hand, Xiangmei Gu wields paintbrushes and tweezers as the Smithsonian’s only conservator of Chinese paintings

"In the bad old days, when medical life was more free-wheeling, "MASH"-style humor was commonplace."

UBI in the Knife and Gun Club

The secret language of doctors and nurses

The Nike Zoom Victory Spike is among the showcase of winners honored by the National Design Awards.

What’s Up

Some 80 million "lost" pages include records of people and police assassination orders.

A Human Rights Breakthrough in Guatemala

A chance discovery of police archives may reveal the fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war

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Fevers

Temperatures at the Boiling Point

John Brown and many of his followers holed up in the fire engine house awaiting reinforcements by a swarm of "bees"—slaves from the surrounding area. But only a handful showed up.

John Brown’s Day of Reckoning

The abolitionist’s bloody raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry 150 years ago set the stage for the Civil War

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October Anniversaries

Momentous or Merely Memorable

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