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Even if they make a list, neurotic people may need to check it twice.

New Research

Being Neurotic Makes It Harder for You to Remember Things

Brain scans suggest that certain personality types are wired to have better memories

Plaster cast of Greek Slave, 1843, by Hiram Powers

The Scandalous Story Behind the Provocative 19th-Century Sculpture “Greek Slave”

Artist Hiram Powers earned fame and fortune for his beguiling sculpture, but how he crafted it might have proved even more shocking

Jane's Carousel sits between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges and is housed in a $9-million-dollar transparent acrylic box. The restoration by artist Jane Walentas took 20 years to complete.

Take a Spin on the Most Beautiful, Hand-Crafted Carousels in the Nation

These historic merry-go-rounds are survivors of a bygone era, when thrills came in a much tamer form

A section of the digitally unwrapped Ein Gedi scroll, bearing text from Leviticus.

1,500-Year-Old Text Has Been Digitally Resurrected From a Hebrew Scroll

Special software helped reveal the words on a burned scroll found inside a holy ark near the Dead Sea

America’s Road Trip: Route 66’s Most Fascinating Museums

Take a drive on Route 66 and encounter the wonders of the road

Checking the plants in Nemo's Garden

Off the Coast of Italy, Two Divers Are Building Underwater Greenhouses

The biospheres could provide an alternate means of farming in regions with unstable growing conditions

A Bengali edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The beloved children's book by British scholar Charles Lutwidge Dodgson has been translated into every major language and numerous minor ones, including many that are extinct or invented.

The Mad Challenge of Translating “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

Explore the linguistic tricks used to make Lewis Carroll’s puns, parodies and nonsense accessible in hundreds of tongues

Tick-tock goes the clock.

New Research

Can Sound Explain a 350-Year-Old Clock Mystery?

Lab experiments suggest that a strange synchronization of pendulum clocks observed in the 1600s can be chalked up to acoustic energy

Signs welcome visitors to Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden.

When Rock Bands Flocked to Howard Finster’s Remote, Bizarre Artist Compound

Even today you can visit the site where groups such as R.E.M. found a true artistic genius

The Milky Way and moon illuminate a lone tree in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

An Astronomer’s Paradise, Chile May Be the Best Place on Earth to Enjoy a Starry Sky

Chile’s northern coast offers an ideal star-gazing environment with its lack of precipitation, clear skies and low-to-zero light pollution

Stone steps descend as far as 500 feet into the Moray concentric agriculture terraces near Maras, Peru, crossing a temperature differential of some 60 degrees. Ancient innovators may have domesticated and hybridized plant species here, using temperature ranges to simulate conditions found across the far-flung Inca Empire.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?

To journey here is to roam through almost six thousand years of civilization, to one of the places where the human enterprise began

Taken by ship to North America and Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, the tiny fruit gave rise to all the many tomato varieties enjoyed today.

Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly: Inca Road

Why Is This Wild, Pea-Sized Tomato So Important?

Native to northern Peru and southern Ecuador, this tiny and rapidly vanishing tomato boasts outsized influence on world gastronomy

Boa constrictors seem to deliver death not through suffocation, but by cutting off blood flow to the heart and brain.

New Research

Boa Constrictors Kill By Stopping Blood Circulation

The popular belief that boas and other constricting snakes deal death by suffocation seems to be a flawed assumption

The Honda Smart Home, on the University of California, Davis, campus, is an experiment in efficiency.

What It’s Like to Live in This Smart, Energy-Efficient Home of the Future

Nine months in, a family of four adjusts to life in the Honda Smart Home, a testing ground for new technologies at University of California, Davis

A veteran visits the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. in 1988.

New Research

Over a Quarter-Million Vietnam War Veterans Still Have PTSD

Forty years after the war’s end, twice as many vets with combat-related PTSD are getting worse as those who are improving

Ensuring a bountiful harvest will require some ingenuity.

Anthropocene

How Will We Feed 9 Billion People on Earth of the Future?

This week’s Generation Anthropocene reveals how seeds on ice and poisonous tubers may offer hope for food security

Activities are designed with 6 to 12-year olds in mind, and presented as open-ended questions focused on themes that rotate throughout the year.

Inspiring Invention the MacGyver Way

Visitors to the Smithsonian’s new Spark!Lab are challenged to solve problems with ingenuity and a pile of off-the-shelf items

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The Innovative Spirit

Teenage Inventor Alexis Lewis Thinks That Kids Have the Solutions to the World’s Problems

With a patent to her name and more likely on the way, the 15-year-old has made it her mission to inspire young innovators

Brazil's Surui people, like the man pictured above, share ancestry with indigenous Australians, new evidence suggests.

New Research

A DNA Search for the First Americans Links Amazon Groups to Indigenous Australians

The new genetic analysis takes aim at the theory that just one founding group settled the Americas

A natural gas flare burns over a fracking site in the Bakken Oil Fields of northwestern North Dakota.

Anthropocene

Recession, Not Fracking, Drove a Drop in U.S. Carbon Emissions

The switch from coal to natural gas played only a small role in the recent carbon dioxide decline

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