Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Smart News / Smart News Ideas & Innovations

Visitors interact with living sound artworks in the "Sonic Succulents" installation by Adrienne Adar

Listen to the Sounds of Succulents at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

An ongoing installation encourages visitors to interact with prickly cacti, palm plants and potted succulents

Najin (left) and Fatu, the last two northern white rhinos, on the day before their eggs were harvested.

Trending Today

Eggs Successfully Collected from the Last Two Northern White Rhinos

Advances in fertility science will hopefully allow researchers to implant embryos of the species into surrogate southern white rhinos

Experts hope the bridge will enable mountain lions to find potential mates and increase the local population's genetic diversity

California Will Build the Largest Wildlife Crossing in the World

The overpass will provide safe passage for mountain lions, coyotes, deer, lizards, snakes and other wild animals crossing the 101 Freeway

A park ranger gives the Obama family a tour of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in 2016.

3-D Map to Digitize Part of Carlsbad Caverns Down to the Millimeter

The National Parks Service is also compiling a modern cultural history of the caverns

Edward Hopper, "Western Motel," 1957

Thanks to the Hopper Hotel Experience, You Can Now Spend a Night at the Museum

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will host guests in a 3-D recreation of Edward Hopper’s 1957 painting, ‘Western Motel’

The F.D.A. approved pretomanid's use in conjunction with two other drugs

F.D.A. Approves New Treatment for Deadliest Strain of Tuberculosis

The drug regimen involves just five pills taken orally for a duration of six months

The underlying sketches found beneath The Virgin of the Rocks

Cool Finds

Imaging Reveals Leonardo da Vinci Wrestled With the Composition of ‘The Virgin of the Rocks’

Two underdrawings detected using high-tech imaging techniques show he altered the figures twice before painting

Speakers featured in the Celebrating Indigenous Languages project.

At-Risk Indigenous Languages Spotlighted on New Google Earth Platform

The new initiative features recordings of native languages from around the globe

Eva Papamargariti, Acedia (still from video work), 2019.

Miami Museum Launches Exhibition Exclusively on Instagram

Over eight weeks, ‘Joyous Dystopia’ is posting digital works by eight different artists

Nearly 16,000 pages of letters, speeches, newspaper articles and other suffragist documents are now available on By the People.

Women Who Shaped History

The Library of Congress Needs Your Help Transcribing Suffragist Papers

Nearly 16,000 pages of diaries, letters, speeches and other documents are available on the library’s crowdsourcing platform

Keven Walgamott lost his left hand and part of his arm in an electrical accident 17 years ago

Robotic Hand Restores Wearer’s Sense of Touch

The prosthetic enabled a test subject to pick up an egg without cracking it, send a text message, peel a banana and hold his wife’s hand

No pizza rats here

Trending Today

London Signs Up as First ‘National Park City’

The city has commited to upping its greenspace to 50 percent and making the urban landscape healthier, greener and more beautiful by 2050

A rendering of the 363-foot Saturn V projection

Future of Space Exploration

Watch the Apollo 11 Anniversary Show That Was Projected Onto the Washington Monument

The immersive experience combined full-motion projection-mapping artwork and archival footage

The app presents users with 100 works of art drawn from the museum's collection of more than 15,000 artifacts

Atlanta Museum’s ‘Dating’ App Matches Visitors With Artwork

The High Museum of Art creates tour routes based on users’ likes

Poker poses a challenge to A.I. because it involves multiple players and a plethora of hidden information.

This Poker-Playing A.I. Knows When to Hold ‘Em and When to Fold ‘Em

Pluribus won an average of around $5 per hand, or $1,000 per hour, when playing against five human opponents

New Research

Mussels’ Sticky Threads Could Inspire Ways to Clean Up Oil Spills, Purify Water and More

A new review shows the sticky threads the bivalves used to cling to rocks could have lot of potential engineering applications

Olafur Eliasson, "The Cubic Structural Evolution Project," 2004

Art Meets Science

Consider the Nature of Perception at Olafur Eliasson’s New Show

Tate Modern retrospective features some 40 works pulled from the artist’s decades-long career

The team derived acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, from a plant wall polymer called lignin.

Researchers Develop Plant-Based, Eco-Friendly Method to Produce Tylenol

Current manufacturing processes rely on coal tar, which is produced using fossil fuels

Dragonfly will explore dozens of locations across the icy moon

Trending Today

NASA’s Dragonfly Mission Will Fly Through the Clouds of Titan, Saturn’s Biggest Moon

Over the course of its initial 2.7-year mission exploring Titan, the dual-quadcopter will fly a combined total of more than 108 miles

Melanosomes linked with blue feathers are much longer than they are wide

Cool Finds

Scientists Identify Blue Hues in Fossilized Bird Feathers for the First Time

A new study shows how the shapes of tiny pigment-carrying structures called melanosomes are associated with different colors

Page 33 of 102