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

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

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

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

Scientists Connect Monkey Brains and Boost Their Thinking Power

Researchers at Duke University have enhanced the mind power of monkeys and rats by linking their brains together

Brain-to-brain interfaces may soon be a therapeutic technique.

New Research

Linking Multiple Minds Could Help Damaged Brains Heal

Monkeys and rats hooked up as “brainets” may lead to innovative treatments for Parkinson’s, paralysis and more

Smithsonian Takes a Giant Step with Its First Kickstarter Campaign to Fund the Conservation of Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit

On the 46th anniversary of the historic moonwalk, the spacesuit that made it possible is headed to the conservation lab

Mission operations manager Alice Bowman shares the real secret behind the Pluto flyby in December 2014.

These Pictures Give a Rare Glimpse Into the Heart of the Pluto Flyby

Spanning the full 9.5 years of the mission to date, the images by Michael Soluri capture the people behind the epic close encounter

An illustration shows the process of cell division, which involves chromosome pairs swapping some of their genetic data.

New Research

Human Sex Chromosomes Are Sloppy DNA Swappers

The genetic bundles that code for males and females can get a little messy when they trade pieces during cell division

Ask Smithsonian

Ask Smithsonian: What Makes Us a Righty or a Lefty?

Scientists are interested in studying why some of us are non-right-handers because it might offer insight into how the brain develops

An Anopholes mosquito, the vector for malaria, taking a blood meal from a tasty human.

New Research

Mosquitoes Can Carry, and Deliver, a Double Dose of Malaria

Insects that are already carrying one strain are more likely to pick up a second infection and harbor higher numbers of parasites

Turns out Pluto is covered in ice mountains up to 11,000 feet high.

Behold, the First Closeup Pictures From the Pluto Flyby Are Here

From fresh-faced moons to ice mountains, these are the visual surprises that hit the ground the day after the Pluto flyby

Exaggerating the colors on Pluto and Charon helps mission scientists see distinct terrains on each icy world.

Where Will the New Horizons Probe Go After Pluto?

The historic flyby may be over, but the spacecraft should still go on to study even smaller bodies on its path through the Kuiper belt

Pluto as seen by New Horizons on July 13, when the spacecraft was about 476,000 miles from the surface.

The New Horizons Probe Has Made Its Closest Approach to Pluto

Mission scientists have received the confirmation signal that the pre-programmed event went as planned and the craft is healthy

EJSCREEN overlays demographic data with EPA pollution data.

The EPA Has a New Tool For Mapping Where Pollution and Poverty Intersect

To better target its efforts, the agency is identifying problem areas, where people are facing undue environmental risks

Flames and smoke cover the hillsides near Yucca Valley in California during a June wildfire.

Anthropocene

Wildfires Are Happening More Often and in More Places

Average fire season length has increased by nearly a fifth in the last 35 years, and the area impacted has doubled

Not all water is easy to see.

Anthropocene

How Can We Keep Track of Earth’s Invisible Water?

This week’s episode of Generation Anthropocene goes on a deep dive into some of the planet’s more mysterious water sources

The Allosaurus was a true terror of the Jurassic world.

What Killed the Dinosaurs in Utah’s Giant Jurassic Death Pit?

Paleontologists are gathering evidence that may help crack the 148-million-year-old mystery, including signs of poisoned predators

Page 205 of 454