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An assortment of squash

Beyond the Butternut: A Guide to Selecting a Great Winter Squash

They all taste great with a simple bake in the oven, but each has some characteristics that make it unique

Anonymous Donor looms, at more than ten feet tall. “As you are walking through it you’re just engulfed by the object,” says curator Nicholas Bell.

The Renwick Reopens

Artist Chakaia Booker Gives Tires a Powerful Retread

Booker empowers her monumental sculptures with new life, shaped by the shearing and bending and folding of repurposed rubber

Say hello to the tardigrade, an extreme gene machine.

New Research

Water Bears Are the Master DNA Thieves of the Animal World

Foreign genes from bacteria, fungi and plants may have bestowed these animals with their ability to tolerate boiling, freezing and the vacuum of space

Army ants really know how to take the road less travelled.

New Research

Army Ants Act Like Algorithms to Make Deliveries More Efficient

The marauding ants know just where to place living bridges to create shortcuts without sacrificing their food-gathering prowess

Sinatra on the radio

Listen to Never-Before-Released Tracks From Frank Sinatra’s Earliest Years on the Radio

You haven’t heard Ol’ Blue Eyes quite like this

Med School Students Can Play “Operation” With These Synthetic Cadavers

Florida company SynDaver is making life-like organs and bodies. But, as teaching models, are they as helpful as the real thing?

Poster, Gib acht sonst . . [Be Careful or Else . .], 1929–30.

When “Danger” Is Art’s Middle Name

A new exhibit looks at the inspiration that comes from the clash of glory and catastrophe

Yes, we have no bananas: Bananas may be plentiful on store shelves today, but since Americans commercially eat only one variety, our banana supply (like many other foods) is vulnerable to disease or other dangers.

Age of Humans

How Globalization and Climate Change Are Taking Away Our Favorite Foods

In a new book, author Simran Sethi argues that we are facing one of the most radical shifts in food ever.

A Byzantine-style motif is woven on 18th-century looms by the weavers of Bevilacqua. A winged lion is the symbol of St. Mark, the city’s patron saint, and of the city. Mario e Paola Bevilacqua, 337/b, San Marco, Fondamenta della Canonica.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Venice

Nine Luxury Gifts You Can Only Find in Venice

"Baby Louie," formerly of the Indianapolis Children's Museum, is now back home, at the Henan Geological Museum.

Big Baby Dinosaur Finally Goes Home

An infant oviraptorosaur smuggled out of China decades ago comes back to Henan Province with new stories to tell

This gigantic piece of chalk art was created by dozens of artists in attempt to snag a Guinness World Record for Largest Anamorphic Pavement Art.

These 3D Pavement Paintings Take Chalk Art to a New Level

The pavement becomes a playground at the Sarasota Chalk Festival

This Pump Could Make Blood Transfusions Safer and Cheaper in the Developing World

The Hemafuse gives doctors a sterile way to suction, filter and retransfuse patients’ blood in places without electricity

Echelman's sculpture is inspired by data supplied by NASA and NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, measuring the effects of the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Tohoku, Japan in 2011.

The Renwick Reopens

How One Artist Learned to Sculpt the Wind

Artist Janet Echelman studied ancient craft, travel the world and now collaborates with a team of specialists to choreograph the movement of air

Movilă: "I was near the Bataclan café and I saw two girls. I saw this one in front of me starting to really scream and cry. I took several photographs of her and posted one to Facebook, and it was picked up by another account. This girl wrote me, 'Cristian, I am the girl in the photo.' She lost her two close friends."

Photographer Cristian Movilă’s Eyewitness Photos of the Attack on Paris and its Aftermath

The experienced photographer says that nothing could have prepared him for what he saw

The latest Li-Fi prototype

What Is Li-Fi, and Will It Replace Wi-Fi?

Mobile communications professor Harald Haas has theorized about using LED bulbs to transmit data for years. Now, the technology is a reality.

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Spectacular High Fashion Rises From a Landscape of Trash

Photographer Fabrice Monteiro conjures the specter of environmental ruin

In 1856, a Nantucket sailor sketched the killing of his crew’s “100-barrel” prize.

How Nantucket Came to Be the Whaling Capital of the World

Ron Howard’s new film “In the Heart of the Sea” captures the greed and blood lust of the Massachusetts island

Get Reintroduced to Rosa Parks as a New Archive Reveals the Woman Behind the Boycott

The Rosa Parks collection adds depth to the story of the civil rights heroine

Scientists reconfigured a magnetic resonance scanner to capture a woman and her baby.

Why I Captured This MRI of a Mother and Child

A venerable symbol of human love, as you’ve never seen it before

Ask Smithsonian 2017

When Did the Vice Presidency Stop Going to the 2nd Place Winner and More Questions From Our Readers

Also up for discussion—why are oceans seawater and not freshwater?

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