Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Science

None

World View

Panama offers an ideal vantage point for scientists to see the big picture of life on earth

Some boaters complain of too many manatees. But biologists (such as Cathy Beck, with some of the 100,000 manatee photos in the U.S.G.S.'s archive) say there may be too few.

Fury Over a Gentle Giant

Floridians raise a ruckus over manatees as biologists weigh prospects for the endangered species’ survival

None

Gas Guzzlers

New research shows how microscopic diatoms remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and may help keep the planet from overheating

None

Reading Faces

Is that a scowl or just disgust? Facial expressions can be harder to interpret than most of us realize, but help is on the way

None

Sleepless in Hawaii

Insomniac islanders are hopping mad over a tiny frog from that threatens their fragile ecosystem

None

To Catch A Thief

When biologists study food theft among endangered roseate terns, they find that crime most definitely pays

None

Prize Fight

Raymond Damadian refuses to take his failure to win a Nobel Prize, for a prototype MRI machine, lying down

This image of the Sun's outermost layer, or corona, was taken June 10, 1998, by TRACE (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer). The Earth-orbiting NASA spacecraft, launched two months earlier, has an unobstructed view of the Sun eight months of the year. It is helping to solve the mystery of why the Sun's corona is so much hotter (3.6 million degrees Farenheit) than its surface (11,000 degrees Farenheit). TRACE is also shedding light on solar storms, which damage satellites and disrupt power transmissions.

Celestial Sightseeing

From Triton’s active geysers to the Sun’s seething flares, newly enhanced images from U.S. and foreign space probes depict the solar system as never before

The Atchafalaya Basin (dark green in this satellite image, with the Atchafalaya River running through its center) is almost a million acres of bottomland woods and swamp.

Saving Atchafalaya

A more than 70-year effort to “control” America’s largest river basin swamp is threatening the Cajun culture that thrives on it

None

Ouch!

A new finding that fish feel pain has set off a tortured debate about the ethics of angling

The hall combines natural history with state-of-the-art technology.

New Hall on the Mall

A dazzling exhibition space celebrates mammalian diversity through re-creations of habitats on four continents

None

Hooked on Aging

Our writer tries to just say no to getting older

Terrestrial creatures (a forest crab in a defensive pose) were not easily confined for photographing.

Portraits in the Wild

In an unexplored region of Africa’s Atlantic coast, an innovative photographer captures Gabon’s bountiful wildlife

Neuroscientist Eugene Aserinsky attaches electrodes to his son, Armond, who was a frequent subject in his early sleep studies

The Stubborn Scientist Who Unraveled A Mystery of the Night

Fifty years ago, Eugene Aserinksy discovered rapid eye movement and changed the way we think about sleep and dreaming

Cattle suffocated by carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos

Defusing Africa’s Killer Lakes

In a remote region of Cameroon, an international team of scientists takes extraordinary steps to prevent the recurrence of a deadly natural disaster

Chemical structure of the Penicillin core

Eureka!

Accident and serendipity played their parts in the inventions of penicillin, the World Wide Web and the Segway super scooter

Navy dolphin K-Dog sports a "pinger" device that allows him to be tracked underwater.

Uncle Sam’s Dolphins

In the Iraq war, highly trained cetaceans helped U.S. forces clear mines in Umm Qasr’s harbor

Six weeks after authorities said SARS had broken out in Asia, CDC scientists in Atlanta identified a coronavirus as the culprit.

Stopping a Scourge

No one knows if SARS will strike again. But researchers’ speedy work halting the epidemic makes a compelling case study of how to combat a deadly virus

None

Talking to Horses

Stanford Addison uses intuition, compassion and persistence to “break” wild horses

Having logged thousands of hours observing chimpanzees and other apes, Frans de Waal (left, at his Atlanta field station) argues that primates, including humans and bonobos, are more cooperative and less ruthless than once thought.

Rethinking Primate Aggression

Researcher Frans de Waal shows that apes (and humans) get along better than we thought

Page 422 of 441