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The Innovation Handi-hour will be held on the third floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Wednesday, March 25, 2015, from 5:30-9 p.m. Admission is $10 at the door.

The Innovative Spirit - OLD

Innovation Handi-Hour Gives Creative Types the Chance to Dive-in Hands First

These artists blur boundaries between craft and manufacturing, using lasers, computers and 3D printers

The carriage that transported President Abraham Lincoln, Mary Lincoln, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée Clara Harris to Ford's Theatre is on view at the American History Museum through May 25, 2015.

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

This is the Carriage That Took Lincoln on his Fateful Trip to Ford’s Theatre

As the April anniversary of Lincoln’s last ride approaches, an historian recounts the president’s other horse and buggie moments

John Wayne's dark-green 1971 Pontiac station wagon.

Make a Pilgrimage to the Brand New John Wayne Birthplace & Museum

Opening in April, a museum to match the movie star’s legacy

Workers with the Nigiri Project head out to test pens in the flooded rice fields near Sacramento.

Anthropocene

Rice Can Help Save Salmon If Farms Are Allowed to Flood

The Nigiri Project aims to restore the beloved fish by cutting a notch in a California levee and letting some floodplains return to nature

Etude 1, 1967- 1968, is a piece of Thermo fax paper with an image that looks like a four-leaf-clover, with four overlapping circles. Each circle has concentric inner circles composed of individual letters of the alphabet.

New Works by Nam June Paik Are Discovered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

While inventorying the massive archival materials left by the artist, a researcher comes across forgotten works of art

Scientists Turn Packing Peanuts Into Battery Components

Chemical engineers at Purdue University have found a surprising way to repurpose the foam pieces

Marijuana buds are often two to three times as potent as they were 30 years ago.

New Research

Modern Marijuana Is Often Laced With Heavy Metals and Fungus

Medical and recreational marijuana use is increasingly legal—but do consumers know what they’re smoking?

This Week in Crowdfunding

A Moon Landing in Virtual Reality, Bookniture and Other Wild Ideas That Just Got Funded

Could a new material that uses static charge to stick to any surface spell doom for Post-it notes?

Best Space Photos of the Week

A Rainbow Eclipse and X-Ray Fireworks Are Among These Cosmic Treats

A solar eclipse painted the cloudy U.K. skies and an explosion rocked a stellar corpse in our picks for this week’s best space images

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Meet Doris Raymond, the Fairy Godmother of Vintage Clothing

A Smithsonian Channel series features the team behind Hollywood’s beloved vintage boutique

The Civil War

The Underappreciated and Forgotten Sites of the Civil War

To commemorate the end of the war 150 years ago, here are fascinating locales that remind us of the conflict’s sprawling impact

An App Helps the Blind to Type Quickly and Efficiently on an iPad

The iBrailler Notes app provides the blind and visually impaired with a Braille writer at an affordable price

Houston's futuristic Astrodome is home of the first skybox and an animated scoreboard,150 yards wide.

Remembering the Astrodome, the Eighth Wonder of the World

Fifty years after its grand opening, the spectre of the Houston stadium still looms large

The details of the replica (under construction last year), its area nearly the size of a football field, are based on 700 hours of laser scanning in the actual cave.

Finally, the Beauty of France’s Chauvet Cave Makes its Grand Public Debut

A high-tech recreation of the immortal artworks shines a new light on the dawn of human imagination

The Hermione, 17 years in the making, replicates the original wartime frigate that ferried the Marquis de Lafayette to America in 1780.

The Marquis de Lafayette Sails Again

Now that the ship that the Frenchman took on his 1780 trip to America has been rebuilt, its time to revisit his role in history

A large colony of Mexican free-tailed bats can consume an estimated 250 tons of insects in a single night.

These Bats Use Sonar to Jam the Signals of Their Rivals

How hungry Mexican free-tails sabotage the competition

The natural habitats of many bumblebees are nearly gone and restoring floral diversity is vital to promote their survival.

Can Returning Farmland to the Wild Help Bumblebees in Crisis?

Even if only a small percentage of current farmland became wild meadows, it could bring populations back to previous levels

Art Meets Science

The Terrible Beauty of Glaciers Melting and Oceans Rising

Daniel Beltra’s aerial photographs reveal the human impact on nature

Who Determined That the Sun Was a Star and More Questions From Our Readers

You asked, we answered

Diners eat lunch outdoors at the Osteria Margutta.

Rome’s Very Short Street With a Long, Magnificent History

Taste the food life on the Via Margutta, once home to Fellini and since 1953, the scene of Americans’ sweetest Roman Holiday

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