Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Science

None

Nobel Prize Winners Are Put to the Task of Drawing Their Discoveries

Volker Steger photographs Nobel laureates posing with sketches of their breakthrough findings

Tune into the National Zoo’s newly reinstalled panda cams and watch Mei Xiang and Tian Tian any time of day.

Cool New Panda Cams Deliver Panda Life in Living Color

Watch the pandas munch bamboo on 24-hour live-stream cams at the Zoo and check out new video of Mei Xiang

None

Powering the 21st Century

To Develop Tomorrow’s Engineers, Start Before They Can Tie Their Shoes

The Ramps and Pathways program encourages students to think like engineers before they’ve reached double digits

New work suggests that dolphins each have their own distinctive whistle, and respond to hearing their sound made by calling right back.

Do Dolphins Use Whistles to Call Themselves by Unique Names?

Audio experiments show that the marine mammals each have their own whistle, and respond to hearing their distinct whistle by calling right back

None

The Macabre Beauty of Medical Photographs

An artist-scientist duo shares nearly 100 images of modern art with a ghastly twist—they’re all close-ups of human diseases and other ailments

None

Hangovers: The Driving Force Behind Our Favorite Foods

Overimbibing makes some people’s brains shut down, for others, it gets the innovative juices flowing

Kalelicious Smoothie Pops: A big hit at the Fancy Food Show

Food Science Brings Us Kale on a Stick and Twinkies That Last Longer

With so much interest in what’s in our meals, food innovators are focusing on making the healthy palatable.

None

The End of the World Might Just Look Like This

Artist Ron Miller presents several scenarios—most of them scientifically plausible—of landscapes imperiled and of Earth meeting its demise

Although their perception of color is limited, new research suggests that dogs routinely discriminate between objects based on their hue.

New Study Shows That Dogs Use Color Vision After All

Although their perception of color is limited, dogs discriminate between objects based on their hue—a finding that may change the way dogs are trained

Traveling in pods through tubes. Is this what Elon Musk has in mind?

L.A. to San Fran in 30 Minutes? Can You Say Hyperloop?

Entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks bullet trains are too slow and expensive. He says he has a better idea: high-speed travel in tubes

Two neutron stars violently collide—potentially the sourse of all heavy elements in the universe, including gold.

All the Gold in the Universe Could Come From the Collisions of Neutron Stars

When two stars recently collided, astronomers landed on a new theory about where gold and other heavy elements originate

ARBIMON—a system of distributed recording stations and centralized analysis software—was used to track populations of the endangered plains coqui frog, in Puerto Rico.

A New Technology Can Remotely Analyze an Ecosystem’s Species By its Sound

By distributing networks of microphones to wetlands and forests around the world, biologists could track biodiversity in a whole new way

Close inspection showed that a T. rex tooth was lodged in a hadrosaur’s vertebrae, the result of an ancient attack gone awry.

Caught in the Act: Scientists Find A T. Rex Tooth Stuck in a Hadrosaur Tail

The ancient attack proves once and for all that the T. Rex was a hunter, not just a scavenger

None

Ask Smithsonian 2017

Wait, Have I Been Here Before? The Curious Case of Déjà Vu

Although the strange sensation’s cause remains unknown, scientists are searching for ways to induce that nagging feeling of familiarity

None

Scientists Get Best View Yet of the Structure of Glass

The amorphous solid holds many mysteries, but a new study using a high-powered microscope shows that atoms in glass are organized into distorted shapes

The city of Shanghai presents A True Story (above), an impressive work of mosaïculture, at Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal 2013.

Horticultural Artists Grow Fantastical Scenes at the Montréal Botanical Garden

Take a peek at some of the living artwork entered in an international competition in Quebec this summer

A community of glass sponges under Antarctica’s ice.

Glass Sponges Move In As Antarctic Ice Shelves Melt

Typically slow-growing glass sponge communities are popping up quickly now that disappearing shelf ice has changed ocean conditions around Antarctica

None

These Decapitated Worms Regrow Old Memories Along with New Heads

New experiments show that beheaded flatworms can retain trained behaviors after their brains regenerate

None

Some Day Your Passwords Could Be Replaced by a Pill

Now that passwords are neither secure nor easy, what will replace them? Fingerprint scans? Electronic tattoos? A pill?

What do you see?

Fruits and Veggies Get a Close-Up

In the darkroom, photographer Ajay Malghan creates abstract art by casting light through thin slices of produce

Page 259 of 457